EIC Accelerator 2025

Overview

• Do you have a high-impact innovative technology, product, service or business model that could create new markets or disrupt existing ones in Europe and even worldwide?
• Are you a start-up or a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) with the ambition and commitment to scale up?
• Are you looking for substantial funding, but the risks involved are too high for private investors alone to invest the full amount needed

If your answers to the above questions are ‘yes’, then the EIC Accelerator may be the right funding scheme for you.

Scope

The EIC Accelerator focuses on innovations building on scientific discovery or technological breakthroughs (‘deep tech’) and where significant funding is needed over a long timeframe before returns can be generated (‘patient capital’).

Such innovations often struggle to attract financing because the risks and time period involved are too high. Funding and support from the EIC Accelerator is designed to enable such innovators to attract the full investment amounts needed for scale up in a shorter timeframe. 

The EIC Accelerator supports the later stages of technology development as well as scale up. The technology component of your innovation must therefore have been tested and validated in a laboratory and other relevant environment. The EIC Accelerator looks to support companies where the EIC support will act as a catalyst to crowd in other investors necessary for the scale up of the innovation.

EIC Accelerator grant funding covers innovation activities, including demonstration of the technology in the relevant environment, prototyping and system level demonstration,R&D and testing required to meet regulatory and standardisation requirements, intellectual property management, and marketing approval. 

Applicants to the EIC Accelerator can submit proposals through:

EIC Accelerator Open, which has no predefined thematic priorities and is open to proposals in any field of technology or application;

EIC Accelerator Challenges in pre defined areas of emerging and strategic technologies.

EIC AcceleratorChallenges 2025:

• Acceleration of advanced materials development and upscaling along the value chain: Scaling SMEs belonging to the whole value chain of advanced materials and addressing one or more of these four key application areas: energy, mobility, electronics and construction
• Biotechnology driven low emission food and feed production systems: Radically decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and the wider environmental footprint of the food production system requires further action on several fronts
• GenAI 4EU: Creating European Champions in Generative AI: To support start-ups and SMEs committed to bringing transformative AI-driven solutions to market, to safeguard human autonomy and enhance human expertise thus providing significant added value to decision-making processes, services or industrial workflows
• Innovative in-space servicing, operations, robotics and technologies for resilient EU space infrastructure: To support companies developing cost-effective, scalable and resilient solutions to service and/or augment satellite capabilities, perform in-orbit refuelling, contribute to space debris reduction, and protect EU space infrastructure
• Breakthrough innovations for future mobility: To support cost-effective and scalable deep tech breakthroughs that will help deliver reductions in mobility-related emissions

Project duration

‍Up to 24 months

Award value

‍EUR 2 499 999 maximum grant amount

Funding rates

• Eligible costs for the grant component are reimbursed up to a maximum of 70% within the ceiling of the maximum grant amount, i.e. EUR 2 499 999
• All successful proposals will receive, in addition to funding, tailor-made access to a wide range of BusinessAcceleration Services
• The 30% co-funding of the work packages to be covered by the grant component has to be financed by the beneficiary through its own resources

 Eligibility criteria

• For single start-up or SME (including spin-outs) applicants from EU Member States and countries associated to the Horizon Europe programme (which includes the UK)
• Technology must be at TRL6 at project start and reach TRL8 by project end
• Subcontractors can be used, only if justified, for activities which are essential for the objectives of the project
• Applicants can only submit one application at a time (additional applications can be submitted after receiving the results of the original submission)

2025 deadlines

Short proposals can be submitted at any time, and are assessed on a first-come-first serve basis. Feedback will be provided within 4-6 weeks.

2025 cut off dates for full proposals (by invite only): 12th March; 1st October