The EU’s innovation council, part of Horizon Europe, announced Tuesday it would be supporting European deep tech research and high-potential start-ups to the tune of EUR 1.4 billion next year.
The European Innovation Council EIC) Work Programme 2025, which the Commission has adopted, represents an increase of nearly EUR 200 million in comparison with 2024.
In addition to a bigger budget, the 2025 work programme now includes better access to scale-up equity funding with the EIC Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) scale-up scheme, introduced following the STEP regulation adopted earlier this year.
Main highlights are:
- New EIC STEP Scale-up scheme, which will work with a budget of €300 million in 2025 (and expected to grow to €900 million over the period 2025-27) to provide larger investments in companies aiming to bring strategic technologies to the EU market and avoid strategic dependencies. It will provide investments of between €10 and €30 million through the EIC Fund per company to leverage private co-investment, achieving at least €50 to €150 million in total. The EIC STEP Scale-up scheme will help address a market gap in deep tech scale-up funding in Europe, targeting digital technologies, clean and resource-efficient technologies including net-zero, and biotechnologies.
- Updated set of ‘EIC Challenges’:
- €120 million for emerging technologies including autonomous robots, climate resilient crops, converting waste to input materials and medical diagnosis.
- €250 million for earlier stage companies in specific target technologies including generative artificial intelligence, new space, agri tech and future mobility solutions.
- Increasing access to Business Acceleration Services for emerging companies from ‘widening countries’ (countries with lower levels of research and innovation performance).
- Awarding of Seals of Excellence under the Transition and Accelerator calls and the new STEP Seal under the STEP Scale-up scheme and Accelerator Challenge calls: these Seals aim to facilitate access to complementary and alternative funding sources such as Cohesion Policy Funds as well as to EIC Business Acceleration Services.
The EIC Work Programme 2025 is built around three main funding schemes:
- EIC Pathfinder – €262 million for multi-disciplinary research teams to undertake visionary early-stage technology research and development with the potential to lead to technology breakthroughs (grants up to €4 million).
- EIC Transition – €98 million to turn research results into innovation opportunities, following up on results generated by EIC Pathfinder, European Research Council Proof of Concept and Horizon Europe Pillar 2 (societal challenges) collaborative projects (grants up to €2.5 million).
- EIC Accelerator – €634 million for start-ups and SMEs to develop, commercialise and scale up innovations with the potential to create new markets or disrupt
