Europe boosts EIC innovation and scale up funding

The European Innovation Council (EIC) is to invest €1.4 billion in deep tech and scaling up strategic technologies in 2025, up by €200m on the original plans.

The EIC will support European deep tech research and high-potential start-ups with more funding and better access to scale-up equity funding and several other improvements. The funds were cut back this year.

The scale up equity funding is will come from a new EIC Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) scale-up scheme. This follows the launch of the Trusted Investor Club last week.

The EIC STEP Scale-up scheme 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.

This aims to address a market gap in deep tech scale-up funding in Europe, targeting digital technologies, clean and resource-efficient technologies.

There is also an updated set of ‘EIC Challenges‘ that the funds will support. These now include €120 million for emerging technologies including autonomous robots, climate resilient crops, converting waste to input materials and medical diagnosis as well as €250 million for earlier stage companies in specific target technologies including generative artificial intelligence, new space, agri tech and future mobility.

There will also be increasing access to Business Acceleration Services for emerging companies from countries with lower levels of research and innovation performance.

The EIC Work Programme 2025 is built around three main funding schemes:

EIC Pathfinder has €262 million for multi-disciplinary research teams to undertake visionary early-stage technology research and development with the potential to lead to technology breakthroughs with grants up to €4 million.

EIC Transition has €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 with grants up to €2.5 million.

The EIC Accelerator has €634 million for start-ups and SMEs to develop, commercialise and scale up innovations with the potential to create new markets or disrupt existing ones. Grants are below €2.5 million, with equity investments from €500 000 to €10 million).

STEP will now provide additional equity funding to promising companies driving innovation in critical areas (SMEs, start-ups, spin-offs and small mid-caps) to help them secure larger private co-investment for further scaling.

So far, under Horizon Europe, the EIC has supported more than 630 companies and more than 450 research projects.

The EIC’s investment arm, the EIC Fund, has reached €1 billion in actual investments in deep tech start-ups, tapping into €4bn in co-investments. This makes the EIC Fund the largest and the most active deep tech co-investment fund in Europe.

“The European Innovation Council has emerged as a gamechanger in EU support to breakthrough innovation. In 2025, it will boost EU deep tech with even more resources, amounting to €1.4 billion from Horizon Europe, our research and innovation programme. The targeted support, especially through the STEP scale-up call, will help bridge critical funding gaps and build a stronger, more resilient innovation ecosystem in Europe,” said Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth.

EIC information days are taking place next week, on 5th November for general information and 6th for the EIC Accelerator Challenges.