Europe regulates AI in order to boost investment in innovation and deep technologies

Europe regulates AI in order to boosts investment in innovation and deep technologies: European Innovation Council to invest €1.4 billion in deep technologies in 2025

Next year, the European Innovation Council (EIC) will boost deep technologies and high-potential start-ups from the EU with €1.4 billion. This is set out in the EIC Work Programme for 2025. The increase is €200 million compared to 2024 and aims to boost a more sustainable innovation ecosystem in Europe.

One of the main improvements to the programme is the EIC’s new scheme to expand the Strategic Technology Platform for Europe (STEP) – its budget is €300 million and will finance larger investments in companies aiming to bring strategic technologies to the EU market.

The remaining budget is distributed across 4 funding schemes:

EIC Pathfinder – for technology solutions with a technology readiness level of up to TRL 4 with the potential to lead to technological breakthroughs.

EIC Transition – an opportunity for consortia that have already achieved research results within the EIC Pathfinder or other Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes to turn them into innovations ready for market implementation.

EIC Accelerator – support for innovation projects in the final development phase.

The individual programmes are eligible for funding by research organisations, universities, SMEs, start-ups, manufacturing companies or sole traders, large companies, small mid-caps, etc.