Three European scaleups have been selected for the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) scaleup scheme, which will allow them to gain access to funding of between €10-30M each.
The scaleups are:
- Multiverse Computing (Spain) – quantum/AI
- Hyimpulse Technologies (Germany) – satellite launch services
- Dronamics (Bulgaria/Ireland) – drones for cargo delivery
The companies 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 19 companies that submitted their proposal to the first batch, five were invited to interview with independent high-level experts, and four that meet all the criteria will be put forward for investment decisions by the EIC Fund.
Multiverse Computing recently announced a whopping €189M funding round to compress LLMs by up to 95%. Meanwhile, all three scaleups put forward for the STEP program are part of the EIC Scaling Club, a club made up of 120 of Europe’s most promising deeptech scaleups.
The EIC STEP Scale-up call has a budget of €300 million in 2025 and a projected growth to €900 million over the period 2025-2027. This initiative 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.
It’s one of a range of calls being implemented across multiple EU programmes to support strategic technologies.
