KTH researchers received grants from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
Seven innovation projects in AI, quantum technology and ICT have received grants from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation through its Proof of Concept programme.
Proof of Concept programme
The programme allows university research groups to take early discoveries a step further towards validated methods, products or processes, and to prepare them for commercialisation.
Martin Monperrus, who got funding for Sustainable Inference Usage in Agentic Coding Platforms, tells us, "AI-powered, agentic coding platforms consume vast amounts of tokens per task. Yet, studies show that 24–60% of the context they send to the language model is bloat or waste, thus inflating costs, latency, and energy use."
The project builds a transparent middleware layer between coding agents and LLM backends that debloats prompts by combining program analysis (identifying the minimal relevant code slice per sub-task), targeting 50–80% token reduction while preserving output quality.
"Thanks to the Proof of Concept grant, a team will be funded for 24 months to implement the middleware, build the benchmarking infrastructure, and carry out pilot deployments," he adds.
Website: superleanai.com
KTH congratulates the researchers who have been awarded Proof of Concept grants in AI, quantum technology and ICT in the 2026 call: Martin Monperrus and also Ali Elshaari, for the project Hybrid 2D–3D Programmable Photonic Processors for Scalable Quantum and Optical Information Processing.
The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation awards Proof of Concept grants in three areas: life sciences, materials science, and AI, quantum technology and ICT.
A third call for Proof of Concept grants in AI, quantum technology and ICT will open on 15 January, with the application deadline on 12 February 2027.
"The program plays an important role in strengthening and accelerating innovation based on academic research. It is therefore gratifying to see the growing interest in the program from researchers at universities around Sweden. This year, the Foundation has also shortened the evaluation process in order to be able to meet research-based innovation more quickly," says Pontus de Laval, chairman of the expert panel.
The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation awarded the first Proof of Concept grants in 2017. In 2019, the Wallenberg Launch Pad, WALP, platform was created. Researchers who have or have had grants from any Wallenberg Foundation can apply to WALP with their ideas. Those who then proceed in the process receive support and coaching within WALP. All in all, since 2017, a total of 165 Proof of Concept grants have been awarded.