EIC funds 38 deeptech companies in the first 2026 cut-off

In the 2026 cut-off, 38 companies received funding from the EIC Accelerator out of the 87 that reached the interview stage! (roughly 44% success rate). Congratulations to these disruptive companies!

Let’s dive deeper into the statistics of this call ⬇️

Key Insights

• 38 companies have been funded in the EIC January & March 2026 cut-off, with €292 million in funding,
• 61% report between 11-50 employees,
• France and the UK are the top countries in number of winners,
• 42% were founded more than 3 years ago,
• 84% of the approved projects requested blended finance.

EIC Accelerator 2026 cut-off: winners per country

Figure 1. Winners per country.

France has been the leading country with 6 awarded projects (16%), followed by the UK (5 projects, 13%) and Sweden, Switzerland and Germany (4 projects each,11%). Interestingly, Spain didn’t have any winning company within this batch which seems to obey a balancing mechanism implemented by the EIC to counter the large number of Spanish projects in the previous round. 

Winners per area

Projects can be classified into five different categories: Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Health, Biotechnology, Engineering, and Environmental technologies.

Environmental technologies has been the most awarded area (11 winners, 29%), followed by ICT and Health (9 projects each, 24%):

Figure 2. Awarded projects per area.

Winners per company type

In terms of number of employees, according to the companies’ LinkedIn profiles, most of the companies range from 11-50 employees (23 companies, roughly 61%), while 9 of them have smaller teams (from 2-10 employees, 24%). The remaining 5 companies employ 51 to 200 people (13%), according to all the companies that disclosed this information.

Most of the companies are relatively new: 42% were founded more than 3 years ago.

The table below includes the full list of winners: