From Pilot to Growth: How Open Horizons Continues Supporting Women-Led Deep-Tech Startups Beyond Validation

For most startups, validating an innovative solution in a real business environment marks the beginning of a new set of challenges. How do you transform a successful pilot into long-term commercial opportunities? How do you approach investors? How do you build strategic partnerships? And how do you prepare your company to scale? These are exactly the questions the Open Horizons Follow-On Programme was designed to address.

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Open Call #3 Results: 389 Bold Ideas from 38 Countries

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.

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Presenting the 12 Startups Advancing to Open Horizons Inception Phase, Cohort 2

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.

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Why EU Public Funding Is a Game-Changer for Women-Led Deep-Tech Startups in Europe

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.

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