Innovate UK has named the winners of its first Agentic AI Pioneers Prize, a competition designed to identify and fund UK startups building real-world applications of AI systems capable of acting autonomously and managing complex workflows. Delivered in partnership with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the contest drew more than 200 applications spanning advanced manufacturing, healthcare and the creative industries.
The top prize of £500,000 went to Danu Insights for its Agentic Digital Twin Builder for the Life Sciences. The platform allows researchers to simulate biological systems and model potential experimental pathways, bringing together the normally separate stages of modelling, validation and experiment planning into a single environment. The judges saw it as a credible tool for tackling the growing complexity of drug discovery and biomanufacturing, with the potential to cut development costs and shorten timelines for new therapies.
Two runner-up prizes of £250,000 each went to companies working in manufacturing and culture respectively. Singular Machine was recognised for CoEngen, a multi-agent engineering platform that coordinates design work across disciplines using shared data models, helping engineering teams optimise complex systems faster without sacrificing traceability or safety. In the creative sector, Tellme received its award for a platform that delivers personalised, real-time museum experiences via smartphones — allowing visitors to engage dynamically with exhibits without any additional hardware, and opening up new possibilities for how cultural spaces connect with their audiences.
The prize reflects a broader government push to move the UK from AI research into AI deployment. Agentic systems — which don’t just respond to prompts but take initiative, adapt to changing conditions and work alongside human users — are increasingly seen as the next meaningful shift in applied AI, and the competition was designed to surface who is already doing this in practice rather than theory.
Sara El-Hanfy, head of AI and machine learning at Innovate UK, said the aim is to help companies cross the gap between early-stage innovation and scalable commercial deployment — supporting not just the technology but the businesses built around it.