The Hypercat consortium has received additional funding of 1.6 million from the UK Government's innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board.
The consortium is made up of 40 British companies, and aims to develop an open standard for the Internet of Things(IoT)and encourage widespread interoperability.
There is currently no standard by which everyday smart objects can communicate with each other, meaning that various smart devices around the home or elsewhere are unable to talk to each other without human intervention.
Justin Anderson, CEO of IoT vendor Flexeye, said: "As new entrants to the IoT market strive to deliver revolutionary solutions at an extraordinary pace, HyperCat will ensure that these players can securely speak a common language.
"The UK has an opportunity now, through HyperCat, to be central to the IoT revolution, leveling the playing field with the ubiquitous American giants and inspiring British industry to deliver 100 billion of value by 2020."
John Davies, chief researcher at BT, added: "We look forward to working on this exciting project both to push forward the world-leading HyperCat IoT interoperability specification and to deliver a compelling set of use cases demonstrating the very significant business value to be gained.
"We are confident the consortium can thus drive the uptake of this technology by British business to the economic benefit of the UK."
Hypercat has been working towards complete interoperability between machines, diminishing the need for human input and creating a standard that helps the internet of things to grow in the same way as the World Wide Web before it.
The global economic gain from this venture has been estimated at $1.9 trillion by 2020, according to leading information technology research and advisory company, Gartner.
Speaking on these ambitions back in June, Anderson said: "HyperCat is a seed that will be watered further, and what the government has done is put in place this crucible that brings together a lot of different stakeholders from application developers, data owners, end users, large companies and small companies.
"We've gotten to a point now where we really are leading the world in this thinking around interoperability of the IoT."
