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Projects funded
  • Coordinators: Horizon Europe
  • Opening of application: 14 May 2025
  • Allocated budget: Combination of grant (up to 2,5M€) and equity (up to 10M€)
  • End of applications: 1 October 2025
  • Project duration: 24 months
  • Project submitted on: Open calls

Objective

Support the scaling of SMEs across the entire advanced materials value chain, focusing on key strategic sectors such as energy, mobility, electronics, and construction. This includes identifying and bringing breakthrough innovations to market, in order to strengthen the EU’s strategic autonomy in these critical areas.

Priorities

  • Strengthen the European value chain of advanced materials in the energy, mobility, electronics, and construction application areas.
  • Enable a more diversified, digitally driven, and risk-aware configuration of the European advanced materials value chain and associated processes and technologies.  
  • Accelerate market uptake of advanced materials in the energy, mobility, electronics, and construction industrial sectors.
  • Address the EU’s industrial dependency on imports of resources, such as CRMs, for the energy, mobility, electronics, and construction sectors. 

Eligibility

Eligible activities

Projects should target one or both of the following areas, taking into account the Safe and Sustainable by Design framework, including Life Cycle Assessment and circularity approaches: 

  • Technologies for design, synthesis, characterisation, up-scaling, and production of advanced materials.
  • Scaling up processes to reach the targeted functionalities or improved performance of advanced materials, such as surface functionalization of nanoparticles, or additive manufacturing approaches which may enable a fast integration of the advanced materials into smart devices.

Eligibility

This programme is mono-beneficiary :

1. Be established in one of the following countries :

  • Member States of the European Union, including their outermost regions,
  • The Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) linked to the Member States,
  • Countries associated to Horizon Europe – Pillar III & low- and middle-income countries

2. Single start-up or SME (including spin-outs)

3. Small mid-caps (up to 499 employees)  in two scenarios:

  • Can apply for “investment only”,
  • Or for “blended finance” in exceptional cases for rapid scale up of TRL 9.

4. Natural persons or legal entities willing to set up an SMEs or a mid-cap.

5. Applicants may submit only one application to the EIC Accelerator. Additional applications can be submitted after receiving the results of the original submission.

The application can be rejected maximum 3 times up until the end of the programme under Horizon Europe i.e. the end of 2027.  (If you are successful at the short proposal stage, this does not count within the limit of three applications. If you are successful at the remote evaluation stage of a full proposal but then unsuccessful at the interview phase, this counts as one unsuccessful application.) 

Different types of funding

Grant only: – for start-ups and SMEs with capacity to scale-up. To be provided only once during the implementation period of the Horizon Europe programme (2021-2027) (your application must demonstrate that you have access to the resources needed to commercialise and scale up your innovation)

Blended finance: a grant component & direct equity or quasi-equity such as convertible loans. 

Investment only: for mid caps companies and companies that have received a «grant only». 

You may adjust the EIC funding request when submitting your full proposal 

Applications process

1. Write your short proposal

Short proposals may be submitted at any time and which will be evaluated remotely by EIC expert evaluators on a first come, first served basis :

  • A short form where you must summarise your proposal and respond to a set of questions on your innovation, your potential market and your team;
  • A pitch-deck of up to ten slides in PDF format; 
  • A video pitch of up to three minutes where the core members of your team (up to three people) should provide the motivation for your proposal. 

If your application meets the basic criteria, you will be invited to prepare a full proposal to submit to one of the periodic cut-off dates for funding.

Please note that short proposals are collected for evaluation on the first Tuesday of every month, and the results are transmitted to applicants within 4 to 6 weeks of the date at which the evaluation is started.  

It is therefore recommended to submit a short proposal at least 10 weeks ahead of the deadline of a full application 

2. Prepare your full proposal

If your short proposal receives a GO, you can submit your full proposal to any of the 2025 – 2026 cut-offs.

Prepare your full proposal on Funding and Tenders portal. The full proposal consists of a full business plan, pitch deck in PDF & a 3 minutes video pitch.

You will get the result in a 8-9 weeks. 

3. Pitch your innovation

If you receive a GO, you will be invited to an interview with an EIC jury. The interview will take place within 4–5 weeks after the announcement of the previous step’s results. The format will be determined later. 

You will receive the interview results within 2–3 weeks.

  • October 1 cut off : interviews January 19-23, 2026

4. Step 4

Negotiate the grant component, start due diligence for investment component 

Would you like to apply ?

Please follow the link below

Apply here
For more information, please contact our europe team

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