The European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder programme is Europe’s flagship innovation programme and provides funding to breakthrough deep tech projects with a high degree of scientific and technological ambition and risk and potential to create new markets (TRL 1-4).

About the EIC Pathfinder

The European Innovation Council (EIC) Pathfinder programme is Europe’s flagship innovation programme that provides funding to breakthrough deep tech projects with a high degree of scientific and technological ambition and risk and potential to create new markets (TRL 1-4).

This funding programme under Horizon Europe offers support to research teams by:

• Funding research to develop the scientific basis to underpin breakthrough technologies,
• Supporting the earliest stages of scientific, technological or deep-tech R&D (TRL1-4),
• Aiming to build on new, cutting-edge directions in science and technology to disrupt a field and a market or create new opportunities,
• Realising innovative technological solutions to identify, develop and scale up breakthrough technologies and disruptive innovations in Europe.

Objectives

The EIC Pathfinder has several objectives:

• To create high-quality scientific publications, ideally in open access journals,
• To present a compelling vision for their potential future impact,
• Projects are expected to take steps to ensure their findings can be further developed and adopted in the futur.

Most important points of the EIC Pathfinder 2026

• Increase in the project scope and simplifying administrative aspects.
• The indicative budget size of EIC Pathfinder projects is increased to €4 million, and it also includes the introduction of lump sum funding. This means that eligible costs for both Pathfinder Open and Challenges will take the form of a lump sum, the amount of which will be determined during the evaluation process.
• Three new topics for EIC Pathfinder challenges: Biotechnology for Healthy Ageing, DeepRAP: Deep Reasoning, Abstraction & Planning towards trustworthy Cognitive AI Systems, and Advanced Materials for Miniaturised Energy Harvesting Systems.

Budget of the EIC Pathfinder

The total budget for 2026 under the Pathfinder Programme amounts to €262 million.

Non-reimbursable grants of €3 to €4 million to support early-stage development of future technologies (e.g. various activities at low TRL 1-3), up to proof of concept.

EIC Pathfinder schemes

The EIC Pathfinder is divided into two schemes:

• EIC Pathfinder Open (€166 million): it is open to support projects in any field of science, technology or application without predefined thematic priorities.
• EIC Pathfinder Challenges (€96 million): it aims to support coherent portfolios of projects within predefined thematic areas with the aim to achieve specific objectives for each Challenge.

EIC Pathfinder Challenges 2026

During 2026, the EIC Pathfinder Challenges fall within the following topics:

Application process in a nutshell

Proposals must meet all the following essential characteristics in order to apply for the
EIC Pathfinder:

• High-risk/high-gain research approach and methodology, with concrete and plausible objectives,
• Concrete, novel and ambitious science-towards technology breakthrough, providing advancement towards the envisioned technology,
• Convincing long-term vision of a radically new technology that has the potential to have a transformative positive effect to our economy and society.

To know more about the EIC Pathfinder

Strata has published the ultimate guide to the EIC Pathfinder 2026 with the most important novelties introduced by the European Commission.

If you want to know more about the application process for the EIC Pathfinder 2026, learn about its novelties in detail, and access Strata’s unique offering, download our guide filling in this form:

Also, if you want to check our previous EIC Pathfinder Guide for 2025, you can now read and download it!

Click on this link and download our guide for free to check on the previous requisites.