With grants under €2.5 million and investments ranging from €0.5 to €15 million, the EIC Accelerator will deploy €675 million in 2024 to enable start-ups and SMEs to develop and scale up innovations that have the potential to create new markets or disrupt established ones. The EIC Fund, which will receive an extra €180 million to follow up on investments in firms chosen under past EIC Accelerator calls, will have a total budget of €405 million set aside for investments.
Novelties for 2024
The work programme for 2024 has been recently released, where we find some novelties and changes that should be taken into consideration:
- There are only two cut-off dates for 2024, which are due on March 13 and October 3;
- The “grant first” kind of support is no longer available, however, beneficiaries of “blended finance” may begin with grant-only funding and get the investment component later on;
- The experts’ evaluations must yield three of the four GOs in order for the short application stage to be passed;
- If evaluators have different opinions, consensus sessions for the assessment of complete applications are introduced;
- The evaluation criteria for excellence includes an evaluation element to assess excellence of the company,
- The jury may offer suggestions on the amount of equity financing that the EIC Fund will take into consideration, but they are not allowed to alter the type of assistance or the amount of equity asked,
- Applicants will receive a rejection letter right away if they are not selected for the jury interview stage, and if qualified, they will also be given the Seal of Excellence,
- There are new constraints on application resubmissions.
Background: What happened in 2023?
The following data has been extracted from an analysis of the three EIC calls available in 2023: the January, March and June calls. Results from the fourth call have not been published yet.
Total number of funded companies
Overall, a total of 130 companies received funding from the EIC in 2023.
In the January call, 32 companies were funded, while 51 and 47 companies received funding in the March and June call, respectively. This shows an increase by 59% from the first call to the second one, and although there was a small decrease from the second call to the third one (-8%), the third one still exceeded the first one by 46%.
Overall success rates
The success rates amounted to 7%, 9% and 7% in the three calls correspondingly.
Most awarded financing type
Blended finance has been the most awarded financing type (53%, 45% and 68%, respectively), followed by grant first (38%, 43% and 19%, respectively) and grant only (9%, 12% and 11%, respectively).
Overall, in the three calls 72 companies chose blended finance as financing type (55%), while grant first was chosen by 43 companies (33%) and 14 companies chose grant only (11%).
Top 3 countries
France continues to lead the EIC Accelerator (20 companies, 15%), followed by Netherlands (19 companies, 14%), and the UK (9 companies, 7%).
Top areas
Overall, the most awarded area has been Health, with a total of 63 projects belonging to this area (48%), followed by New deep-tech & ICT (44 projects, 34%) and Environment (23 projects, 18%).
