Advanced Research and Invention Agency

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The formation of ARIA was announced on 19 February 2021 and it was formally established on 26 January 2023.^[11][12][13]

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022 created the legislative framework for the agency and it was formally established as an independent research body in January 2023.^[14] Parliament established ARIA in statute and set a ten-year legal mandate. The law directs the agency to fund research that is risky, uncertain and speculative in nature. ARIA’s initial budget was confirmed to be approximately £800 million over five years. Following the June 2025 spending review, the Government has committed to providing ARIA with a minimum of £1bn over the spending review period of 2025–2029.^[15][16][17]

In 2022 Dominic Cummings suggested that ARIA should act as a “moonshot” programme akin to the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Organisationally, it is small, independent of UKRI (the main UK government funding body), and has autonomy to operate at speed innovate funding, (for instance with X-Prize type inducements around research goals), rapid "seed" funding, with successful seeds entering a much smaller tier of large-grants, and bonuses for accomplishing research goals.^[18] The agency avoids DARPA's connection to military research.^[19]

ARIA is designed to operate with a large degree of autonomy and is exempt from Freedom of Information requests. In March 2021 Labour Party Member of Parliament Dawn Butler said this would "raise alarm bells" about how taxpayer money is spent, in light of a scandal over how the UK government procured PPE contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kwasi Kwarteng, who was Business Secretary at the time, insisted the "corporate governance arrangements are very robust" and that MPs would be able to scrutinise the agency's accounts.^[20]

On 20 July 2022, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy announced that ARIA's first CEO would be Ilan Gur and its first Chair would be Matt Clifford.^[21] In early 2023, it was announced that Nobel prize-winning organic chemist Chemistry Sir David MacMillan and Dame Kate Bingham, the entrepreneur who headed the successful Vaccine Taskforce, would join the board, advancing the high-risk/high-reward research agenda.^[22]

As of September 2024, ARIA had 10 live opportunity spaces – underexplored areas of research, that serve as the basis for their multi-year coordinated funding programmes.^[23] The first cohort of eight Programme Directors joined ARIA in October 2023, followed by another eight in April 2025.^[24][25][26] ARIA’s most notable programmes include Precision Neurotechnologies, led by Jacques Carolan and funded by £69m, which helped enable the first UK NHS clinical study to test a brain-computer interface; Forecasting Tipping Points, an international programme of 27 teams, led by Sarah Bohndiek and Gemma Bale, and spanning climate science, optics, computer science, mathematics, statistics, photonics, and nuclear physics; and Scaling Compute, led by Suraj Bramhavar, targeting reducing AI computing costs by a factor of 1,000.^[27][28]

ARIA has nine Activation Partners, made up of non-profits, research labs, and VCs, who work with ARIA to develop targeted programmes from helping to create prototypes, to AI talent placements in scientific labs. The goal of these partnerships is to help embed science entrepreneurship across ARIA’s work to translate research into commercial success.^[29][30]

Ilan Gur was ARIA’s first CEO, previously having served as a founding Programme Director at ARPA-E.^[31] Gur announced in June 2025 that he was leaving his position at ARIA^[32] and in November 2025, Kathleen Fisher was appointed as the new CEO Elect of ARIA. Kathleen took over in February 2026, as former-CEO Ilan Gur returned to the US. Fisher, a US computer scientist, is a specialist in programming languages, and previously served as a professor at Tufts University. Her cybersecurity work at DARPA was later named the agency’s most influential programme of the decade, and she went on to lead its Information Innovation Office, overseeing more than 50 programmes with a budget of $500 million.^[33]

ARIA’s Board comprises the CEO, Kathleen Fisher; the Chair, Matt Clifford; the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Dame Angela McLean, and five other Non-Executive Board members – appointed by the Secretary of State for DSIT – as well as three other Executive Team members, including Ant Rowstron as Chief Technology Officer, and Pippy James as Deputy Chief Executive Officer — appointed by the Chair.^[29] ARIA’s Advisors include Sir Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind, Hayaatun Sillem, former chief executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of payments company Stripe.^[17]

Following the Government’s June 2025 Spending Review, the Department of Science and Technology (DSIT) has committed to providing ARIA with a minimum of £1bn over the Spending Review period.^[15][34]

In April 2025, it was reported that ARIA would fund a £50 million programme of small-scale outdoor geoengineering experiments. The agency stated that the experiments would be rigorously assessed and were intended to generate data on the feasibility and risks of Solar radiation modification (SRM) technologies. These methods seek to reflect a portion of incoming sunlight, for example through the injection of reflective particles into the atmosphere or by increasing the reflectivity of clouds.^[35]

The programme was announced alongside an £11 million initiative, making the United Kingdom one of the largest funders of geoengineering research. ARIA's work is led by Professor Mark Symes.^[35]

The research has drawn criticism from some scientists, who warned of potential unintended consequences such as disrupted rainfall patterns.^[35]

• UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)