3 out of 8 awarded EIC scale-ups are Dutch

The European Commission announced a new group of eight companies to receive scale-up investments through the EIC Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) Scale Up call. Three of them are Dutch: Leyden Labs, Qphox, and Smart Photonics (Gerard & Anton Award winner in 2015). 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 secure 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.  

Of the 51 companies that submitted their proposals, 36 were invited to interview with an independent committee of 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;
• Nexwafe (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 an 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.  

A market gap in deeptech scale-up funding

The EIC STEP Scale-up call has a 2025 budget of €300 million, with the same budget in 2026. This initiative, which has attracted strong demand, aims to provide larger investments to companies developing strategic technologies to bring them to 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 the Funding and Tenders portal with evaluation sessions taking place every quarter.