European initiatives cover over €400 billion worth of R&D subsidies under the current 2021-2027 framework program, which will result in several thousands of innovations to be developed. Until now, it has been very difficult for investors to find out which of these innovations are the most promising and have the potential to bring truly groundbreaking innovations to market.
A good example of an innovation made possible with EU funding is BioNTech. The spinout from Mainz University received €9.4 million in grants during its earliest years to support the development of cancer therapeutics, as well as vaccines for infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Today, BioNTech is valued at $22 billion.
For investors, EU-funded companies are particularly interesting, as each of them has already received significant non-dilutive funding, which clears the early development risks and enables them to gain large competitive advantages. This offers a unique opportunity for early-stage VC funds and business angels to invest in highly innovative low-risk companies with mature products and clean cap tables.
As the EU supports thousands of cutting-edge innovations there are many more potential BioNTech-like companies to be discovered.
Until now, it has been extremely difficult for investors to connect with these EU backed innovations as there used to be very limited information available. It was just possible to see which grants had been awarded to which entities but there was no indexed information about the results coming out of these funding programs.
To solve this, the European Commission has created the “Innovation Radar Initiative” and launched “Dealflow.eu”. A platform with the mission to close the gap between investors and innovations from both sides where investors can easily search and filter through the entities.
VCs and other industry experts from across Europe are encouraged by the arrival of this platform and are seeing Dealflow.eu as an essential tool to increase transparency and decrease informational arbitrage.
Miruna-Ioana Girtu, Venture Partner at SyndicateRoom, stated: “With so many teams working on cutting-edge technologies across Europe, data-powered initiatives that can both facilitate curated access to capital and increase visibility in the market are very much welcomed.”
The Dealflow.eu platform leverages the Innovation Radar data of the European Commission and combines it with Dealroom.co’s data to make its startups easily searchable and filterable by industry, age, employee numbers, total funding, industry focus, growth rate and many more dimensions. Dealflow aims at helping investors discover promising innovations, supporting the commercialization and bringing knowledge and experience to founders about taking a prototype to market.
Startups are already starting to see the benefits of the platform. Material Mapper CEO Ieva Sibilla Strupule stated: “The Dealflow team have played a pivotal role in the development of our startup’s go-to-market and funding strategy. They are a team of well-connected, goal-driven and creative executors with a sharp business mindset, who I am happy to recommend to anyone in need!”
The platform can be used for free and supports interactions between investors and the most promising EU-funded innovations. Feel free to add your own industry filters and try it out yourself here.
Each year, the Dealflow.eu team, together with the European Commission, is hosting the Innovation Radar Prize to award the best EU-funded innovators, bringing visibility to the innovations to support their fundraising.
The 2021 final is going to take place on 21 October and each of the 12 finalists are going to e-pitch their EU-supported innovation and their plans to get them ‘out of the lab and into the market’ to a jury composed of a panel of investors and entrepreneurs. To find out more about the event and sign up to participate, click here.
via https://www.AiUpNow.com
October 6, 2021 at 03:36AM by contact@bcurdy.com, Khareem Sudlow
