The EIC board has endorsed the 2025 EIC work programme but with some reservations. Here are the main highlights:
The Board welcomes the new STEP scale-up call to support ambitious deep tech companies to stay and grow in Europe by catalyzing essential scale-up finance in the range of €50 to 150 million per company. The Board recognizes that the budget available for this call is significantly below the market needs. The estimate of the Board is that the budget shall be at least €1 billion per year.
However, the Board considers that the €300m set aside in 2025 for these larger, strategic investments, will demonstrate the importance and impact of this type of funding. Moreover, the STEP scale-up call as planned for WP 25 represents only a start in securing the necessary scale up support for European deep tech companies. A more ambitious action will be needed in future, i.e allowing for a thorough portfolio management.
With regards to Challenges, the framework should be progressively improved, including an effective role of EIC Programme Managers, to identify areas with breakthrough potential which can be activated with EIC support. In some Challenges, their ambitions are not fully in balance with the budget assigned, underlining the need for higher budgets or sponsors
from other EU-programmes for the EIC funding lines.
In particular the Board welcomes that the budgets for the existing Pathfinder, Transition and Accelerator calls have been maintained, with some improvements in processes and transparency. However, the Board sees a high number of excellent companies and projects not funded, and hence strongly encourages Member States to make full use of the Seal of Excellence and the possibility to transfer budgets into additional
EIC support to their countries. For this reason, the Board advocated and welcomes the extension of the Seal to Transition projects.
The Board welcomes the new EIC Pre–Accelerator which follows the Board’s recommendations and will provide Business Acceleration Services and grant funding (to be provided under the future Widening Work Programme), to early-stage companies from Widening Countries to develop their technology, business and investor readiness, and increase participation in the EIC Accelerator.
Source:
https://eic.ec.europa.eu/news/eic-board-endorses-2025-eic-work-programme-2024-10-29_en
