Additional €150 million for the European Innovation Council to fund breakthrough ideas tackling coronavirus

The additional budget, approved by the European Commission today, will fund the best start-ups and SMEs who applied under the March cut-off.

The Commission will also award special Seals of Excellence to high quality coronavirus relevant applications that cannot be funded with this €150 million in order to support their financing from other sources. Companies selected for EIC support will be announced in late May.

The extra €150 million, set out in the revised EIC pilot work programme, is specifically for companies with Coronavirus relevant innovations and comes on top of the €164 million already announced on the 25 March, which will be used to support a wide range of other breakthrough innovations.

A record number of close to 4000 start-ups and SMEs applied to the EIC Accelerator pilot in March – over 1000 of which have innovations relevant to the coronavirus outbreak. Remote evaluation of all the applications have been completed, and the highest ranked applications are being invited for live interviews from 11 to 15 May 2020, where experts in specific coronavirus-relevant fields have been especially recruited to help select the strongest proposals.

This support to start-ups and SMEs is part of the Commission’s coordinated coronavirus response.

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