Behind Every Start-up Success Story: How Ecosystems Shape Growth, Scale and Impact”, an official side event of Startup Fair 2026, organised by our sister projects INNOVATE-EU, WE-RISE and EPIC-X.
The next stage of the Open Horizons journey has officially begun. After receiving 282 applications through Open Call #2 and completing the Inception Phase, 7 women-led deep-tech startups have now been selected to enter the Pilot Phase of the programme.
Open Horizons Open Call #3 received 389 submitted applications from 38 countries. This is the strongest response across all three open calls of the programme. But beyond the headline numbers, what the submissions reveal is more interesting than any single figure: a growing, geographically diverse community of women-led startups building serious technology and ready to bring it into real industrial environments.
At the EIC Summit 2026, Open Horizons will showcase how challenge-based collaboration between startups and corporates can accelerate technology validation, generate scalable industrial solutions, and create new opportunities for investment and growth.
The Open Horizons journey continues with a new group of women-led deep-tech startups ready to transform bold ideas into real market pilots has joined Open Horizons. Following the evaluation of Open Call #2 applications, 12 startups from across Europe have now entered the Inception Phase of the programme. In this key stage they will prepare the selected teams for collaboration with corporates and future pilot implementation.
For anyone working in the European innovation ecosystem, the underrepresentation of women in deep-tech entrepreneurship is a well-known challenge.
The EmpoWomen project (a Horizon Europe-funded initiative and sister programme to Open Horizons) published a whitepaper attempting to analyse this challenge, find out what works and how it can be improved. The research draws on a structured empirical study comparing funded and unfunded cohorts of women-led deep-tech startups across revenue, team growth, equity dilution, and market traction.
The main finding? EU public funding helps women-led deep-tech startups to transform and grow.
Why Strong Startup Applications Still Get Rejected — Insights from Evaluators
Even high-quality applications fail—often due to avoidable weaknesses. Based on evaluator feedback, here are the five most common issues and how to address them:
Open Call #3 is the final call of the programme, open until 19 May 2026, 17:00 CEST.
If you are thinking about applying, take a moment to reply to these questions:
ne year ago, Open Horizons started with a clear mission: to help women-led deep-tech startups turn innovation into real market solutions.
Since then, we’ve been building a growing ecosystem where startups, corporates, investors, and innovation actors collaborate to bring new technologies closer to real-world applications.
Here is what the first year of Open Horizons looks like.
Deep-tech founders don’t attend events. They use them. The founders who extract real value from the ecosystem don’t treat events as stages, they treat them as systems. Systems for testing their narrative with real stakeholders. For translating complex technology into outcomes that resonate. For understanding who actually needs what they’re building. Because in deep tech, traction often begins before the product is finished. And the right conversation at the right event, in the right room, can become a turning point. The question is never ‘should I attend?’ It’s ‘am I ready to use this?’