Digital Science Catalyst Grant 2026

The Digital Science Catalyst Grant is an international initiative to support innovation in new software tools and technologies to advance research and create meaningful change. It funds early-stage ideas for agentic tools and platforms that embed in research workflows, with a grant of up to £25,000 for the most promising ideas, and also provides guidance, introductions and professional feedback. The grant targets tools that operate across multiple steps in the research lifecycle and carry governance and provenance features.

Financial grant up to £25,000; advice, introductions and sharpening of project ideas; potential integrations into researcher workflows

Open to early-stage startups and research projects proposing agentic tools that integrate into existing research workflows and address multi-step processes.

Apply via the online application form; applicants are asked to describe the research decision their agent affects, where it sits in the research lifecycle, the tool it must integrate with, failure modes and an outcome metric.