What Is a Catapult? Inside the UK's Hidden Innovation Network

 

Nine centres, £1.6 billion in Innovate UK funding, and a network now being asked to prove it belongs in a rebuilt innovation system.

Picture a founder somewhere outside Newcastle, three years into building a sensor for offshore wind turbines. She doesn't need a government scheme she needs a wind tunnel, or a rig that can simulate twenty years of saltwater corrosion in twenty weeks, or an engineer who's already solved the exact problem keeping her up at night.

What is a Catapult to a founder like her? Probably nothing, until the day she discovers the UK already built exactly what she needs in a converted paper storage shed in Blyth, Northumberland and gave it a name straight out of a medieval siege.

That's the first thing worth knowing: nobody sets out looking for a Catapult. Founders stumble into the idea sideways, usually after months of trying to solve a facilities problem on their own.

So, what is a Catapult, in practical terms? A not-for-profit innovation centre, set up by Innovate UK, built to give businesses access to specialist R&D facilities, equipment and expertise they couldn't justify building themselves.

Nine Centres Built for Problems Startups Can't Solve Alone

There are nine Catapult centres, each built around a different frontier cell and gene therapy, compound semiconductors, connected places, digital technology, energy systems, high value manufacturing, medicines discovery, offshore renewable energy, and satellite applications.

Between them, these Catapult centres run more than 60 sites, from that Blyth shed to a compound semiconductor packaging facility in Newport that didn't exist anywhere in the country before 2024. The idea itself dates back to 2011: launch British technologies further and faster than they'd travel on their own.

Fourteen years later, that's still roughly the pitch. By the network's own count, it's now worked with close to 12,000 SMEs along the way, all backed by Innovate UK funding. Zoom out further and the collaboration count is even bigger the Catapult Network Office puts the tally at over 18,000 industry collaborations and 5,500 academic collaborations since 2013, a reminder that Catapults spend as much time plugging businesses into universities as they do into their own labs.

Catapults Aren't Grants, So Where Does the Money Go?

Here's where it gets interesting: whatever a Catapult is, it isn't a cash machine. Ask for money and you'll be pointed towards the door just as quickly as at any other funding body, because Catapults themselves aren't sitting on a pile of innovation grants UK founders can simply apply to.

Innovate UK funding underpins the whole network, but it doesn't flow to founders directly through the Catapults. The £1.6bn Innovate UK has committed to the network for 2023 to 2028 splits roughly into thirds a core government grant, industry money, and collaborative R&D funding that Catapults have to go out and win, competing for the same innovation grants UK founders are chasing themselves.

Which, oddly, works in a founder's favour. A Catapult that needs to win those bids has every reason to bring good SMEs along for the ride rather than shut them out. It also explains why so much of what a Catapult offers arrives as vouchers, cohort programmes and co-funded pilots rather than a straightforward cheque. The High Value Manufacturing Catapult alone is working with £167m of core funding for 2026–27.

The payoff shows up downstream, too. A separate Innovate UK evaluation tracking 1,000 SMEs supported by Catapults up to 2020 found those businesses went on to raise more than £2bn in private-sector investment over the following four years a roughly 5:1 return on the original support.

How Startups Actually Get Access

Understanding what is a Catapult day-to-day matters more than the definition on paper. Take Frontier Technical, an engineering outfit down in Plymouth it had developed MARLIN, a floating foundation system for offshore construction, but couldn't afford its own testing, consenting advice and technical analysis. An ORE Catapult support voucher, funded through Innovate UK Business Growth, covered exactly that gap.

Up in Northern Ireland, Rubik Technologies won a similar prize after pitching through Digital Catapult's Manufacturing Innovation Challenge a £75,000 grant jointly awarded by Techstart Ventures and Digital Catapult, to push its data platform further than its own budget would stretch.

Neither company knew what a Catapult was before they needed one. Both walked away with facility access and funding that would have taken years to build alone, and neither route started with a form it started with a conversation. High Value Manufacturing Catapult, for one, begins every engagement by sitting down with a business and working through the actual problem before anyone talks about facilities. Digital Catapult runs its own cohort programmes on top of that its Digital Twin Adoption Accelerator currently offers UK-wide founders up to £100,000 in grant funding alongside nine months of hands-on support.

For most founders, the practical starting point sits one step earlier than any individual Catapult: Innovate UK Business Growth, the advisory service that connects eligible SMEs into the network in the first place. Eligibility isn't complicated on paper a UK-registered trading company with up to 250 employees and a genuinely innovative product or service is enough to get a conversation started. Knowing to ask, knowing what is a Catapult before you need one, is still the hardest part of the whole process.

The Geography Problem: Who Actually Gets Access?

Say our wind-sensor founder isn't near Newcastle at all say she's in Cornwall, or Belfast, or anywhere that isn't already sitting inside one of these clusters. That's where the story gets less tidy, since Catapult sites don't spread evenly across the country but cluster around existing strength: compound semiconductors in South Wales, offshore energy in the North East and Scotland, manufacturing across the Midlands and Yorkshire, satellite technology out of Leicester and Oxfordshire, and life sciences threaded through London, Stevenage and Edinburgh.

The government's own line is that this is deliberate, not an oversight Catapults go where the industrial capability and research excellence already exist, not where a map of the UK suggests they should. Defensible, maybe, if you're already inside one of those clusters, but it's still a genuinely long drive for founders who aren't.

A Network About to Change Again

The ground keeps shifting, too, which raises the question of what a Catapult will even look like in a year. In March 2026, Innovate UK published a new strategic prospectus, signalling a move towards backing fewer businesses more deliberately, aligned to a shortlist of Industrial Strategy sectors.

The Catapult Network survived that reshuffle intact, explicitly named a "national asset," but UKRI has also confirmed it's actively reviewing the Catapult portfolio, with decisions on any structural changes due within the year. Which means the answer to what is a Catapult, and how many of them there are, is accurate as of today and not guaranteed to still look this way by the time anyone's read this twice.

Do Catapults Actually Help Startups Grow?

Innovate UK's own evaluation found SMEs working with Catapults grow 50% faster than similar businesses that don't. That's a strong case for picking up the phone, but what's harder to answer is whether a founder outside the existing hub regions gets a genuinely fair shot at that growth once the portfolio narrows towards a smaller set of priority sectors.

We don't think that question has an answer yet, and maybe it shouldn't, this early into a review that's still underway.

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About EP+: Entrepreneur Plus UK is a UK founder-first startup platform covering founder stories, funding and the wider UK startup ecosystem.

Sources: UK Research and Innovation; Research Professional News; Catapult Network Office; UKRI (Facility Directory and Delivery Plan 2026–27); ORE Catapult; Digital Catapult; Sync NI; High Value Manufacturing Catapult; Innovate UK Business Growth; catapult.org.uk.