Where is cybersecurity research funding actually heading?

Most funding advice focuses on the current cycle: open calls with pressing deadlines, approaches to wording the proposal. That information is necessary but reactive; by the time a call is open, the funder has already decided what it wants to pay for. The more useful question for a funding roadmap is different: what do policy documents and think-tank analysis suggest is coming next, before it shows up as a funding line?

Funding pots may be less stable than they appear

It can be tempting to treat familiar funding streams as a fixture that will simply renew every year because it always has. A deeper look at policy shows that is a risky approach.

In the UK, there are growing concerns that promising UK cyber research is being taken out of the country by overseas buyers rather than funded through to commercialisation domestically. Government-backed programmes like Innovate UK's Cyber Runway and CyberASAP, along with joint Innovate UK/DSIT competitions such as Cyber Local, exist to try to tackle this issue, but there are still gaps in the early funding stages.

In the US, a think-tank analysis of state and local cybersecurity funding published in April 2026 flagged that the federal government's main state and local cybersecurity grant programme has only been reauthorised to the end of the current financial year, with no new funding attached. That means a programme jurisdictions have relied on for years could simply stop.

The EU's flagship research programme faces its own version of this. Member states missed their own May 2026 deadline to agree the successor to Horizon Europe, and the picture has only gotten less settled since as the Commission's original €175 billion proposal has already been trimmed to roughly €167.9 billion in a preliminary Council proposal. Brussels is now aiming to agree the full multi-year budget by the end of 2026, officials involved in the talks have publicly described that timeline as "aspirational." Horizon Europe has been a staple of funding roadmaps, and its current instability shows the need to look further ahead.

Neither of these is a reason to panic, and neither means the money disappears overnight. But both are a clear reason to build a funding plan with multiple funding routes, not a single dependency.

Where will new money be going?

Policy reports and think-tank analysis will give you an idea of the direction of new money.

In the UK, the government's 2026 cyber security sectoral analysis, based on consultations with investors and the innovation ecosystem, names AI security (particularly the new risks created by agentic AI) and post-quantum cryptography as the two areas drawing the most active interest right now. That gives a clear, government-published signal of where UK research funding priorities are likely to concentrate next.

A new US cybersecurity strategy released in March 2026 explicitly reframes national cyber policy away from pure defence and toward deterrence and disruption, with specific emphasis on AI security and advanced cryptography named as technical priorities going forward. Items buried in strategy documents are likely to turn into funding priorities roughly twelve to eighteen months later, which makes them useful early indicators of where new calls are likely to concentrate, well before any specific programme is published.

If you’re seeking cybersecurity grant funding, you can use this information to your advantage. A research programme that already sits close to a policy priority has a head start when new funding does appear, because it doesn't need to be reframed to fit. A programme that ignores where policy is heading has to do that reframing later, under deadline pressure, which is a much harder position to write from.

What you can do to plan ahead

Prioritise reading policy documentation, industry reports, and think-tank outputs as a key part of your funding activities. A roadmap looking at least two years ahead should account for the real possibility that a familiar funding source changes or disappears.

This needs to happen alongside the core work of identifying grant funding calls and writing strong applications, and means you can shape your narrative well ahead of future calls being released. That puts you in a much stronger position for winning that crucial funding.

It is. At Ailsa, we’re already looking years ahead on your behalf. Want us to save you time researching, finding and writing grants so you can do what you do best? Get the grants you deserve at ailsa.io