Sister initiatives

The Access2Europe project helps European startups enter and scale up in other EU markets by bridging key tech ecosystems. In order to do so, four consortium partners representing major European startup hubs have joined forces: CUBE (Berlin, Germany), Tehnopol (Tallinn, Estonia), the French-German Chamber of Commerce (Paris, France) and Peninsula (Barcelona, Spain). Drawing on their strong experience supporting startups and corporates cross-nationally, they have designed customized programmes for startups to accelerate their entry into the respective markets. Through discovery tours and 3-month incubation programmes, entrepreneurs will benefit from introductions to local ecosystems and industry players, office space, workshops and hands-on coaching free of charge.

Nordic Angel Program (NAP) is a training and investment program for startup investors operated by a coalition of Nordic & Baltic angel networks EstBAN, FiBAN, DanBAN and BANNorway. The goal of the program is to increase cross-border investing awareness among existing and potential startup investors. The program is cofinanced by EU's Horizon2020 and coordinated by NordicBAN and Civitta.

European startups fail to scale, which often is the reason why they also fail in general. To avoid this, Startup ecosystems have to be connected and support the flow of startups from one ecosystem to another. Like nature‘s ecosystems, startups follow the path of least resistance or rather of the biggest opportunities, flowing like rivers downstream, from smaller ecosystems to the larger ones. Following such logic, this Project will connect smaller startup ecosystems to the larger ones through building awareness and capcaity for scaling and providing Soft-landing support.

MERLIN aims to support ICT researchers, SMEs and startups across to realise the full potential and impact of their research and development outputs by crafting them into innovations and achieving market validation using modern needs-first, market-led methodologies like Business Model Canvas, Customer Discovery, Lean Hardware, etc. The project will provide training, networking and follow-on support through 43 practical workshops, 4 webinars (on SME growth and PPP business models), 5 international conference workshops and 8 meetups with potential customers and commercial partners.

The Startup Europe Partnership is a platform where the best scaleups meet the best corporates and investors with a single goal: make things happen. Whether that means procurement (product licensing or initiating co-development/POCs), investments, and exits (acquisitions and IPOs).
Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) hosts “Europe’s Corporate Startup Stars”, a ranking of the most startup friendly corporates in Europe, each year.
SEP also connects the European ecosystems with Silicon Valley (SEC2SV mission) and Israel (SEC2IL mission).

Startup Lighthouse is a European Commission funded project developing cross border connections within and beyond Europe. The project lights the way for startups within Europe by organising 8 Deep Dive Weeks in 4 ecosystems, meeting over 1,600 different ecosystem players in specific themes and culminating with a Lighthouse Award in London each year.

IRSUS will bridge the gaps faced by innovators (research teams, SMEs, spinoffs & startups) to reach the market with a feasible, viable and attractive business case and strategy for users, clients, partners and investors. IRSUS will create value to support innovators through the road to market.170 promising ICT innovations coming from research projects and detected by the Innovation Radar methodology by the EC will directly benefit from IRSUS activities, to successfully drive their way to markets and to reach commercial exploitation.

Scale-EUp2 is a market driven project aiming to scale-up 30 IoT/deeptech start-up through the connection of 4 hubs (Paris area, Barcelona area, Stuttgart/Karlsruhe area, Styria & Carinthia area). The market focus is on 4 emerging application domains of the Internet of Things (IoT)/deeptech: Smart Cities, Mobility, Industry 4.0 and Health and Well-Being.Six events (called Deeptech4good) will be organized during the project in the 4 hubs to help start-up raise funds (fundraising pitch contests), meet large corporates from the areas (business to business meetings) and get involved in public-funded innovation and R&D collaborative projects (open innovation workshops)