Evaluation & outcome

The EIC Accelerator is the largest EIC instrument, with a 2026 budget of around €634 million. It combines a grant of up to €2.5 million with a direct investment of €1 to €10 million in exchange for a stake taken by the EIC Fund. A single company applies, and selection runs through a short application, a full application and a jury interview.

Most Horizon Europe proposals are rejected not for a weak idea but for predictable failures: drifting from the topic scope, unmeasurable expected results, a consortium duplicating expertise instead of complementing it, and a work plan that does not match the narrative. Learning this list beats waiting a year for the next call.

The Evaluation Summary Report is the final report on the evaluation of your proposal, with the experts' scores and comments for each criterion. It arrives through the portal roughly five months after the deadline, and only the evaluation procedure can be challenged, not the scientific judgement itself.

Evaluation in Horizon Europe means scoring a proposal from 0 to 5 against three criteria: Excellence, Impact and quality of the implementation. To be considered for funding at all, a proposal needs at least 3 points on each criterion and 10 out of 15 overall, but in practice only those that fit within the call budget are funded.

The Seal of Excellence is a quality label for proposals that passed the evaluation threshold but received no funding because the call's budget ran out. It brings no money of its own; it eases access to national and regional programmes that recognise the label.