MEPs and Council of Ministers agree to open Horizon Europe calls to defence applications

The Council of the EU and the European Parliament reached an agreement on 05/11/2025 to open some of the European Innovation Council's calls for funding for scale-up projects to defence applications.

The deal applies to the EIC's Accelerator Scale Up calls for the Strategic Technologies for Europe (STEP) instrument. It supports deeptech start-ups through larger investments (€10-30 million per company) and addresses a financing gap in Europe for deeptech acceleration rounds.

The changes come as part of the Council and the European Parliament negotiators' approval of the Commission's EU ReArm Europe Plan presented in March 2025, which aims to provide up to €800 billion for defence-related investment. It amends existing EU programmes: the Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP), Horizon Europe, the European Defence Fund (EDF), the Digital Europe programme and the Connecting Europe Facility.

This is a change to the conditions for Horizon Europe in the current MFF (2021-2027), which does not allow research for defence or dual-use applications, i.e. civil ones with potential…