Eureka Eurostars: How SME-Led Cross-Border Consortia Get Funded

Eureka Eurostars is an international funding programme for collaborative research and development projects led by innovative small and medium-sized enterprises. Each partner is paid at home by its own national funding body; Eureka itself pays out nothing.

What is Eureka Eurostars and who does it fund?

Eureka Eurostars funds collaborative research and development projects led by innovative small and medium-sized enterprises. The Eureka Network calls it the world's largest SME R&D funding programme. Eurostars is part of the European Partnership on Innovative SMEs and co-funded by the European Union through Horizon Europe.

Eurostars is bottom-up. There are no themes, no priority sectors and no topic list. Any civil application in any field qualifies, which is rare in European funding and the main reason it suits companies whose project does not fit a Horizon Europe call.

The programme runs two cut-offs a year, and a cut-off is the Eurostars term for a call deadline.

Brit Helle, Director General of the Eureka Network, described the programme in July 2026 as "a great opportunity to bring organisations together from across the world".

Scale is modest by EU standards and that is the point. The Eureka Network reported in July 2026 that the most recent call supported 110 innovation projects involving 328 organisations across 28 countries.

Who is eligible for Eurostars funding?

The Eureka Network sets seven international criteria. Your consortium must be led by an innovative SME from a Eurostars country. It needs at least two independent entities from at least two Eurostars countries, one of them an EU or Horizon Europe Associated Country. Miss one criterion and the application is rejected before evaluation.

Source: Eureka Network, Eurostars programme page, checked 18 August 2026.

Criterion 3 catches people out, usually the wrong way round. Canada, Singapore, South Africa and South Korea are Eurostars countries, and none of them is an EU Member State or a Horizon Europe Associated Country. A German SME paired with a Canadian partner still clears the criterion, because the German company is itself the EU entity the rule asks for. What fails criterion 3 is a consortium drawn only from those four countries, a Canadian and South Korean pair for example, with no EU or Associated partner in it at all.

Criterion 6 is a hard limit. A thirty-seven-month project is ineligible.

Who actually pays for a Eurostars project?

Your own national funding body pays. The Eureka Network operates a decentralised model in which organisations receive no money from Eureka itself. Each national body decides independently which organisations it funds, which activities are eligible and at what rate, so one consortium runs on several separate funding decisions at once.

Rates vary widely. Across the country sections of the Eureka Call 11 page they run from roughly 25% to 100%, depending on the country and the type of organisation.

Your partner's rate is not your rate, and your partner's cap is not your cap.

The headline figure you see quoted is therefore rarely the figure you receive. One biotech client had an assay it could not build alone and a partner abroad with the lab automation capability it lacked. The consortium filed one joint application, and each side was funded at home under its own rules. The German partner's share came to roughly EUR 460,000, with the partner abroad funded in parallel by its own agency, as our Eurostars biotech transnational case study sets out.

How much can a German partner receive?

A German SME receives up to 50% of eligible project costs, and the maximum grant is EUR 500,000 for all German partners per project, per the Eureka Call 11 country section for Germany. That ceiling is per project, not per partner, so two German participants share one grant.

The German funding body for Eurostars is the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR). The national contact point is hosted by the DLR Project Management Agency.

In Germany the rate depends on the type of organisation; the cap does not:

• SMEs: up to 50% of eligible project costs.
• Research organisations and universities: up to 100%, but only if a German SME in the consortium takes on a considerable amount of the R&D work.
• Large companies: no funding at all in Germany. They may participate, but must file a self-funding declaration.
• Maximum grant: EUR 500,000 for all German partners per project.

You will see that ceiling quoted as EUR 500,000 per partner, and that reading is wrong.

Take two German SMEs, each holding EUR 400,000 of eligible costs. At the 50% rate they request 200,000 apiece, 400,000 together, comfortably inside the EUR 500,000 ceiling. Now double both budgets: each asks for 400,000, still 50% of its own costs, and the combined 800,000 leaves 300,000 that cannot be funded.

The international application can still score well. The German money simply is not there.

Three further German rules disqualify projects quietly:

• Clinical trials are not funded.
• Only R&D activities up to Technology Readiness Level 6 are eligible, so a proposal running to TRL 8 is internationally valid and nationally unfundable.
• Costs must be calculated in the DLR's easy-Online tool and submitted with the Eurostars application.

Changes under the General Block Exemption Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1315, substantially affect eligible overhead costs. For that reason the Eureka Call 11 page states that all German SMEs should contact the German Eurostars team before applying. Read that as an instruction.

Choosing partners: the 50/70 test and the country-budget trap

Run two arithmetic checks before you agree a consortium. First, do the SMEs from Eurostars countries hold at least 50% of total project cost, excluding subcontracting? Second, does any single participant or country exceed 70%? A two-partner project where one side does most of the work usually fails the second test.

Next, check whether your partner's country has money at all. Several do not.

Source: Eureka Network, Eurostars Call 11 country information, checked 18 August 2026.

Cyprus is a further case: the Eureka Call 11 page states that its entire national programme budget is already committed across calls 9 to 13.

Budgets also move between calls. Greece funded Eurostars partners in Call 11 but has no allocated budget for Call 12, according to the Eureka Call 12 page. Singapore runs the other way. Check the country section of the call you are actually applying to, because the two calls do not fund the same countries.

How are Eurostars applications evaluated and ranked?

Three independent experts score each project against three criteria: Quality and efficiency of the implementation, Impact, and Excellence. Funding then follows the ranking, and no score guarantees a place on its own: only the best 200 projects scored by the remote experts progress to the Independent Evaluation Panel, per the Eureka Call 11 page.

Each criterion has its own sub-criteria, and Impact holds the ones SMEs most often skimp on: market size, market access and risk, competitive advantage, and commercialisation plans.

Three conditions decide funding: a rank inside the best 200, a positive legal and financial viability outcome for every partner, and a panel rating of excellent or good.

Ranking changes the writing task. You are not clearing a bar. You are competing for a place in a ranked 200.

The Eureka Network publishes no official success rate, though it does publish raw figures per call, among them the 110 funded projects cited above. Percentages circulating online are consultancy arithmetic laid over those figures, and the cut you can genuinely plan against is the top 200.

How long does Eurostars take, from deadline to money?

Call 11 closes on 10 September 2026 and the funding decision is communicated by mid-December 2026, around three months later. Eureka's objective is that agreements with your national funding body are signed five to seven months after the submission deadline, per the Eureka Call 11 page.

Call 11 opened on 9 July 2026 and closes on 10 September 2026 at 14:00 Brussels time. Call 12 opens on 17 December 2026 and closes on 4 March 2027.

The Eureka Call 11 page sets out what happens next:

1. Eligibility check, within one week of 10 September 2026.
2. Legal and financial viability check, mid-October 2026.
3. Expert evaluation by three independent experts, mid-October 2026.
4. Independent Evaluation Panel and ranking, end of November 2026.
5. Ethics review, end of November 2026.
6. Funding decision communicated, mid-December 2026.

A funding decision in December does not put cash in the bank in December.

German applicants have one more clock. National applications must be submitted within two weeks of being requested by the DLR, and that request only arrives after a positive evaluation and once funding is secured.

Eurostars against the alternatives, and what the ZIM stop changes

Since 7 July 2026 at 12:00 the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) has accepted no new ZIM applications, for all project forms and project outlines. Reopening is targeted for early 2027 and depends on the 2027 federal budget, per the BMWE notice of 7 July 2026.

Eurostars is unaffected, and the reason is structural. ZIM sits with the BMWE, while Eurostars in Germany sits with the BMFTR, a different ministry on a different budget line. There is a second and independent reason: the ZIM notice exempts applications with international partners under open bilateral and multilateral calls from the stop.

Our explanation of what the ZIM application stop means in practice covers the domestic route in detail.

Timing is where Eurostars disappoints people. If you need money this quarter, this is the wrong instrument: five to seven months from deadline to a signed agreement is a long stretch to fund a development budget out of your own cash flow. For the wider comparison, see how Eurostars compares with the other EU programmes.

Why do Eurostars applications fail?

In our client work the same handful of mistakes keeps coming back, and the expensive ones are all decided long before anyone starts writing: a consortium assembled three weeks before the deadline, a budget that quietly breaks the 50/70 split, and two German partners costed against a single EUR 500,000 ceiling. Each is visible in the finished proposal, and each was avoidable months earlier.

• A consortium assembled three weeks before the deadline. Evaluators score the quality of the consortium and the added value of the cooperation, and a partnership arranged in a hurry reads like one. Start the Call 12 conversations now.
• A budget that breaks the 50/70 split. Model the shares while the work packages are still in draft; reopening a partner's budget afterwards is a diplomatic exercise.
• Two German partners planned against one EUR 500,000 ceiling. Decide early which German entity carries the grant, and build the cost plan around that decision.
• A proposal written above TRL 6. The German work packages have to stay in development; demonstration at scale belongs in the project that comes after this one.
• No commercialisation case. Impact is a full third of the score, and evaluators want market size, a route to market and named prospective customers.
• Missing annexes. The commitment and signature form and the SME declaration are both mandatory, and chasing signatures across several countries in the final week is how administratively sound projects still fall over. Collect them a fortnight early.

A Eurostars application is really two applications on different clocks: one joint international proposal on myeurekaproject.org, and a national filing with DLR Projektträger due within two weeks of being requested. We run both, and our Eurostars consulting is success-based, so it costs nothing unless the grant lands.

Unless a link says otherwise, every figure, rule and deadline above comes from the Eureka call pages, the DLR national guidance and the ZIM notice named in the text, checked 18 August 2026. This article is general information, not legal or financial advice, and national rules change between calls, so confirm your figures with your national funding body before you commit budget.