The Commission announced a new group of companies to receive scale up investments through the EIC Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) Scale Up call. Proposed to receive a combined €171 million of equity investments, they will now go forward to the EIC Fund for investment decisions, subject to due diligence.  

The EIC STEP Scale Up scheme provides investments of between €10 and €30 million (per company) aiming to leverage private co-investment and achieve financing rounds of €50 to €150 million or more. This addresses the market gap in such financing rounds which are critical for scaling breakthrough innovations in Europe.  

Out of 51 companies that submitted their proposal, 36 were invited to interview with independent high-level experts. Eight of those have met all the criteria and are now put forward for investment decisions by the EIC Fund.  

The selected companies cover a range of strategic technologies for Europe:  

Aldoria (France) – optimising and securing space operations;Focused Energy (Germany) – dealing with laser driven fusion;Leyden Laboratories (The Netherlands) – working to free people from the threat of respiratory viruses;Marvel Fusion (Germany) – building a laser-driven fusion power plant;Nexwave (Germany) – next generation of solar wafers;Qphox (The Netherlands) – developing scalable, high-performance quantum processors;Quandela (France) – photonic quantum computers;Smart Photonics (The Netherlands) – creating next generation chips.

These eight companies, together with additional 21 companies that were also excellent, but not selected in this round due to the limitations of the available STEP budget, will all receive the STEP Seal. The Seal aims to facilitate access to complementary or alternative funding as well as to EIC Business Acceleration Services.  

Background information 

The EIC STEP Scale-up call has a budget of €300 million in 2025, continuing with the same budget in 2026. This initiative, which has attracted high demand, aims to provide larger investments in companies developing strategic technologies to bring them to the market and reduce strategic dependencies. The EIC STEP Scale-up will help address a market gap in deep tech scale-up funding in Europe, targeting digital technologies, clean and resource-efficient technologies including net-zero, and biotechnologies.  

The EIC STEP Scale Up call remains continuously open on Funding and Tenders portal  

 with evaluation sessions taking place every quarter. In 2026, proposals will be batched at following dates: 11.02.2026, 6.05.2026, 9.09.2026, 25.11.2026. 

It is one of a range of calls being implemented across multiple EU programmes to support strategic technologies.  

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