With the additional financial support, the total budget raised by the flagship research and innovation programme comes to roughly €14.8bn.

The European Commission has announced that an additional €500m will be allocated to the Horizon Europe initiative, which is the EU’s flagship research and innovation programme. The new funding brings the total amount to around €14.8bn and will be implemented across 2026 and 2027.  

The Commission also announced that it would be extending the scope of the scheme by introducing two new cross-cutting calls built to tackle major challenges in the research and innovation spaces. 

The first, ‘Bridging Actions 2027′, focuses on the ‘innovation to investment journey’ to better connect research with market deployment. This project has a total financing figure of €260m. 

Bridging Actions will lay the foundation for the EU’s next research and innovation programme for the period 2028-2034. 

16 actions under this call will support advanced technologies with strong commercial potential, tackling topics such as the AI media platform, which is a modular multilingual public-interest infrastructure for European news and audiovisual media; autonomous driving ambitions; research and technology infrastructures as strategic assets for talent to choose Europe; and advanced scaling frameworks. 

The second, ‘Transformative Change Towards a Nature-Positive Economy and Society’, which is financed to the tune of €237m, aims to drive the transition towards nature-positive economic models, supporting Europe’s long-term competitiveness, economic and societal resilience and strategic autonomy.

The European Commission claims that the call will fund 11 research and innovation actions supporting the EU’s biodiversity goals and help meet the 10pc biodiversity spending target set out in the Horizon Europe Strategic Plan 2025-2027.

Commenting on the announcement Ekaterina Zaharieva, the commissioner for start-ups, research and innovation, said: “With this amendment, we are putting new funding behind priorities that matter to Europeans and to attract and boost excellence to and within Europe. 

“And we know that this investment delivers, it is helping more than 151,000 young researchers build their careers and 20,000 companies turn ideas into solutions, products and jobs. With more than half of beneficiaries participating in the programme for the first time, Horizon Europe is opening doors.”

In August, the EU announced it is planning to back deep-tech businesses in the bloc with a new funding mechanism aimed at helping the region catch up with the US and China.

The €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund, which was initially announced in October 2025, is designed to build on the ‘Choose Europe to start and scale’ strategy. 

Updated, 12.57pm, 30 September 2026: This article was amended to clarify the aims of the two new calls under Horizon Europe.

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