The formation of ARIA was announced on 19 February 2021 and it was formally established on 26 January 2023. 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. 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. 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. The agency avoids DARPA's connection to military research. 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. 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. 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. 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. The first cohort of eight
Programme Directors joined ARIA in October 2023, followed by another eight in April 2025. 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. 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.
Ilan Gur was ARIA’s first
CEO, previously having served as a founding
Programme Director at
ARPA-E. Gur announced in June 2025 that he was leaving his position at ARIA 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. 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. ==Climate Engineering Research ==