EIC Pre-Accelerator Results 2026: 70 Companies Selected, Success Rates, Country Breakdown, and Deadlines

The first EIC Pre-Accelerator call has now produced its first full set of public results, and the numbers are much stronger than many applicants expected. The European Commission announced on 23 April 2026 that 70 companies were selected under the new instrument, representing 22 countries and receiving around €32.5 million in EU funding. In parallel, 320 additional applications were awarded a Seal of Excellence, which means the first call generated a much larger pool of high-quality projects than the funded cohort alone suggests.

This article breaks down the first EIC Pre-Accelerator results in detail: award rates, Seal of Excellence rates, country distribution, budget math, timeline slippage, and the practical implications for future applicants. It also uses the official selected-companies PDF contained in the source material to reconstruct a full country-by-country breakdown of the 70 funded companies.

Before the results were out, I had already written about the first EIC Pre-Accelerator submission wave in my earlier newsletter, EIC Pre-Accelerator Statistics, STEP Scale-Up Winners, and Pathfinder Results, published on 26 November 2025. That earlier note is worth revisiting because it captured the early public statistics, flagged the eligibility-cleanup issue, and made a first estimate of the likely success rate before the Commission released the final winner list.

At a Glance

• Call: HORIZON-WIDERA-2025-02-ACCESS-01
• Call opening: 12 June 2025
• Submission deadline: 18 November 2025 at 17:00 Brussels time
• Eligible submissions reported by the EIC: 1,056
• Total raw submissions reported in footnote form: 1,083
• Total requested funding: €479.4 million
• Average requested amount per proposal: about €454,000
• Funded companies selected: 70
• Countries represented among funded companies: 22
• Official funding volume for the 70 selected companies: around €32.5 million
• Seal of Excellence awards: 320
• Women-led share in applicant pool: 26%
• Women-led share among selected projects: 24%

How the November 2025 Newsletter Held Up

The earlier newsletter held up well on the main competition picture. The rough estimate of about 1,000 applicants was effectively on target because the Commission later disclosed 1,083 total proposals and 1,056 eligible submissions. The point that final eligibility checks would matter also proved correct, because the public statistics were eventually split between raw and eligible counts.

Where the final outcome ended up materially different was the number of funded companies. In November 2025, a rough calculation based on the originally published €20 million budget and an average requested amount of around €454,000 pointed to roughly 44 winners and a headline success rate of around 4.17%. The final public results were much stronger than that scenario: the EIC announced 70 selected companies and around €32.5 million in funding, which implies an actual funded success rate of 6.63% against eligible submissions or 6.46% against raw submissions.

• Earlier applicant estimate: about 1,000
• Actual later-disclosed volume: 1,056 eligible submissions and 1,083 raw proposals
• Earlier eligible-applicant success-rate estimate: about 5%
• Actual funded success rate: 6.63% vs eligible submissions and 6.46% vs raw proposals
• Earlier budget-based winner estimate: about 44 companies
• Actual funded cohort: 70 companies

So the earlier newsletter was very solid on applicant volume and on the importance of distinguishing raw from eligible applications, while the winner estimate ended up too conservative because the final award volume was significantly above the originally published indicative budget.

Success Rates: The Real Funnel

There are two denominators for this call, and both matter. The EIC first reported 1,056 submissions from 30 eligible countries, but added a footnote that the total number of proposals received was 1,083 and that final eligibility checks were still ongoing. Because of that, the cleanest success-rate analysis is to show both the eligible-submission view and the raw-submission view.

Funded Success Rate

• Funding rate vs eligible submissions: 70 / 1,056 = 6.63%
• Funding rate vs raw submissions: 70 / 1,083 = 6.46%

That means the first EIC Pre-Accelerator call funded roughly 1 in 15 eligible applicants. This is competitive, but it is clearly not an easy-access or symbolic funding line.

Seal of Excellence Rate

• Seal rate vs eligible submissions: 320 / 1,056 = 30.30%
• Seal rate vs raw submissions: 320 / 1,083 = 29.55%

This is an important result. Even if applicants were not funded directly, almost a third of the pool still reached the quality threshold needed for a Seal of Excellence, which can support alternative national or regional funding routes.

Funded or Seal of Excellence Combined

• Funded or Seal rate vs eligible submissions: 390 / 1,056 = 36.93%
• Funded or Seal rate vs raw submissions: 390 / 1,083 = 36.01%

This combined figure is arguably the most useful one for strategic planning. More than one third of the applicant pool appears to have cleared the threshold for either direct funding or a Seal of Excellence.

Rejected Without Funding or Seal

• Rejected without funding or Seal vs eligible submissions: 63.07%
• Rejected without funding or Seal vs raw submissions: 63.99%

Budget Math and Oversubscription

The call attracted €479.4 million in requested funding. Against the officially reported €32.5 million for the selected cohort, this implies an oversubscription of around 14.75x. The average selected funding, using the official results figure, comes to about €464,286 per company, which fits the stated grant range of €300,000 to €500,000.

There is, however, an important public-data caveat. The WIDERA Work Programme 2025 and the current EIC Pre-Accelerator page still refer to a €20 million grant budget and an indicative number of 50 funded projects. Yet the public results article reports 70 selected companies and around €32.5 million in funding. That means the public sources do not fully explain the budget delta. For practical purposes, the best approach is to treat €32.5 million as the official results figure, while noting that it is materially above the originally published indicative grant budget.

• Average requested amount per submission: about €454,000
• Average selected amount using the official results figure: about €464,286
• Oversubscription vs official selected funding volume: about 14.75x
• Oversubscription vs original €20 million published grant budget: about 23.97x
• Actual funded projects vs the indicative 50-project expectation: 70 / 50 = 1.40x

Additional Derived Metrics

• Raw-to-eligible drop: 1,083 - 1,056 = 27 proposals, or about 2.49% of raw submissions
• Seal-to-funded ratio: 320 / 70 = 4.57, meaning there were more than four Seal of Excellence awards for every directly funded company
• Funded share of the "funded or Seal" quality tier: 70 / 390 = 17.95%
• Share of total requested budget actually covered by the selected-funding envelope: 32.5 / 479.4 = 6.78%
• Average winners per represented country: 70 / 22 = 3.18

Deadlines and Full Timeline

One of the more interesting aspects of the first EIC Pre-Accelerator call is the timing. The call itself looked straightforward, but the public evaluation schedule slipped noticeably compared with the initial expectation communicated shortly after the deadline.

For applicants, the key operational lesson is simple: this was not a fast process. The public expectation in late November 2025 was that results would be communicated around late February or early March 2026, but the public results article only appeared on 23 April 2026. It is possible that applicants were contacted before the public announcement, but based on public dates alone, the process took longer than the early communication suggested.

• Time from submission deadline to public results article: 156 days
• Public announcement lag vs 1 March 2026: about 53 days
• Public announcement lag vs 28 February 2026: about 54 days

Country Breakdown of the 70 Selected Companies

The official EIC news article only states that Portugal, Estonia and Turkey recorded the highest number of successful proposals. Using the official selected-companies PDF contained in the source material, the funded cohort can be broken down more precisely across all 22 represented countries.

This table shows a few useful concentration effects:

• Top 3 countries - Portugal, Estonia and Turkey - account for 25 of 70 winners, or 35.7% of the funded cohort.
• Top 5 countries - adding Greece and Poland - account for 37 winners, or 52.9%.
• Top 6 countries - adding Slovenia - account for 42 winners, or exactly 60.0%.
• 22 countries secured at least one winner out of the 30 eligible-country pool cited by the EIC at the application-statistics stage, meaning roughly 73.3% of the eligible country set achieved at least one funded company.

All 70 Winners

Below is the full funded list reconstructed from the official selected-companies PDF. I normalized a few characters to plain ASCII to keep the markdown clean, but the company names, project labels, country assignments, and websites follow the official list.

Gender Statistics

The gender split also deserves a closer look. The EIC reported that the applicant pool consisted of 74% men-led and 26% women-led companies. In the funded cohort, the share of women-coordinated projects is reported at 24%.

That does not indicate a dramatic gap, but it does show a slight drop of 2 percentage points between application share and funded share. Because both percentages are rounded and because the public reporting mixes applicant-pool and selected-project terminology, it is safer to interpret this as a small representation decline rather than to claim a fully precise gender-specific success-rate differential.

• Approximate women-led applicants if the rounded share is applied mechanically: about 275 of 1,056
• Approximate men-led applicants if the rounded share is applied mechanically: about 781 of 1,056
• Approximate women-led funded projects if the rounded share is applied mechanically: about 17 of 70
• Approximate men-led funded projects if the rounded share is applied mechanically: about 53 of 70
• Women-led share in funded cohort relative to women-led share in applicant pool: about 92.3% of the application share

What the Call Actually Supports

The EIC Pre-Accelerator is not a miniature EIC Accelerator clone. It is a specifically designed widening-country instrument for early-stage deep-tech SMEs that are usually still too early for the Accelerator itself. The underlying logic is to move promising teams from a stronger TRL 4 starting point toward TRL 5 and potentially TRL 6, while improving investor readiness and market readiness at the same time.

• Applicant type: single SME or start-up from a widening country
• Technology maturity at application: at least TRL 4
• Target maturity by project end: at least completed TRL 5, with validation progress toward TRL 6
• Grant size for the 2025 call: €300,000 to €500,000
• Funding intensity: 70% of eligible costs
• Required co-funding: 30% from the beneficiary's own resources
• Maximum duration: up to 2 years
• Pre-financing: 90% in principle at project start
• Proposal length: Part B capped at 22 pages
• Extra support: Business Acceleration Services, Seal of Excellence for quality proposals not funded, and possible Fast Track access to the EIC Accelerator following project review

The public FAQ also clarifies that there are no interim payments, only the initial pre-financing and the final payment after project completion. That makes cash-flow planning and the 30% co-funding component more important than many founders may initially assume.

How Competitive Was the First Call Really?

The answer depends on what benchmark you use. Against typical early-stage grant competitions, a 6.6% direct funding rate is harsh. At the same time, the programme did not operate as a pure funded-or-rejected binary because it also generated a large Seal of Excellence tier.

The practical interpretation is as follows:

• If your only definition of success is direct funding, the first call was highly selective.
• If your broader goal is to secure either direct support or a strong quality label for follow-on national funding, the picture is meaningfully better.
• If your company is too early for the Accelerator, the Pre-Accelerator is now clearly established as a serious pipeline instrument rather than a symbolic side programme.

What Happens Next?

According to the results article, all selected companies have already been informed and are preparing grant agreements. The FAQ indicates that grant signatures are expected in June-July 2026, which should also be the normal starting window for most projects. There will be no 2026 call; instead, the next call is planned under the WIDERA 2026-2027 work programme, and the current EIC page already shows a 5 May 2027 opening and 18 November 2027 deadline.

The next call is also expected to be materially larger. The EIC states that the next Pre-Accelerator call is planned with a €40 million budget and funding per company of up to €1 million. That would make the 2027 version not just a rerun, but a substantial scale-up of the instrument.

Bottom Line

The first EIC Pre-Accelerator call can be read as a strong validation of market demand. It attracted more than €479 million in requests, funded 70 companies, produced 320 Seal of Excellence awards, and created a funded cohort spread across 22 countries. The direct funding rate was about 6.6% on eligible submissions, but the broader "funded or Seal" quality signal reached almost 37%.

For widening-country deep-tech founders, that is the most important takeaway: the EIC Pre-Accelerator is now a real competitive instrument with a meaningful quality ladder, not just a side note in the wider EIC ecosystem.