https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/finance-funding/gettin...
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/finance-funding/gettin...
https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/erdf/
https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/cohesion-fun...
https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/social-fund/
Besides these EU projects there are also national projects within EU member states. Like for example the NIC-SE foundation that manage the .se ccTLD tend to grant money to small startups.
Most recent unicorns will simply not thrive in this environment, it's more catered to the professional grant seekers or already successful companies, that can absorb a financing round of 500k-2.5 mil €
It's clear that there has to be some bureaucracy. If anything because you might want to do some auditing in the future.
PG and friends mostly spend their own money and they're free to do as they please, follow instinct or whatever.
You can't do that (thank god) with public money.
Grants are bureaucracy, sure, but if you understand how you navigate it - and every entrepreneurial person shoud - then it's really free money with a bit of strings attached. But it's primarily used for seed purposes (vs. series A, B...) in new companies or as a suplement in existing companies.
EU also does investment matching (one of our VCs had half of his fund matched by the EU). Based on my experience, this is an even better model, since it derisks investmens for local VCs - the biggest problem in investing here is not the lack of funds, but insane risk aversion. It really feels like everybody is looking for stable and good performing businesses and not for investment opportunities that would be moon shots.
From the 1st link there is https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/news/deep-tech-europe-report-k... which claims that companies that received EIC funding have attracted 5Bi in private funding (the program is new so this is apparently a couple of years, maybe more)
By comparison: Total money raised by all YC companies: >$7 billion https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats/
I think companies would apply for EIC later than on YC hence it might be apples to oranges but it's an interesting metric nonetheless
Deadline every 2 months, next one in four days. Support for improving existing FOSS projects as well as endeavoring new ones. Past recipients worked on Wireguard, Jitsi, NextCloud, LibreOffice, EteSync, Guix and many more: https://nlnet.nl/project/
You have the horizon 2020 and horizon Europe programs for example. It's not perfect of course but it works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_Programmes_for_Res...
Show material examples of this.
Also, the EU needs 'big companies' that employ a lot of people, pay high salaries, can afford to sustain complicated projects with know-how, to acquire and integrate other projects.
A nice batch of 'open source' projects that some people might use will not move the needle.
Why? Funding open source projects seems just as useful to me.
It's nice to have some support for it, but it doesn't even lend well to that: it's very hard to know which projects to support until after the fact, of course we know that 99% of it is never even used. The kinds of people involved don't do it generally for money, and also have their own ambitions. What happens when you have a 'great piece of open source' that AirBus and Daimler really want to integrate, but the 'maintainer' just doesn't care to make the necessary changes? Or is against it? Or is only working 'now and then ? Or doesn't feel 'large corps should benefit' or whatever? It's a tricky space. Worth supporting, but it would take a very specialized team and frankly, not that much money.
Europe needs large industrial organizations because they are the lifeblood of the economy, in fact, the hallmark of advanced civilizations. You want to know the 'difference' between 'rich' and 'poor' Europe? In 'rich Europe' a far grater portion of the population works in corporations with >1K employees.
Only at a certain scale can a lot of activities be addressed: you can't make an airliner with all it's supply chain, IP, R&D, systems integration, training, support and the myriad of operational activities with 'open source' or even with 'small shops' or 'vc money'. A lot of know-how is embedded within these groups that given them competitive advantage, and of course, scale is necessary to be competitive at an international level especially in 'winner takes all' type markets.
EU investment in open source is nice, but it's a side-show. What EU needs is Googles & Salesforces etc..
Best example is that big blue brain project in Switzerland that got billions even when the science was not there.
Universities are currently filled with bureaucrats that know how to win grants and produce no results.
It's the Human Brain Project, and it's 1 billion over 10 years. It is currently in year 7, and at the end, it will provide the AWS of neuroscience in Europe.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ten-year...
Or will build, if they are granted the additional money they ask for past 2023: “The development of high-quality brain simulators requires a long-term commitment of resources”. We shall call it Deep Thought: the sunk-cost brain.
I'm involved with HBP and other non-European and European national neuroscience projects (though I am neutral here, just a university-employed engineer), and the science in the recent phase (starting in April this year) is a complete break with preceding funding phase and on-par with other projects. The people leading the science subproject are actually leading PIs on the topics. For comparison, let's name Allen Institute, though Allen is more a monolith, whereas HBP is more like micro-services, with a high cost in coordination, but now a focus on "FAIR" aspects like open-ness and reusability.
The infrastructure side is also coming along, and will provide an AWS of neuroscience (6 national HPC sites, multi-zone OpenStack/OpenShift, 2 neuro-morphic platforms, neuro-robotics platform, federated IAM, metadata and object storage stack, dedicated clinical infrastructure, etc) , but the failure or success will depend a lot more on the larger community getting convinced to engage their workflows on the platform. If people collectively agree that it isn't worth using, then the infrastructure teams never get to justify the whole thing, and it will flop. In that sense, the marketing aspect is not a facade, but a necessary condition for HBP to become a EU RI.
Of course I have no chickens in the fight; if it flops I can keep writing my shitty works-on-my-computer codes for one off unreproducible research projects.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090904071908.h...
To make that claim in 2009 was complete and utter bullshit, if you've sold your project on grandiose claims like that then I don't think you are into science.
Maybe my problem is that I don’t see myself as “believing” in the project or not: it’s easier to learn from failure in fact. If the whole thing fails, it will make the EU a little more cautious about the next potential flagship project. Which is presumably what all the FUD surrounding HBP is about.
The EU should have insisted on believable deliverables. At the time I was highly critical about the claim, it being 11 years ago doesn't really matter to me, it was obvious that you could not extrapolate from the state of the art+a relatively limited amount of time to such a game changing deliverable (essentially: general AI).
I sincerely hope that you will be able to come up with enough results worth applying somewhere in real-life projects and products that in the end it will all be worth it. Best of luck to you.
I'm not qualified to speak of the science behind the HBP but I know that a few labs in China and in the US (like the Allen institute) see some value in it. It's a big engineering project and maybe the end goal and result isn't what's important here. Pretty much like CERN.
It's most pronounced in new EU countries that get flooded with these funds.
That's wrong. There are four real reasons:
1) our pension systems are mostly government run and on a rolling scheme (i.e. payments from current workers fund current pensioners, in exchange for future-redeemable points). That means that there is a lot less of "dumb cash" lying around in pension funds that screams to be invested for decades... historically that cash used to be put into "safe bets" such as government bonds but their returns are at below-inflation rates, and the only thing that is "profitable" is spreading out the cash over either the big tech companies or small startups.
2) networking. Just look who's in the "angel investor" rounds: people, both founders and early employees who got lots of money in the dotcom era or in the IPOs of the last years - they are all concentrated in the SV area, and enjoy the benefits of close personal contact, and then of course there is YC and a couple of less known clones which come in later. We simply do not have such networks in Europe.
3) risk aversity. Europeans do not like risk, the most obvious example being us Germans who are notorious for being risk averse, so risk averse that our car companies, 12 years after Tesla hit the market, still believe they can make "clean ICE" cars (by investing in synth-fuel tech). A side effect of that is the infamous Wirecard scandal - they were hyped so hard by everyone including our Chancellor who went lobbying in China simply because they were the only company other than dinosaur SAP who were German, were in digital business, and had (on the paper...) good business numbers.
4) "rags to riches" mentality: us Europeans have generally decent social security networks, stable government funded education - basically, you don't have that mentality, starting with young people, to "always hustle" to survive. We live mostly generally comfortable lives, but we're not driven to exploit whatever and wherever we can, simply because we don't need to.
The end result: we don't have venture capital simply because there has been no need for it for decades, it's only a recent trend here.
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/investments/asset-classes/pr...
I don’t know where you’re located, but at least here in The Netherlands we seem to have a fairly healthy startup ecosystem, where grants seem to be more of an afterthought because there’s a fair amount of VC money or bootstrapped startups.
Again, I’m not claiming that our startup climate is anything like what your see in SV, but it’s definitely a fairly healthy scene, and it would be an insult to characterize these as grant chasers.
Mollie & Adyen have had success because of the walled garden iDeal payment system of the Dutch banks. Eindhoven was a very innovative region until Philips decided to move HQ.
Even Sweden produced more unicorns with a population size a 1/3 of the Netherlands.
Maybe you have had more luck with raising money but I experienced a lot of stupidity from private investors.
So I'd wonder how many funds are truly private. And for those that aren't I'd like to see if any bureaucracy gets pushed onto to the startups they fund.
Say EU-funded VCs, due to the special obligations they're under will often make startups comply with many of the same stuff. So even though a startup might not be a grant recipient themselves they will ultimately have to submit to that regime too.
https://venturebeat.com/2014/02/11/gameon-teams-with-dutch-g...
https://business.gov.nl/financing-your-business/funding-and-....
https://business.gov.nl/starting-your-business/launching-an-...
https://nlfunding.co/ provides a list of all VCs active in The Netherlands, and while a few obvious ones are working with EU grants, I have no reason to believe most of them do.
Regardless, my response was mostly to the “EU startups are grant chasers” comment, which I still believe is an unfair depiction.
Potato potato. Most "startups" in the US are nothing but VC money chasers and often lose billions of infinite investor money (looking at you, Uber) for indefinite periods of time. How is this different from grants other than it's "free" government money in one case and "free" VC money in the other?
When you get a grant you're subject to many rules. You usually have to submit a budget and money will only get disbursed in accordance with that plan. And there may be many limitations as to what the budget can contain in the first place. Say only X percent can go towards Y class of spending.
Your startup is doing poorly and you want to downsize? Well you can't because you budgeted for X people. Want to cut or increase salaries? You can't. I mean you could fire these people but you'd be forfeiting the funds. So people don't.
Then there's pressure. [Private] VC is an honor system. There are very few legal obligations but you're expected to perform. Your continued access to funds will mostly depend on how you're perceived by the VCs.
With grants you only need to follow legal requirements. No pressure to perform. The agencies only care about you following the rules. When applying for more money, again, you need to fulfill a bunch of requirements. There's not much of a reputation system. If you get denied but meet all the formal requirements you can often sue and win.
And since there's no dilution there's no limit to how many different grants you can take.
It's really a common thing.
As far as innovation in the EU goes, the governments (yes, plural, another problem) need to get out of the way. I'm usually positive when it comes to the functioning of European governments, but this is one of the major exceptions.
I argue for European federalism, but also realize that's unrealistic. One possible step in the right direction would be to have an EU wide company structure with a single set of rules that makes investment between different European countries less complicated for companies and investors. I've also thought that a high profile EU investor could force some change by making it a requrement for their portfolio companies to immediately invert ownership to a Delaware Corp. That would open them up to US capital while simultaneously pissing of a lot of the innovation people in the government.
Also many new innovations on the way. Like "green graphene" composite, made from biomass, by Brightday Graphene in Sweden.