The European Commission's European Innovation Council has selected 65 innovative startups and SMEs to receive 363 million euros of funding for breakthrough innovations. Each company will receive a combination of grant financing and equity investment of up to 17 million euros to develop and scale up their innovations. This is the first batch of companies that will be funded under the fully-fledged European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator.

The companies were selected following a new two-step process, introduced under Horizon Europe. Applications are rigorously assessed by external experts and followed by an interview with a jury of experienced investors and entrepreneurs. The 65 successful companies are established in 16 countries. The demand for equity financing through the new EIC Fund was particularly high, Commission says, with 60 out of the 65 companies. This means that 227 million euros out of the total 363 million are expected to be in the form of investment component.

Two Italian startups are among the newly funded entities. enGenome developed eVai, described as "a novel bioinformatics SaaS platform to identify and classify the pathogenicity of single genomic variants and oligogenic variant combinations for the diagnosis and treatment of genetic diseases". Voiseed introduced ETTS, An Expressive Text-To-Speech platform to create emotionally resonant virtual voices.

The EIC Accelerator offers start-ups and SMEs grants of up to 2.5 million euros combined with equity investments through the EIC Fund ranging from 0.5 to 15 million euros. In addition to financial support, all projects benefit from a range of Business Acceleration Services that provide access to leading expertise, corporates, investors and ecosystem actors. The EIC was launched in March 2021 and has a budget of over 10 billion euros of which approximately 1 billion is available in 2021 for the EIC Accelerator.

Since March over 4,000 start-ups and SMEs have sent their projects, of which 801 presented full applications to the first cut-off on 16 June 2021 and a further 1098 to the second cut-off on 6 October, which are now being assessed.