The EIC Accelerator data room has received an upgrade. Rather than only covering the companies funded from 2021 onwards, it now reaches further into the past, and the industry explorer classifies the investigated winners by the sector they work in and the technology they apply.
Going Back Before the EIC Accelerator
If you have followed the programme for a while, you know that before the EIC Accelerator got its name, it was called the SME Instrument. The SME Instrument ran for a very long time, and it is essentially the same programme you know today as the EIC Accelerator, with a grant of up to €2.5 million.
Right now the data goes back to 2019, and over time it will go further and further into the past. Alongside that, the data room creates follow-ups on what happened to the companies:
- How many of these companies ended up succeeding?
- How many ended up scaling?
- What happened to the funding put into them, and did it bring a return on investment?
The first results of those follow-ups are in What Happened to EIC Accelerator Winners.
A Three-Dimensional Breakdown of the Winners
In the past I have written a lot of articles on the industries, to give applicants an indication of which types of industries are funded the most and which are not funded a lot, for example the Step 1 success rates by country and sector and the Step 2 success rates and year trends. This time the picture is much more accurate, because each winner is classified twice.
- Sector: the type of industry the company operates in.
- Technology: the technology it applies, because the same technology can be applied in different industries.
Together with the funding year, that gives a three-dimensional breakdown of the winners: industries, technologies and time.
What the data covers
The video focuses on the 2019 to 2024 cohorts. In the data room snapshot dated 21 October 2026, 1,211 of 1,333 companies have been investigated and classified, spanning 12 sectors, 88 industries and 288 technologies. That classified sample already includes six companies first awarded funding in 2025; coverage of recent cohorts is still incomplete. The counts below describe this snapshot, not every winner of the programme. See the data room methodology for how the data is compiled.
Health Is Clearly the Winner
The conclusion is not that different from my previous articles. Health is clearly the biggest sector, with 445 companies, or 36.7% of the 1,211 classified winners. Digital and computing comes second, with 131.
Within health, medical devices account for 220 companies, followed by biopharmaceuticals with 108 and in vitro diagnostics with 44. Medical devices alone represent almost half of the health sector.
The health result is not that surprising. There is a very natural fit between medtech and deep tech. Very often the company is a university spin-off, very often there are scientists involved, and very often there are real hardware patents or patents on certain therapeutics or treatments. That makes it very hard to argue that a medtech company is not deep tech, and that is why medtech is so overrepresented.
Why digital and computing still comes second
Digital and computing is usually the opposite. These companies usually do not have the PhD researchers, they more rarely have patents unless they build hardware, and they are usually much more software heavy. It is not that Europe has so many health tech companies; health has the big numbers because of its natural fit with deep tech.
For digital and computing, my guess is that it does so well simply because there are so many companies. There are many, many software companies, so even with a weaker fit, a large number in absolute terms comes through when enough companies apply.
The following places in the sector breakdown are energy with 117 companies, agrifood with 98, electronics and semiconductors with 81, climate and environment with 79, and industrial technology with 72. Each company counts once here, under its primary sector. It is very interesting to cross-reference these sectors with the other numbers in the data room: how many companies are funded per cut-off, how many are still active, how many managed to scale and how many ended up failing.
The same snapshot includes 31 space companies, 63 in mobility and transport and 23 in construction. These totals give the scale of the sectors; the year and cut-off charts on their data room pages show how their representation changes over time.
Space Is Rising, Industry Is Falling
There are some very clear trends over time. Space is going up: more and more space companies are funded every single cut-off. Other sectors show a negative trend, with fewer and fewer companies funded every cut-off. Those are industrial technology, mobility and transport, and construction.
Rising
Space, with more companies funded at every cut-off.
Falling
Industrial technology, mobility and transport, and construction, with fewer companies funded at every cut-off.
What could be the reason? My guess is that policy is a big one. It is becoming more and more clear that space is very, very important. Even if you do not want to be in space, you need satellites in space. Space has major strategic importance in itself, through access to launches and access to satellites. Right now SpaceX carries most of the world's cargo to orbit, and Europe has completely fallen behind. So I am not too surprised by that trend.
AI Is the Top Technology
When it comes to the technologies, I am also not very surprised to see that artificial intelligence is the top technology across all sectors, with 204 companies. Computer vision follows with 55, then robotics with 50. The full technology ranking also includes cloud software with 49 and semiconductor design with 35. A company can use several technologies, so these counts overlap and should not be added together as separate winners.
Of course, many technologies in the EIC Accelerator are basically N equals one. There is a very unique technology that only this company is developing, or that fewer than ten companies in the world are working on. So you cannot make the calculation that health is the biggest sector and AI is the biggest technology, and therefore an AI health start-up is going to win.
The takeaway
Health and AI are the biggest sector and the biggest technology among EIC Accelerator winners. That describes what ends up being funded, not a formula for winning: most winning technologies are close to unique.
There are many more statistics in the data room than I can go into here, so open the EIC Accelerator data room at www.eiceu.com and click through the sector and industry explorer, the technology rankings and the company outcomes. It will keep being updated, and over time more and more companies will be added.
