The EU takes significant measures to nurture European startups and scaleups in their growth, especially via the European Innovation Council. One its most impactful instruments, the EIC Accelerator, provides substantial financial support for SMEs, startups, spin-outs and in some cases small mid-caps. Despite the high-quality applications, the success rate is still low with only a minor fraction of applicants receiving funding. In reality, many more startups need support in creating a high-impact innovative product, service or business model. Even applicants who obtain a Seal of Excellence from the EIC Accelerator struggle to secure appropriate alternative funding from other sources. High quality support should be available to many more companies than those selected by the EIC Accelerator. SynergistEIC project is conceptualized by four partners with experience in advising technology startups and running FSTP measures. The project’s long term strategic objective is to help European digital and deep tech startups scale in the EU and globally, contributing towards EU’s autonomy in strategic sectors. This will be achieved by providing tailored, specific and hands-on support to European impact-driven startups, notably in the sector of climate-tech, green-tech, circular economy and agri-food to increase their competitiveness and readiness to succeed in EIC Accelerator. SynergistEIC project will identify and select 30 digital and deep tech startups (10 startups that are Seal of Excellence holders or those who passed Step 1 of EIC Accelerator application, and 20 non-EIC applicants), especially from Widening countries, through two waves of open calls. The team will award them with sub-grants, tailored advisory and acceleration services. It will also raise their awareness of EU funding and procurement opportunities, and will connect them with investors, and national and European innovation ecosystem actors, to boost their scalability and business performance.

B-HUB FOR EUROPE will target deep tech vertical startups in the blockchain domain. The initiative is aimed at: discovering high-potential innovations, shaping suited proof of concepts and business models, providing specialised acceleration services to overcome current market barriers and assist the go-to-market process, unlocking new market channels with potential private/public customers, scaling up innovative businesses across five startups ecosystems in Europe: IT (Rome), FR (Paris), DE (Berlin), LT (Vilnius) and RO (Cluj-Napoca).The initiative will build on the excellence of European blockchain high-growing innovations and will help startups to shape and offer high-tech solutions to address public challenges and business needs.Public and private actors involved will benefit from a tailormade knowledge transfer process on blockchain technologies and use cases for internal barriers removal and faster adoption.The project will open to follow-up initiatives beyond the project conclusion stimulating the uptake of blockchain solutions in the private/public sector, through procurement processes, joint collaborations and fund rising opportunities.B-HUB FOR EUROPE will provide to blockchain startups, accurately identified and recruited in the five ecosystems through dissemination and engagement initiatives, a set of customised, expert-based services aimed at: accelerating business perspective, providing mentoring and coaching, supporting access to finance, improving cross-border networking with the broad EU blockchain community. Collaboration schemes will be explored for co-creation processes between blockchain startups, public organisations, corporates, and SMEs. Connections and cross-border activities will be promoted to favour exchange among grown-up and less developed ecosystems.The project will contribute to the on-going efforts for a more favourable regulatory framework in the blockchain domain in Europe, with inputs and recommendations collected during the project life.

EIC-ACCESS+ mission is to enable EIC Awardees and Seal of Excellence holders to access specialised services offered through the EIC Service Catalogue by offering financial support to partially cover the services price and facilitating the delivery of tailored assistance to address the unique scaling challenges of deep tech European innovators. An initial survey will allow to assess the alignment of the pool of services available in the EIC Catalogue with the needs of the EIC Community members, their availability and accessibility, and provide actionable information and recommendations to assure a complete coverage of key categories of needs. Through a permanent public open call for applications, up to 180 beneficiaries will be selected to access three categories of service packs from the EIC Catalogue to answer their specific needs and matchmaking them with EIC Ecosystem Partnership service providers. The selection process will be aimed to efficiently assign and distribute the financial support to the selected EIC Community Members as lump sums. EIC-ACCESS+ will carefully monitor the service delivery and assess results and impacts for the EIC Community members through detailed statistics and analytic dashboards, making sure that stringent quality standards are respected and reflected through an overall high satisfaction rate and the emergence of success stories to be promoted in the yearly “uptake and impact report” and more generally through online channels and social media. The initiative will contribute, in close synergy with the EIC and the contractor implementing the call for Ecosystem Partners, to making the EIC Ecosystem Partnership stronger by facilitating the service delivery with the financial support, providing insights about the service offer availability and impacts and engaging the community in a peer learning and co-construction process to fill in the gaps and fully cover the needs of the EIC Community members.

The EU data market has been analysed in the past years by several studies and reports. The estimate of the overall value of the data market in EU28 had a growth rate of a 9.5% between 2015 and 2016. Despite of this growing bottom-line market, there are some barriers: •Europe has been slow to adopt data technologies compared to the US. •Data skills gap. Between demand and supply of data workers, almost 400k jobs go unfilled. •Standardization. Increasing complexity and variety on standards can slow innovation. •Privacy and data protection. A reliable legal framework, like GDPR, is complex but can guarantee success of the companies. •Reaching all sorts of SMEs and start-ups. Companies emerging from entrepreneurial ecosystems like accelerators or incubators are usually not so linked to EU initiatives. Data Market Services is born to overcome the barriers of data-based SMEs and start-ups in Europe in data skills, entrepreneurial opportunities, legal issues and standardisation, thanks to the provision of free support services for them. To achieve this a 100-data-based companies portfolio in 3 different cohorts from 2019 to 2021 will be built. 12 free support services, in 5 categories, will be offered to them. These will be monitored and analysed every year to update them and keep a high-level on the delivery. All of this considering the consortium will have The Next Web Conference as its own flagship event to assure major impact on dissemination. Consortium is comprised by: ZABALA, an innovation firm working on several of data-based programmes as FINODEX and EDI. Univ. Southampton, owner of their data science academy and leading ODINE and Data Pitch. Kings College London, a highly ranked British university. Private accelerators/incubators like Spinlab (DE), Spherik (RO), Bright Pixel (PT) to assure presence in all corners of EU. Ogilvy as expert on communication, currently in charge of FIWARE and BDV PPP comms. IPTector as IPR expert. TNW as owner of our flagship event and the tq.co incubator; and W3C as main standards body.

The overall concept of MY-GATEWAY builds around the growth potential boost of CEE start-ups on a pan-European level by exploiting the Consortium partners' Startup Europe experience (as former coordinators and partners of the ICT-13 projects) and by implementing actions aimed at creating new opportunities and synergies within and beyond the MY-GATEWAY’s ecosystem. As a result of the project the CEE start-ups and the startup support organizations representing them will have better access to networks, finance and talent and will acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to maximise their growth potential. Moreover, the project will actively contribute to the expansion of the Startup Europe Community by opening the GATE of the Startup Europe to the Balkans. MY-GATEWAY involved the leading startup support organizations from Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (as members of its Balkan Committee) who will continuously follow up the project activities, facilitate the knowledge transfer - MY-GATEWAY KEY - to the Balkan region and mobilize the Balkan start-ups to set up the "Startup Europe comes to the Balkans" Network.