Budget
€75000 per startup, plus: - Female mentors - Investor outreach and pitch preparation - Investor and Export Readiness Check - Soft skills training - Sales strategy and Execution - Environmental impact assessment - Corporate access
Key dates and deadline
• Deadline for submission: 4/08/2025, 17:00h CEST*, Brussels time Evaluation period: Indicatively period to evaluate applicants. 05/08/2025 to 19/09/2025 • Eligibility check: 05/08/2025 – 25/08/2025 • External evaluation and normalization score: 25/08/2025 – 18/09/2025 • Ethical review: 19/09/2025 – 13/10/2025 • Results: The communication of the evaluation's final results to all the applicants will be around 25/09/2025. There will not be any prior disclosure of information about the evaluation process before the ethical review has not finished. The selected applicants will go through the legal validation and the sub-grantee agreement preparation afterwards. • Legal validation and Sub-grantee agreement preparation and signature: Starting from 26/09/2025 until 23/10/2025. Legal validation is applied exclusively to successful applicants and involves the submission of various documents (see Section 5.e) to ensure compliance with the requirements of the Women TechEU project. • Starting of the programme of services: Successful applicants will start the service programme as of 24/10/2025.
Details
Women TechEU is a 2-year EU-funded project supporting women leading deep tech startup companies from Europe. Our mission is to create a more gender-balanced entrepreneurship ecosystem. We believe that diversity drives innovation, and we are here to provide women in deep tech with more opportunities, resources, and support to thrive. The project consortium is launching 4 calls for applications over the span of 2 years which, following a rigorous evaluation process, will result in a total of 160 beneficiaries. Each beneficiary will receive €75k grants (non-dilutive finance) as well as a personalised business development programme which includes mentoring, coaching and targeted training among other options.
Eligibility
Women TechEU targets early-stage deep tech start-ups founded, or co-founded, by women holding a top management position (CEO, CTO or equivalent). Women should hold at least 25% of the shares in the company at the time of submission. The company must be registered and established in an EU Member State or a Horizon Europe Associated Country for at least six months prior to the deadline of the submission date and a maximum of eight years. Women-Led Company: ● A woman is legally recognised as co/founder of the company and must currently hold a top management position (CEO, CTO, CSO or equivalent) ● Women need to make up together 25% of the company in total, but the woman co/founder does not need to hold all 25% herself. ● It has to be a private company - any other type of legal entity is NOT accepted. The company must be a SME according to the European Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC and must be at a stage before reaching a high fidelity Minimum Viable Product1 as well as having raised less than 1M€ in equity. Neither the application as a whole nor any parts of it should have already benefitted from any other similar EU programme before e.g. Women TechEU initiative, EmpoWomen etc.
Additional information
Age of Company: ● The age of the company is determined by the date of its registration in the national company register of the country it is registered in. ● This date needs to be greater than 6 months and less than 8 years at the date of the submission of the application ● Even if there was a period of inactivity, this time is still counted in the age of the company
How to apply?
http://www.womentecheurope.eu/