Venture Café Manchester: The Future of Scientific Discovery

The weekly Thursday Gathering, built this week around how breakthrough science gets funded and what happens when AI agents start doing parts of the research themselves.

Two sessions sit inside the usual open evening. ARIA 101, from 17:30, is a moderated panel with senior representatives of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency on what it backs, how it picks and how to get involved, with audience questions. From 18:30 the UK Agentic Science Network runs an unconference-style workshop on agentic science, participant-led rather than presented. Networking, pizza and music run across the whole 17:00 to 20:00 at Sister in the Renold Building. Free.

Why go: ARIA rarely explains its funding logic to a room this open, and the agentic-science workshop is a working session rather than a talk. Best for researchers, deeptech founders and anyone near the research-commercialisation boundary.