Three technologies that can change the world

And how the UK can take the lead

We have a guest post today from Ilan Gur, the CEO of the UK government’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).

ARIA was set up in 2023 to fund cutting edge research, but there has been relatively little coverage of what it’s actually doing. The one thing that has cut through recently is ARIA’s funding of some small geoengineering experiments. This has been written up by some outlets, in a sensationalist fashion, as a “secret government plan to dim the sun” (you can read about the actual work and safeguards here).

We thought it would be of interest to readers to give Ilan the space to set out some other work ARIA is engaged in, as well as setting out some of the barriers to success.

Prior to ARIA, Ilan founded two deeptech startups and served as a Programme Director at ARPA-E, the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for cutting-edge energy technologies. He is also the founder of Activate.org, a US-based non-profit that supports scientists and engineers in bringing groundbreaking research to market.

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Two and a half years ago, I moved from Silicon Valley to the UK to take on the role of leading the government’s newly created Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).

I joined because of the enormous, inspiring ambition underpinning the project: to unlock breakthroughs in science and technology that can drive a step change in economic growth and social prosperity, for Britain and the world.

Our team has since been working to develop a new model for UK innovation. Drawing inspiration from the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which catalysed the internet, mRNA vaccines, personal computing, and GPS – we are adapting the best parts of a proven model to the strengths and opportunities of Britain.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve built an initial portfolio of bold bets – high-ambition R&D programmes backing researchers and entrepreneurs to invent the world-changing technologies and trillion-pound industries of tomorrow. Many of these may sound improbable or uncomfortable at first – as transformative ideas often do – but history shows that the biggest breakthroughs rarely follow conventional paths.

Here are three examples of breakthrough technologies we’re supporting, with the potential to transform how we treat disease, grow food, and secure the benefits of AI. Success would position the UK for global leadership in the most pivotal technology revolutions of the coming century.

Precision Neurotechnologies

Neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, PTSD, and depression affect millions of people in the UK and globally. These illnesses can be devastating, not only for those experiencing them, but also for their families and caretakers. Collectively, they place a staggering burden on health systems – nearly three times that of heart disease.

For decades researchers have searched for better treatments. But traditional pharmaceuticals have not gotten us very far, in part because the complexity of the brain makes it nearly impossible to target specific pathways without triggering unintended side effects.

Enter neurotechnology: systems which interface with the brain to stimulate neurological functions. In Silicon Valley, companies like Neuralink are betting that this approach will be a game-changer. But in practice, today’s neurotechnology is very narrow in scope: limited to surgically implanted devices that address a very small set of conditions.

At ARIA, one of our Programme Directors — a quantum physicist turned neuroscientist — took a fresh look. The latest research reveals that most diseases do not arise from highly localised areas of the brain, as previously thought, but from neural circuits (the ‘wiring’ of the brain). That insight led to two bold hypotheses: first, that neurotechnology can treat a far broader set of conditions than previously imagined, and second, that current technologies lack the required precision to be effective.

ARIA is now pioneering this new frontier of Precision Neurotechnologies. One of our projects is exploring a non-invasive therapy that uses ultrasound to stimulate precise brain circuits. Our funding is enabling the world’s first clinical trial of this approach, in partnership with the NHS. It aims to provide a new lifeline for patients with severe, treatment-resistant depression – not by overwhelming the brain with chemicals, but by modulating its electrical networks in a targeted way that avoids unwanted side effects.

We can’t say for certain the project will work, but we have reason to be optimistic. Invasive methods like deep brain stimulation have proven effective in this area, but they are far too costly and hard for patients to access. ARIA’s ultrasound-based technology offers a scalable, non-invasive platform that could drive a massive step change in treatment for this condition globally.

Therapies take years to move from trials to clinical use. That’s ok, since our mandate at ARIA is to get massive vs. quick wins. If our Precision Neurotechnologies programme succeeds, it will unlock an entirely new category of personalised brain therapies, reshaping and expanding an already massive global market for neurological and psychiatric care.

ARIA’s Precision Neurotechnology programme is developing advanced, circuit-level interventions designed to match the complexity of the conditions they aim to treat. The results could provide a new lifeline for people living with neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Synthetic Plants

The second example tackles a challenge at the root of our food and fuel systems.

The world’s agricultural system faces growing pressure — climate change, rising food insecurity, and the urgent need to do more with less. Plants, which make up over 80% of global biomass, offer a powerful lever. But to meet the challenges ahead, we’ll need to go far beyond conventional crop science.

What if we could design new plant traits from the genome up — tailored for a changing planet? That’s the vision behind our Synthetic Plants programme, which directs the UK’s world-class strengths in synthetic biology to agriculture, applying to the plant kingdom the same principles that delivered breakthroughs like mRNA vaccines and CAR-T therapy.

Current methods typically alter plants by modifying one gene at a time, like attempting to rewrite a book letter by letter. Even cutting-edge approaches today rarely involve changing more than a handful of genes at once, equivalent to editing a sentence or a short paragraph of a book. Yet crucial plant traits such as crop yield, drought tolerance, and efficiency of photosynthesis are influenced by hundreds or thousands of interacting genes. Our Synthetic Plants programme seeks to transform this, creating the biological tools to rewrite whole chapters or entire books at once, dramatically increasing the potential speed and impact of plant innovation.

A diagram of possibilities for a programmable plant, showing how different techniques could be applied to produce different traits and applications.

The programme is working to develop entirely new biological components – synthetic chromosomes and chloroplasts – to enhance the natural processes of living plants for reducing water use, improving yields in unpredictable conditions, or even making entirely new materials. It’s not just about improving what exists but expanding what’s possible.

The UK is already home to world-leading plant science, from the John Innes Centre to Rothamsted Research. This programme builds on that legacy, bringing together cross-disciplinary teams to accelerate innovation. The potential impact? Transforming the £3 trillion global agriculture sector and positioning the UK at the vanguard of a new bioeconomy.

Scaling AI

Artificial intelligence is transforming nearly every sector — from healthcare and scientific discovery to logistics and national security. But two major bottlenecks are holding back its potential.

The first bottleneck is the cost and scalability of compute resources. AI today is built on vast data centres, running general purpose chips that demand enormous energy, capital, and infrastructure. That model is unsustainable as systems get bigger and bigger.

Our Scaling Compute programme is completely rethinking AI hardware. The projects we’re backing are using principles from biology and physics to cut the cost and energy of AI computation by over 1000x – from processors that mimic the brain’s sparsity to chips that compute with noise.

The implications are enormous: enabling compute for distributed scientific discovery, empowering more of society to participate in the economic opportunity of AI, and reducing the UK’s dependence on a fragile and geopolitically concentrated supply chain.

Demand for compute power has been exponentially increasing as a result of deep learning. ARIA’s Scaling Compute programme aims to bring the cost and energy usage of AI hardware down by >1000x. If successful, the UK can forge a new path for scaling the benefits and economic value of AI.

The second bottleneck AI faces is reliability. As systems become more powerful, ensuring their safe deployment becomes critical. That’s why ARIA is also funding a complementary programme called Safeguarded AI, which deploys advanced mathematics to integrate safety guarantees directly into the foundational architecture of advanced AI applications. These next-gen AI systems would have built-in “gatekeepers” to mathematically prove they will operate as intended.

This is a radical approach well beyond anything being done today, but we are already working to demonstrate its value in critical infrastructure applications, where the risks of hallucinations and mistakes are keeping us from deploying AI. ARIA-funded teams are exploring use cases ranging from automated balancing of the electricity grid to accelerating clinical trials and enhancing pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Together, Scaling Compute and Safeguarded AI are advancing the UK’s global leadership in AI, positioning it at the forefront of key infrastructure layers that can unlock scale.

Capturing the opportunity: how the UK can lead

These technologies — from programmable plants to precision brain therapies — are just a few of the breakthroughs that researchers and entrepreneurs across the UK are building with ARIA’s support. But the question isn’t just whether we can invent them. It’s whether we can turn them into new products, companies, and industries that deliver global value, and capture that value here at home.

To do that, Britain will have to double down, betting on its incredible legacy of scientific achievement and on a new wave of entrepreneurial ambition.

Before ARIA, I spent a couple of decades working at the intersection of scientific discovery and commercialisation. I’ve managed or advised nearly 100 applied R&D projects — across startups, academia, corporates, and government labs. Some became billion-dollar companies or helped spark new industries. Others went nowhere.

Through all of that, one clear takeaway emerged: science entrepreneurship is the most powerful force we have today for turning scientific progress into public benefit.

Startups are custom-built vehicles to create the future. From generative AI giants to gene therapy unicorns, science-based startups haven’t just developed new technologies, they’ve enabled entirely new markets with tremendous value and social impact.

What has begun to shine through our work at ARIA is a generational opportunity for the UK to move beyond its legacy of scientific excellence, and to build out a new legacy of science entrepreneurship. In a recent FT piece, deeptech investor Ian Hogarth described this not as an opportunity, but an imperative: “The next branches of the tech tree have the potential to truly benefit humanity — and there’s no reason they can’t be grown in Europe.” But “things need to happen urgently,” he says, “as time is running out to stay in the race.”

Don’t get me wrong, there are some serious headwinds. The financial sustainability of universities is under significant strain. International competition for talent is fierce. It’s difficult to find growth-stage capital willing to take big bets on technology, so all too often promising startups are acquired early by overseas buyers before they have a chance to scale into national champions with global reach. Meanwhile, the regulatory environment for innovation across Europe has a reputation of stifling rather than supporting innovation.

But here’s the thing: despite all that, the UK is still better positioned than almost anywhere else.

There are only a small handful of places in the world with the scientific talent and institutional capacity to change the world. The UK is one of them. It has a research base that is world-class by any measure — including three of the world’s top ten universities. It has a fast-growing VC ecosystem, now the third largest globally. And it sits at the crossroads of the US, Europe, and developing economies in Africa and Asia that will soon dominate global growth.

Beyond all of that, and perhaps most importantly: the UK has managed to shape a generation of entrepreneurial scientists. Ten years ago, finding top British science and engineering grads who were seriously considering a startup was a challenge. That’s changed. Across the country, university innovation programmes and startup accelerators are helping scientists become founders, enough so that the UK now boasts one of the highest densities of science-based spinouts in the world.

So what’s missing?

The UK has all the ingredients. But they need to be activated. The system needs to be empowered and encouraged to approach this moment with a level of bold ambition far beyond anything that has come before. As Hogarth puts it, “[the key is] to turn an already powerful innovation engine into a harder-edged ambition.”

Coming from Silicon Valley, I see the structural hurdles. Insufficient capital, regulatory drag – these are real constraints. But what worries me most is not structural. It’s our mindset. Because if there’s one thing my career has taught me about innovation, it’s that everything boils down to people. People with bold visions and the support to pursue them are what differentiates world-changing projects from the rest.

The hard truth is that British founders face a culture far better suited to maintaining a position of power and wealth than building them from the ground up. Successful innovators are celebrated for their great accomplishments, but ambitious upstarts are more often than not met with scepticism, or worse. As one British research leader shared with me recently: “when’s the last time you heard a scientist here proudly stand up and say ‘I plan to change the world and make billions with this innovation’?” An equally important question: when they do share their bold ambitions, will they be derided or celebrated by those of us around them?

This matters because bold bets come with risk. Many won’t succeed. And as a result traditional sensibilities serve us poorly in this game. George Bernard Shaw indelibly captured the truth of the matter: “all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

The solution to the high failure rate inherent in innovation is not to make the bets smaller or more sensible. It’s the opposite.

To serve as an engine for growth and transformation, not only do we need our British scientists to abandon their sensibilities, we need them to set their ambitions so unreasonably high that the few who succeed make the failures of the others laudable rather than laughable.

That’s the kind of culture we need to build, not just to create the next generation of global industries but to ensure they’re built here, in the UK, shaped by British values and contributing to our prosperity and security.

At ARIA, we’re doing everything we can to help spark that bold entrepreneurial ambition.

In the past year, ARIA has backed over a hundred projects. Alongside selecting for great research, we’ve selected teams who want more than anything else to deliver something valuable. This has led us to support innovators outside of traditional environments. Nearly half of our research funding has gone to startups and private companies. That’s a major shift from the norm in UK research, where roughly 80% of government research funding flows to universities.

Our goal is not just to fund bold research in existing institutions, but to serve as the basis for ambitious new UK startups. One of our earliest grants helped catalyse UK AI hardware spinout Fractile and another sparked the creation of a UK subsidiary of Normal Computing, a frontier AI startup from the US. All told, over 10% of our awards have already triggered the formation of new deeptech companies or attracted international firms to build operations in the UK.

These aren’t isolated bets, they’re part of an intentional effort to turn the UK into a global launchpad for science entrepreneurship. With that in our sights, we recently launched a network of nine Activation Partners — a coalition of startup builders, venture funds, and labs — who are now working hand-in-hand with our Programme Directors to train scientist founders, accelerate prototyping, and support commercial spinouts in the spaces we’re investing in. Together, they’re building the playbooks, networks, and culture that will help this new generation of British science entrepreneurs take their ideas all the way.

And the momentum is not just within ARIA. We’re seeing encouraging signs across the wider system.

Homegrown companies like DeepMind and Wayve have shown the world that transformative science companies can not only be founded in the UK — they can scale here, too. Founders like Demis and Alex aren’t just reshaping the ambitions of science entrepreneurs, their efforts are creating new pools of talent and capital that will serve as fuel for those elevated ambitions.

Meanwhile, the government is confronting the headwinds and leaning in with real action. Recent leadership appointments at UKRI and Innovate UK (the government’s largest research & innovation funding bodies) signal a shift toward a more entrepreneurial approach to R&D. The creation of the new Regulatory Innovation Office reflects a growing awareness that forward-leaning, adaptive regulation could very well become one of the UK’s most powerful competitive advantages. And the AI Opportunities Action Plan demonstrates ambition and conviction in seizing the potential of the defining technology of our time.

These early steps will not be enough on their own. But taken together they could mark the start of a new chapter — one where Britain’s powerful ecosystem of science, entrepreneurship, and policy pulls in the same direction: not just to invent the future, but to deliver it.