Established in partnership with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the prize is designed to unlock the UK’s leadership in agentic AI by removing barriers to growth and equipping ambitious businesses with the vital support they need to thrive.
The national competition focused on three high-growth sectors: advanced manufacturing, health and life sciences, and the creative industries.
More than 200 applications were submitted, underlining the strength of the UK’s innovation ecosystem and its position at the forefront of AI-driven design and technology.
Prize submissions demonstrated how agentic systems can tackle real-world challenges across complex workflows from design optimisation and regulatory assurance to clinical reasoning, early disease detection, and immersive digital experiences.
Danu Insights, the overall prize winner, received £500,000 for its ‘Agentic Digital Twin Builder for the Life Sciences’ project, submitted for the Health & Life Science category.
The winning solution helps researchers overcome the growing complexity in life sciences by simulating biological processes and pinpointing the most meaningful experiments to pursue.
Through its integrated platform, Danu Insights streamlines modelling, validation, and experiment planning, saving resources and accelerating breakthroughs in therapies and biomanufacturing to enable faster, more efficient, and sustainable innovation.
The winning businesses in the other sector categories, each receiving £250,000, were:
Advanced Manufacturing: Singular Machine – for CoEngen, a multi-agent engineering platform that coordinates design across disciplines using a shared data model, enabling rapid, traceable optimisation of complex systems.
The platform significantly reduces engineering design timescales while maintaining safety and 'explainability'.
Creative Industries: Tellme – for a solution that delivers real-time, adaptive museum experiences via visitors’ smartphones.
Users can point their camera at exhibits and receive tailored interpretation that responds dynamically to interaction.
The system enables accessible, personalised engagement without additional hardware.
Agentic AI, which refers to AI systems that can take initiative, co-create ideas, automate tasks, collaborate with humans, and coordinate complex systems, can enhance existing workflows and reimagine ways of working across all industries.
Ensuring successful and responsible deployment will be central to realising the full potential of the UK’s modern industrial strategy.
Sara El-Hanfy, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Innovate UK, said, “Our ambition with the Agentic AI Pioneers Prize is to support the companies set to shape the future of agentic AI and unlock its potential to drive growth within the UK's key industrial sectors.
“We are excited to be helping these award-winning companies to take the next steps towards scaling up and deploying their solutions to deliver real-world impact.”