Short answer: not in the form you remember. Smart Grants have been paused since January 2025, no rounds ran in 2025 or 2026, and Innovate UK describes the pause as a redesign rather than a cancellation. A pilot is expected around the end of the 2026 financial year. Any successor is likely to be narrower in scope and tied to Industrial Strategy priorities than the open, sector-agnostic competition it replaces.
Below is what Innovate UK’s own funded projects data shows about the scheme that stopped, what has taken its place, and what the numbers say about where the money is now going. Figures are calculated from the published dataset of Innovate UK funded projects (IUK-20260804, UKRI, 10 August 2026), grouped into distinct projects with grant summed across all partners. Analysis by Tatton Consulting, August 2026.
What Smart Grants actually funded
- 1,912 – Projects funded
- £781m – Total grant
- £315,118 – Median project grant
- £408,299 – Mean project grant
Two things stand out. The mean sits nearly £93,000 above the median, so a small number of large awards pulled the average up and most applicants should have been planning against the median. And collaborative projects were funded at a median of £353,427 against £282,609 for single applicants, a gap of around £70,800. Applying with a partner was worth roughly a quarter more.
The scheme was already shrinking before it stopped
Funded Smart Grant projects by competition year:
- 2019 – 324
- 2020 – 397
- 2021 – 344
- 2022 – 415
- 2023 – 181
- 2024 – 209
- 2025 – 25
Awards halved between 2022 and 2024, two full years before the pause was announced. Whatever prompted the redesign, the contraction was already underway. Anyone reading the January 2025 announcement as a sudden decision was reading it late.
What replaced it: Growth Catalyst, and it is not like for like
| Strand | Projects | Median grant | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Growth Catalyst Early Stage: New Innovators | 194 | £49,850 | £25,708–£50,000 |
| Growth Catalyst: Investor Partnerships Round 2 | 13 | £399,076 | £92,366–£867,744 |
This is the single most important thing for anyone who was planning a Smart Grant application. Growth Catalyst is not one scheme at one funding level. Early Stage is high-volume and small: 194 projects, almost all landing at or just under £50,000, roughly one sixth of the old Smart median. Investor Partnerships is comparable in size to a Smart Grant, but only thirteen projects have been funded and it requires an approved Innovate UK investor partner and demonstrated traction before you can apply at all.
The open, sector-agnostic route at around £300,000 currently has no direct equivalent.
Where the money actually went instead
Innovate UK has not stopped funding. Across 2025 and 2026 the dataset records 1,465 funded projects worth £1.87bn. But the shape has changed:
- £89,580 – Median project grant 2025-26
- £181,639 – Median in 2022
- 7.8% – Of projects over £1m
- 89% – Of value in those projects
The median has halved while the mean has risen. In 2022, projects over £1m took 71.5% of all grant value. In 2025-26 they take 89%, from an almost identical share of projects. The portfolio has split into a large number of very small awards, Early Stage and Knowledge Transfer Partnerships among them, and a small number of very large ones concentrated in targeted programmes: Clean Maritime, DRIVE35, Faraday, quantum, advanced manufacturing supply chains, femtech and AI in health.
The practical consequence: the middle has thinned. If your project needs £300,000, the route now runs through a themed competition where you compete against projects selected for sector fit, not through an open call where any good idea qualified.
Why the redesign happened: volume, and the quality problem
Smart Grants were open to any sector, any technology, with quarterly rounds. That accessibility was the point, and it was also the pressure. Innovate UK has published success rate expectations as low as 15% for comparable competitions, and Smart routinely attracted thousands of applications per round against a few dozen awards. Assessment capacity, not funding, becomes the binding constraint.
That pressure has been compounded by a change in how applications are written. Generative AI has made it trivially cheap to produce a fluent, structurally complete, entirely unremarkable application. The volume of submissions that read well and evidence nothing has risen sharply. Assessors are now spending scored time on applications that would once never have been submitted, and applicants who have done real work find their evidence competing for attention with prose that merely resembles it.
A funder facing that has two options: raise the assessment burden, or narrow the front door. The direction of travel across Innovate UK’s 2025-26 portfolio suggests the second. Themed, sector-specific competitions with defined scope are far harder to answer generically, because they require knowledge of a specific technology area, a specific supply chain and a specific policy objective. Industrial Strategy alignment is not only a policy preference. It is also a filter.
What to do now
Waiting for the replacement pilot carries a cost, and nobody can yet describe what it will fund. The practical route is to identify the themed competition that actually fits the work rather than holding a sector-agnostic project until an open call returns. That means starting from the funder’s published scope and working back to your project, which is the opposite of how most Smart Grant applications were built.
Three questions worth answering honestly before you apply anywhere: does the project sit inside a named Industrial Strategy growth sector; is there a collaboration that would make it stronger, given collaborative projects were funded at a quarter more even under Smart; and is the evidence base specific enough that an assessor could not have read the same claims in fifty other applications that quarter.
Method and limitations
Records were grouped by project number and grant values summed across participants, so a collaborative project counts once at its full value. Projects with zero or missing grant values were excluded. Growth Catalyst and 2025-26 figures cover awards recorded as at 10 August 2026 and will rise as later rounds are published; treat them as a picture of the programme to date rather than its final scale. Competition naming has changed over the period covered, so competition-level groupings rely on title matching. The dataset covers Innovate UK awards only and excludes NIHR, SBRI Healthcare and other funders. Values are those offered at the funding decision and may differ from amounts finally drawn. Observations about application quality and assessment pressure are our own, drawn from work on competitive applications, and are not Innovate UK statements.
Sources: Innovate UK funded projects since 2004, UKRI dataset published 10 August 2026; Smart Grants funding guidance, UKRI. Analysis by Tatton Consulting.
