Eindhoven: The EIC work programme 2027 gives Europe’s flagship deep-tech funder a budget of €1.8 billion, and it is the last one the European Innovation Council will run under Horizon Europe. The Commission signed off the plan on 6 November 2026, and it lands in the final year of a research framework that ends in 2027.
The figure is a clear step up. The 2026 work programme committed about €1.4 billion, so the new plan adds roughly 29 percent. Start-ups building chips, batteries, medical devices and quantum hardware will read that number as a signal that Brussels wants to keep pushing risk capital into early-stage technology, even as the next framework programme waits for its own budget.
What the EIC work programme 2027 changes
The headline change targets women founders. The Women TechEU grants double to €150,000 per start-up, which turns a small seed top-up into a real runway for a first prototype. The Commission also creates a European Prize for Women Innovators in Quantum, pairing money with visibility in a field where female founders remain scarce.
These measures in the EIC work programme 2027 matter because the EIC has long reported a gender gap among its applicants and winners. Larger grants lower the cost of entry for founders who cannot raise friends-and-family money. A prize in quantum also fits the Commission’s wider push on quantum technologies this autumn.
Why this is the last Horizon Europe plan
Horizon Europe runs from 2021 to 2027, so the EIC work programme 2027 closes the book on the current EIC design. Its Pathfinder, Transition and Accelerator instruments now face a hand-over to the successor programme, FP10. Member states have so far agreed only a partial Council position on FP10 and have left the budget to the wider talks on the 2028 to 2034 financial framework.
That timing creates a risk of a gap. If the framework talks slip, the EIC could enter 2028 without a clear mandate or a settled envelope. Founders raising a Series A in 2027 would then have to plan around uncertain public co-funding. The size of the EIC work programme 2027 therefore works partly as an insurance policy, because it commits money while the political bargain stays open.
How the EIC fits the scale-up agenda
Europe’s long-standing weakness is not invention but scale-up. Grants and blended finance help a company cross the so-called valley of death, yet later rounds still pull companies towards American investors. The EQT-managed Scaleup Europe Fund, with a target of €5 billion, aims at exactly that later stage and is preparing its first deep-tech investments.
The EIC sits upstream of that fund. Its grants and equity tickets de-risk a technology until a larger investor can step in. If the 2027 budget keeps that pipeline full, the two instruments can work as one chain. If it does not, the Scaleup Europe Fund may struggle to find enough investable companies from within the Union.
What happens next
Applicants should watch the 2027 call calendar and the detailed rules for the larger Women TechEU grants. The Commission has yet to publish how it will split the €1.8 billion across the Accelerator and the earlier-stage schemes, and that split will decide who benefits most. Policy analysts will also track whether the EIC work programme 2027 survives intact when FP10 negotiators begin to divide a scarce budget.
For now, the message to founders is simple. Public money for deep tech is growing in the last year of Horizon Europe, and the EIC work programme 2027 offers the clearest view yet of how Brussels wants to back innovation before the next framework begins.
