The European Innovation Council has nominated six high-growth companies to receive significant equity investments through the EIC STEP Scale Up initiative. These organizations, representing sectors such as clean technology, semiconductor design, and artificial intelligence, will receive a total of €97 million to accelerate their market expansion.
Featured insights of the EIC STEP Scale Up
- Individual funding ranges between €10 million and €30 million per company,
- the EIC aims to address a critical European deep-tech market gap, leveraging these investments to crowd in private co-investment and unlock massive financing rounds of €50 million to €150 million or more,
- out of 24 companies that submitted proposals, 17 were selected for interviews with independent experts, and 6 scale-ups ultimately met all criteria for investment,
- the initiative is backed by a €300 million budget for 2026 under the EIC Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) Scale Up scheme, focusing on digital, clean/net-zero, and biotechnologies.
The 6 Winning Scale-ups & Their Innovations
The selected companies represent some of Europe’s most promising technologies to reduce strategic dependencies:
- Cailabs (France): Developing ground systems to make laser communications commercially deployable. Founded in 2013, Cailabs designs, manufactures, and develops innovative photonic solutions for the space, industry (laser machining), telecommunications, and defense sectors. A global specialist in laser shaping, the company has seen its growth accelerate in the space field with turnkey optical ground stations that integrate atmospheric turbulence compensation technology. This makes it one of the first companies to harness very high data rates enabled by optics in a commercial ground station. The company employs today +200 FTEs and raised €57 million in 2025 from the EIB, EIC and other institutional investors through InvestEU
- Cylib (Germany): Driving the circular economy by recycling end-of-life batteries into critical raw materials. Founded in 2022 in Aachen, Germany, the company builds on nearly a decade of research by the founding team. cylib’s proprietary end-to-end recycling process is characterized by an efficient, resource- and climate-friendly recovery of all raw materials in a battery, including lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt and manganese from battery packs, production scraps, or micromobility batteries. Cylib employs 120 FTEs and raised a €55 million round in 2024 from Porsche Ventures and World Fund. Cylib has also secured over €89 million in non-dilutive public grants.
- Paebbl (The Netherlands): Fighting climate change by sequestrating CO₂ into building materials. Founded in 2021, the company today employs +60 FTEs and has developed a proprietary accelerated mineralisation technology that actively turns captured CO₂ into a stable, light grey mineral powder. This geomimicry process is the foundation for an SCM that not only reduces embodied carbon but permanently locks CO₂ into the built environment. Paebbl has raised more than €30 million in total funding across multiple rounds from Capnamic Ventures, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, and Holcim among others. Paebbl is also the recipient of a EIC Pathfinder grant.
- SiPearl (France): Strengthening digital sovereignty by designing high-performance CPUs for sovereign data centers. Founded in 2019, SiPearl employs +200 people in France, Spain and Italy. SiPearl is the European fabless designer of sovereign high-performance energy-efficient CPUs for supercomputers, AI and data centres. These CPUs will help address strategic challenges in the fields of security, defence, medical research, energy, climate and engineering with a reduced environmental footprint. SiPearl has raised a total of approximately €130 million across its funding history, highlighted by a €90 million Series A round led by chip designer ARM. The company also secured the EIC Accelerator blended finance.
- Skeleton Technologies Group (Estonia): Building rack-to-grid power systems specifically engineered for next-generation AI compute infrastructure. Founded in 2019, Skeleton is the Backbone of Power: equipping AI data centers, electrical grids, defense systems, and critical infrastructure with the resilience to withstand surges, instability, and failure. Their power systems protect GPU clusters from millisecond-level spikes, enable hyperscalers to run at higher rack densities without grid compromise, and make AI data centers up to 40% more energy efficient. The company today employs more than 600 people. Skeleton Technologies has raised a total of approximately €392 million in venture capital funding from investors such as Axon Partners and Siemens. The company counts with the support of EIT InnoEnergy as well as the EIC Accelerator.
- Vsora (France): Delivering ultra-high-performance AI inference solutions for data centers and edge deployments. Founded in 2015, and having raised more than €55 million up to date, VSORA is a French fabless semiconductor company pioneering ultra-efficient, high-performance AI inference processors for cloud and data center environments. Purpose-built to overcome the memory wall and the escalating energy demands of modern AI workloads, VSORA’s flagship chip Jotunn8 delivers breakthrough throughput, ultra-low latency, and exceptional performance-per-watt—enabling cloud providers to scale AI services more sustainably and cost-effectively. The company has been backed by funders such as the EIC, Ardian and Otium Capital and today employs over 60 FTEs.
The Next Opportunities
The STEP Scale Up call remains continuously open.The upcoming 2026 quarterly cut-off dates are 9 September 2026 and 25 November 2026.
Background information: what is the STEP Scale Up initiative and what happened in 2025?
Last year, across the three evaluation batches of the EIC STEP Scale Up in 2025, the scheme demonstrated a highly competitive selection process while supporting companies developing strategic technologies for Europe. Overall, 104 proposals were submitted, 63 companies reached the interview stage, and 19 were selected to move forward to EIC Fund investment decisions, representing an overall success rate of around 18%. The selected companies are expected to receive equity investments of €10–30 million each, designed to leverage significantly larger private financing rounds. The results confirm the strong demand for large-scale European deep-tech investment and the programme’s role in addressing the financing gap faced by high-growth companies.
The STEP Scale Up initiative is a funding program that targets a specific capital gap in Europe by supporting deep-tech firms that require substantial resources to remain globally competitive. Beyond direct financial aid, the EIC awards a STEP Seal to high-quality applicants, assisting them in securing additional private or public funding. By fostering these strategic technologies, the European Commission aims to strengthen the continent’s industrial independence and sustainable infrastructure. Applications remain open for future quarterly evaluations, as the program continues to seek breakthrough innovations with large-scale economic potential.
About the author of this post
Sara Gavidia
Communications Manager
Funding Expert
LinkedIn
sara.gavidia@strata.team
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