The Business of Deep Tech: Inside Europe's health and medtech through the EIC Business Acceleration Services

Brussels, September 30th 2026

Summary

›Health and medtech are the largest area of the EIC portfolio, accounting for roughly 39 percent of Accelerator projects and 39 percent of EIC Fund investment.
›EIC Business Acceleration Services combine corporate days, trade fairs, investor pitches, procurement support and talent services to move companies from lab to market.
›Programmes produced measurable short term returns from trade fairs and pilots while longer term pipelines from soft-landing missions and corporate evaluations are still maturing.
›Concrete wins include corporate pilots, procurement contracts including an €8 million DG HERA procurement award, and multiple venture financings for EIC-backed companies.
›Four empirical patterns emerge: health touches every EIC BAS programme, demand and supply converge on diagnostics and monitoring, services are synergistic, and outcomes build over time.
›Caveats remain. Reporting shows selection and time-lag effects, and many expected investments are pipeline projections rather than realised deals.

How the EIC Business Acceleration Services shape Europe’s health and medtech ecosystem

The European Innovation Council’s Business Acceleration Services, or EIC BAS, run a dense set of interventions designed to help deep-tech companies move from research to customers. Their instruments include corporate days, trade-fair participation, investor pitching, international soft-landing missions, procurement matchmaking, co-funded specialist services and leadership training. Taken together, these activities generate a data-rich view of where European health and medical technology are heading and what support is actually converting into deals, pilots and funding.

Why health dominates the EIC portfolio

Health and medtech are not only numerically dominant in the EIC portfolio but also diverse across technologies and maturity stages. The portfolio mixes preclinical biotech, cell and gene therapies, diagnostics, AI imaging, implants, robotics and connected care. This breadth matters because different subfields face distinct commercial hurdles. For example, cell and gene therapies require large capital and long clinical timelines while point-of-care diagnostics and AI tools face regulatory, reimbursement and hospital adoption challenges that can be addressed faster through pilots and procurement.

EIC portfolio numbers:According to the EIC Impact Report 2026, health biotechnology and medical technologies together account for 317 of 808 EIC Accelerator projects under Horizon Europe, about 39 percent. That breaks down to 204 in medtech and 113 in health biotech. Health also represents 106 of 217 EIC Transition projects, 188 of 477 EIC Pathfinder projects and 39 percent of EIC Fund investment with a 28 percent share for medtech and 11 percent for health biotech. These figures underline both the scale and strategic weight the EIC places on health.

How EIC BAS supports health and medtech innovators

EIC BAS does not fund research directly. Instead it provides market facing services to accelerate commercialisation and scaling. The main instruments covered in the EIC activity set are the Corporate Partnership Programme, VentureMatch investor outreach, International Trade Fairs, the Global Business Expansion Programme, the Innovation Procurement Programme powered by SPIN4EIC and InnoMatch, the EIC Service Catalogue with co-funding via EIC ACCESS+, the Scaling Club, Tech to Market trainings and targeted leadership programmes including Women Leadership and Women TechEU.

Programme	Primary focus	Typical services	Notable short term outcomes
Corporate Partnership Programme	Corporate-startup matching	Scouted participants, one-to-one meetings, pitch coaching, six months follow-up	12 signed agreements including pilots, NDAs and one joint InnoMatch application
VentureMatch	Investor outreach	E-pitches, matchmaking platform, investor lists	E-pitch on Biotech and Pharma with 8 companies, winner Asgard Therapeutics
International Trade Fairs Programme	Market access and visibility	Booth support, coaching, tailored networking	781 meaningful business contacts, €6.8M revenue reported from trade fairs, €19.8M investment already raised
Global Business Expansion Programme	Soft-landing and market entry	Missions, online academy, pitch tanks in hubs such as Silicon Valley and Boston	28 participants on soft-landing missions with €141M expected pipeline investment within a year
SPIN4EIC / Innovation Procurement / InnoMatch	Public and private procurement engagement	Market scans, pilots, tender support, buyer matchmaking	11 health pilots run; procurement wins including an €8M DG HERA contract
EIC ACCESS+ and Service Catalogue	Specialist services and co-funding	Up to €60k grants covering 50% of service costs, access to vetted partners	92 medtech companies applied for 138 services since 2023
Scaling Club and Tech to Market	Scale-up mentoring and investor-ready acceleration	Roadshows, coaching, sector masterclasses	Scaling Club members reported tens of millions in follow-on funding

Corporate partnerships and investors

Health and medtech were the most active sectors in the Corporate Partnership Programme between May 2025 and June 2026. The CPP organised seven activities including single-corporate and multi-corporate days with firms such as Philips, Clariane, Opella, Sanofi, Merck Group, AstraZeneca, Bayer and Coloplast. Those events produced curated cohorts of startups, one-to-one corporate meetings and a six month follow-up period designed to convert conversations into pilots and commercial agreements.

Corporates and startups both reported that careful scouting and EIC preparation made a difference. Corporates said they received pre-vetted companies aligned with strategic priorities. Startups reported that the programme compressed months of outreach into single days of high-quality meetings.

VentureMatch and investor engagement:The EIC VentureMatch Programme staged an E-pitch on Biotech and Pharma on 28 July 2026. The session included 8 EIC-backed companies and 27 investors, producing over 145 platform conversations and 33 meetings. Investors present had expertise in biology, genetics and vaccines and included Heal Capital and Sanofi Ventures. The winner was Asgard Therapeutics, an in vivo cell reprogramming company.

Market access, trade fairs and global missions

Between 2024 and June 2026 EIC BAS took companies to major health trade fairs such as MEDICA and BIO and ran soft-landing missions to Silicon Valley and Boston. Across these activities 102 companies participated, with 74 attending trade fairs and 28 taking part in soft-landing missions. The trade-fair activities generate immediate contacts, early revenue for presenting companies and investment interest. Soft-landing missions build investor pipelines which often take longer to convert into deals.

Measured trade-fair outcomes:Six months after MEDICA and BIO trade fairs and two soft-landing missions, participating companies reported 781 meaningful business contacts, €6.8 million in revenue attributed to trade fairs, and €19.8 million of investment already raised from trade-fair contacts. The two U.S. missions did not yet yield immediate revenue but companies expected €141 million of investment within a year, highlighting a time-lag effect between immersion in a hub and realised funding.

Buyers, pilots and procurement

Healthcare procurement is a major public market but notoriously slow and demanding. EIC’s Innovation Procurement Programme supports buyers and suppliers with market scans, tender reviews, pilot matchmaking and capacity building. Through the InnoMatch pilot instrument the programme ran 11 health pilots across hospitals and regional buyers, advancing technologies through clinical or operational validation in real settings and, in some cases, to TRL 9 integration.

Pilot company	Buyer / partner	Solution tested	Result and TRL
iLoF	Bluepharma	Optomics photonics and AI platform for nanoparticle characterisation	Assessed acceleration potential for formulation development
Nico-lab	Regione Lombardia	StrokeViewer AI for CT analysis and mobile image sharing	Processed over 560 suspected stroke cases, saved clinicians estimated 10 minutes per consultation
MYSPHERA	Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valencia	ORvital operating-room coordination and tracking	Integrated across 16 operating rooms at TRL 9, minor public contract to move to routine use
Contextflow	Universitair Ziekenhuis Leuven	ADVANCE Chest CT AI tool for lung abnormalities	Validated quantitative performance at TRL 9 in production workflows
Better Medicine	Universitätsmedizin Mainz	BMVision Kidney AI for renal tumour detection on CT	Full technical integration and archive processing
BEIT	Molecure	BDocker quantum-inspired virtual screening	Met all targets and improved selectivity prediction by over 30 percent
Microfluidics Innovation Center	Inside Therapeutics	Closed-loop lipid nanoparticle control for RNA vaccines	Encapsulation efficiency 80 to 87 percent across six conditions
Vitalera	Maastricht UMC+	Remote post-surgical monitoring with wearables	Logged over 750 days of recovery data at TRL 8 to 9
Deeploy	Healthcare organisation	AI governance platform for compliance with EU AI Act	Governed 40 AI models and recommended enterprise acquisition
DeepEn	Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology	Holographic microendoscopes for deep-brain imaging	Advanced from TRL 6 to TRL 7
SoundCell	Reinier Haga Medical Diagnostics Center	Graphene biosensor for antibiotic susceptibility	Completed over 100 isolate measurements, 90 percent accuracy in under 2 hours

Procurement support has also produced direct contract wins. ShanX MedTech, an early-stage company, won an over €8 million contract from DG HERA and HaDEA to develop a rapid point-of-care antibiotic susceptibility device. Other pilots moved to purchase orders or framework contracts after multi-stage engagement.

Specialist services, talent and leadership

Access to specialist facilities and regulatory expertise is a recurrent need in medtech and biotech. Since 2023, 92 medtech companies applied for 138 services through EIC ACCESS+, an initiative that co-funds up to 50 percent of service costs with grants up to €60,000. Ecosystem partners pitching services to medtech companies included Euro-BioImaging, CoLAB Trials, Creo Incubator and others. InnoNext internships placed six talents across three health companies.

Skills and leadership programmes also aim to close non-technical gaps. The EIC Tech to Market Programme ran 10 trainings for health teams reaching 145 researchers and advancing several projects in the validation funnel. The Women Leadership Programme is notable for its sector concentration: 25 of 62 participants work in health and medtech, with a strong tilt toward oncology and brain health.

Case studies that illustrate the pipeline

Concrete company examples demonstrate different routes through the EIC ecosystem and the variety of outcomes. Some story arcs are fast and commercially focused while others show the long timeframes typical of biotech and device development.

NanoPhoria:A preclinical inhaled therapeutic platform for heart failure. NanoPhoria raised an €83.5 million Series A a few months after EIC selection, showing how some technology niches can attract rapid investment when scientific and translational milestones align with investor appetite.

INBRAIN Neuroelectronics:A graphene-based brain-computer interface developer that progressed from EIC Pathfinder funding to a completed human trial in four years. This underlines that high-risk hardware and neurotech can advance quickly when regulatory pathways, manufacturing and clinical partners are in place.

Nanordica Medical and the valley of death:Nanordica developed a first-in-class wound dressing, ran one of the largest clinical trials in diabetic foot ulcers with EIC support and attracted its first VC round while scaling its team. The company emphasises that clinical validation and regulatory approval create a financially demanding gap between grants and private investment, a classic 'valley of death' for health ventures.

Clariane × Sooma partnership:Sooma, a Finnish CE-marked neuromodulation headset company and EIC awardee, was selected from a Clariane corporate call in June 2025. Follow-up led to a Letter of Intent in December 2025, an 18-month cross-border pilot in multiple countries in 2026 and a framework contract by June 2026. This timeline shows how conversations can convert into multi-country procurement contracts over 12 months or more.

Investment, scaling and recent financing examples

EIC-supported companies in Scaling Club cohorts and other programmes reported substantial fundraising. Examples cited include Cellply raising €7.15 million, neuroClues closing a €10 million Series A co-led by the EIC Fund, Gate2Brain receiving a €7 million strategic investment, CubaseBio raising €5.9 million including an EIC Transition grant, and Orakl Oncology completing an €11 million seed round. These rounds show that EIC support can coincide with significant follow-on capital, though attribution must be assessed carefully because multiple factors influence investors.

What the data tells us and a cautious appraisal

The EIC BAS data reveals four repeating patterns. These help explain where support works and where expectations should be tempered.

Pattern 1 - Health runs through every programme:Every EIC BAS programme highlighted in this analysis supports health and medtech companies. Where programmes compare sectors, health often comes first. This alignment is unsurprising given the EIC portfolio composition but it also concentrates resources on a sector with particularly complex commercial pathways.

Pattern 2 - Demand and supply are converging:Diagnostics and remote monitoring feature both in corporate open calls and among participating companies. Point-of-care diagnostics and AI for imaging are frequent themes, reflecting parallel needs from buyers and available solutions from startups.

Pattern 3 - Programmes feed each other:Companies often participate in multiple BAS instruments. Eleven companies took part in more than one Corporate Day, some programmes led to joint InnoMatch applications, and services like ACCESS+ and InnoNext are used alongside procurement pilots. This cross-programme engagement multiplies routes to customers, investors and technical partners.

Pattern 4 - Results build over time:Trade fairs produce rapid contacts and some revenue while hub missions create longer term investor pipelines. Corporate engagements often evolve from a curated pitch to LOI to pilot to framework contract across several quarters. Effective impact measurement therefore requires multi-year tracking rather than single snapshots.

Alongside these patterns it is necessary to apply healthy skepticism. The public reporting mixes realised numbers with expectations, such as forecast investments 'expected within a year'. Those forecasts are useful for pipeline management but not the same as realised deals. There is also a risk of selection and survivorship bias in reporting success stories. Many companies participating in events do not immediately sign contracts. The EIC BAS follow-up windows are helpful but must be sustained if they are to capture long conversion cycles typical in health.

Key concepts and definitions

Valley of death:In life sciences this is the funding and expertise gap between discovery research and the point where a product is de-risked enough for larger private investors to commit. It includes costs for regulatory studies, clinical trials and manufacturing scale up that are rarely covered by early grants.

Technology Readiness Level, TRL:TRLs are a scale from 1 to 9 used to measure maturity. For example, a TRL 9 system is proven in operational conditions. Several InnoMatch pilots advanced technologies to TRL 9, meaning technical integration and validation in real workflows were achieved.

SPIN4EIC, InnoMatch and InnoBuyer:SPIN4EIC is the EIC’s strategic innovation procurement programme to open public and private procurement routes. InnoMatch runs pilots with buyers and EIC companies. InnoBuyer pilots demand-driven co-creation between public challenge owners and startup solvers. These instruments aim to convert procurement interest into pilots and then buying decisions.

Limitations, measurement and what should be tracked next

To strengthen causal claims about the BAS impact the EIC should maintain longitudinal tracking of cohorts, differentiate realised deals from pipeline expectations, and document counterfactuals where possible. Aggregated counts of contacts and expected investments are useful for narrative but do not replace metrics on contract value realised, time to procurement, clinical milestones achieved and survival rates of supported ventures.

The programmes would also benefit from clearer reporting on attribution. Many startups receive multiple supports simultaneously. Disentangling which service contributed most to a deal or funding round is analytically hard but critical for allocating resources efficiently.

What is next on the EIC BAS health agenda

EIC BAS plans ongoing sector activities and events to maintain momentum. Immediate upcoming items at the time of reporting included masterclasses from Consonance on 7 and 14 October, a Global Business Expansion Business Week in San Francisco on 19 to 23 October, the Horizon Deep Tech Summit on 10 to 12 November and MEDICA in Düsseldorf from 16 to 19 November. The EIC Community Platform and the Service Catalogue remain the operational gateways for companies seeking to engage with these services.

How companies and partners can engage

EIC-backed companies should register on the EIC Community Platform, review the EIC Service Catalogue, and apply to relevant open calls. Companies eligible for EIC ACCESS+ can apply for co-funded access to specialist services. Corporates, procurers and investors can join the Corporate Partnership Programme, SPIN4EIC or VentureMatch activities to access curated deal flow. For procurement and pilot opportunities public buyers can apply to InnoBuyer and InnoMatch calls.

For policy makers and funders the major takeaways are that coordinated, multi-modal support can accelerate commercial outcomes in health but that results take time and require patient capital. Procurement is an underused lever for adoption but requires active support to lower tender complexity and match innovators to buyer needs.

Final assessment

EIC Business Acceleration Services present a coherent toolbox that maps well to the structural problems health and medtech companies face. The evidence shows early wins from trade fairs, pilots and targeted corporate matchmaking. However the sector’s underlying realities mean many outcomes are multi-year, contingent and dependent on regulatory and reimbursement milestones. Measuring the real impact of BAS will require continued, transparent tracking of realised contracts, funding flows and clinical progress rather than relying on forecast figures.

If you work in health deep tech and are EIC-backed, the immediate steps are pragmatic. Use the Service Catalogue and ACCESS+ co-funding to buy targeted expertise. Join procurement and corporate days to accelerate buyer conversations. And expect that converting pilots into procurement or commercial scale will take persistence, clinical evidence and often further financing.

Where to find resources and contacts

All EIC BAS services, open calls and partner offers are listed on the EIC Community Platform and the EIC Service Catalogue. Companies can subscribe to the EIC BAS Newsletter and the Open Calls Digest for updates. Specific programme helpdesks are available through the platform for Corporate Partnership Programme, SPIN4EIC, InnoMatch, VentureMatch, Global Business Expansion and EIC ACCESS+.