Library FAQ
What happens to unused funds reserved for follow-on investments?
If the budget reserved for follow-on investments is not fully used for its intended cases, the remaining amount will be transferred to the Accelerator Open call.
What is a follow-on investment by the EIC Fund?
A follow-on investment is an amount provided by the EIC Fund in addition to the original equity support awarded to a company, up to a maximum of EUR 10 million and subject to budget availability.
What is EIC Accelerator Open?
EIC Accelerator Open has no predefined thematic priorities and is open to proposals in any field of technology or application.
What is the indicative budget for the Advanced Materials Challenge?
Indicative budget: EUR 50 million.
What is the indicative budget for the Fusion Challenge and any geographic funding expectation?
Indicative budget: EUR 20 million. In view of the contribution transferred from Euratom, it is expected that at least 50% of the indicative budget will be provided to legal entities established in Member States or countries associated to both Euratom and Horiz...
What is the Sovereignty (STEP) Seal for Challenge applicants?
All Challenge applicants fall within the scope of the STEP legislation and will be awarded the Sovereignty (STEP) Seal in accordance with the provisions in Section V.
What is the total indicative budget for EIC Accelerator Challenges and what happens if underutilised?
The total indicative budget for EIC Accelerator Challenges is EUR 220 million. In case of underutilisation, the budget will be transferred to support projects submitted under the Open call aligned with the relevant Challenge scope.
Where does the budget for follow-on investments and “Grant first” subsequent investments come from?
Priority funding comes from the follow-on reserve budget indicated in Annex 1 or from returns generated by EIC Fund investments. If these are exhausted, amounts from the budget of this call or previous amounts allocated to the EIC Fund may be used.
Who manages the investment component of the EIC Accelerator?
The European Commission entrusted tasks related to the implementation and management of the investment component of the EIC Accelerator to the European Investment Bank as the implementing partner.
Can Seals of Excellence or STEP Seals receive funding?
Yes. Seals of Excellence and Sovereignty (STEP) Seals may be funded by national or European programmes for grant and investment components and may also be supported only for the grant component, even if selected for blended finance.
How will the funded portfolio be composed?
The portfolio will ensure coverage across three categories: Cognitive Function Capability (reasoning, abstraction, planning), Technological Approach (variety of approaches including neuro-symbolic and novel frameworks), and Use Case/Application Domain (industr...
What additional requirements must proposals follow regarding data, models and results?
Proposals must follow the FAIR principles: ensure data, models, and results are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable to maximise transparency, reproducibility, and impact.
What are the key expected outcomes for funded projects?
Deliver models/architectures handling multimodal data and uncertainty with constrained resources; provable trustworthiness mechanisms (explainability, transparency, fairness, risk evaluation, security, alignment with ethical and legal standards including the E...
What are the main award criteria for the EIC Accelerator?
The main criteria are Excellence, Impact, and Level of Risk, Implementation and Need for Union Support; specific items include innovation depth, TRL demonstration, IP, market opportunity, business model, broader impact, team capability, risk management, implem...
What evaluation and certification work is expected from applicants?
Proposals should propose new methods and metrics for evaluating and certifying reasoning and trustworthiness in AI and for the use of computational resources.
What is Deep Abstraction as defined in the work programme?
Enabling AI to generalise from limited data by forming and manipulating high-level concepts, analogies, and internal world models to support transfer learning, commonsense understanding, semantic and contextual awareness.
What is expected from Deep Planning proposals?
Develop robust, adaptive, scalable planning algorithms for open-world or uncertain real-time environments, including hierarchical and contingency planning, continual re-planning, and approaches that handle uncertainty with explainability and formal guarantees.
What is meant by Deep Reasoning in this call?
Moving beyond statistical pattern matching to support causal inference, logical reasoning, context-aware or commonsense decision-making, reconciling multiple information sources, and providing transparent, explainable rationales aligned with human values.
What is the expected impact of the DeepRAP portfolio?
Advance scientific state-of-the-art; build a robust, interoperable, application-driven community; position Europe for trustworthy cognitive AI leadership; support sovereignty and competitiveness in key sectors; and contribute to the ambitions of the AI Act and...
What is the main objective of the DeepRAP Challenge?
To significantly improve AI systems' Reasoning, Abstraction, and Planning (RAP) capabilities and move beyond current deep learning and reinforcement learning limitations by exploring novel or combined approaches inspired by various fields.
What is the Seal of Excellence and how does the Sovereignty (STEP) Seal relate?
A Seal of Excellence is awarded when a proposal meets evaluation criteria but is not recommended for funding due to budget limits. If submitted under STEP-relevant Challenges, a project recommended as GO or a NO-GO with Seal of Excellence will also be awarded...
What joint portfolio activities will selected projects engage in?
Projects will lead or engage in activities on interoperability, benchmark development, common pilots, multiagent integration, application shaping with stakeholders, and ethical and societal alignment.
What priority is given in case of ex-aequo scores?
Female-led companies will be given priority in the case of ex-aequo scores.
What submission limit applies to repeated unsuccessful EIC Accelerator proposals?
From 1 January 2024, after three unsuccessful submissions of the same or improved proposal by the same legal entity to the EIC Accelerator, the applicant may not apply again under Horizon Europe.