Derry AI Founder Wins Competitive 75,000 Pound Innovate UK Grant

Mary Blake, founder and chief executive of Derry-based SeeMe Ltd, has won a £75,000 Innovate UK Women in Innovation Award. She was selected from a record 1,590 applicants across the UK. Only 61 companies received the award, and just two winners came from Northern Ireland.

Blake, who is originally from Enniskillen, built SeeMe Ltd around an AI-enabled personal archive platform. The technology lets users turn photo collections into detailed digital archives. It preserves the stories and emotions connected to images, rather than storing files as a simple cloud dump.

What The Funding Will Support

The £75,000 grant will fund a 12-month project called the SeeMe Ltd Narrated Archives Platform, or SNAP. The project will focus on the next stage of the company’s technology development and validation. Alongside the grant, Blake receives 12 months of business support, training, networking, and mentoring through Innovate UK.

Blake said the win confirms the value of work done so far. “Being one of only 61 successful applicants out of almost 1,600 innovative companies across the UK is a huge validation of the work we have done to date,” she said. She added that the award provides the kind of tangible support essential to companies building globally from outside the UK’s traditional economic centres.

Before founding SeeMe Ltd, Blake held senior roles in cultural institutions, international marketing, and the public sector, including work with National Museums. She sees the platform’s potential across family history, elder care, care settings, cultural institutions, and global diaspora communities.

A Programme That Has Backed 260 Founders Since 2016

The Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards are now in their tenth year. More than £15 million has been invested in women-led businesses through the programme since 2016, reaching 260 founders in total. The record applicant pool this year points to growing demand for structured support among women-led tech businesses.

Tom Adeyoola, executive chair of Innovate UK, said this year’s cohort represents some of the UK’s most promising entrepreneurial talent. “Many of today’s most successful companies started with a bold idea and the right support at the right time,” he said. “Through Women in Innovation, we are backing founders with the ambition, talent and determination to develop the UK’s most promising companies.”

The second Northern Ireland winner is Pragya Sharma, founder of Gran Lab, a Belfast-based research and development platform treating skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema. Both SeeMe and Gran Lab will receive the full 12-month support package alongside their grant awards.

For Blake, the prize is also a statement about where innovation happens. Companies outside London and other established hubs can compete and win at a national level, and the SNAP project will now test whether SeeMe’s platform can reach the global scale she is targeting. Women founders facing similar barriers to capital and visibility can find more context on structural funding challenges in this analysis of recognition gaps and in reporting on how regional tech hubs are stepping in where venture capital has not. The broader economic cost of those gaps is documented in research on the female entrepreneurship gap in Europe.