The EIC Accelerator funding (grant and equity, with a blended financing option) by the European Commission (EC) and the European Innovation Council (EIC) awards up to €2.5 million in grant and €10 million in equity financing per project (€12.5 million total). This article provides a perspective on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in grant writing and its impact on startups and Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), as well as professional writers, freelancers, and consultants.

Find Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 here. This article is Part 4 of the series on AI grant writing for the EIC Accelerator. Find ChatEIC here.

It is quite a tragedy that both the applicants and the EIC seem to be integrating generative AI to communicate with each other. This is akin to a married couple arguing through their child, who has to deliver messages between rooms. It is quite inefficient.

The Dilemma: The Redundant In-Between

When creating the EIC Accelerator AI writer ChatEIC, the biggest question became: How can one extract all the necessary proposal data from the applicant with as little friction as possible? Creating an AI-written proposal based on prompts that leverage years of experience in grant writing is easy, but it still depends heavily on the input data received from applicants.

But this challenge gives rise to an even greater question: If one can extract concentrated, distilled, and narrative-free data from an applicant that contains all information relevant to the EIC Accelerator in just a few pages then why is that not used for the evaluation instead of a bloated proposal? Why does ChatEIC need to bloat the raw data into a lengthy narrative instead of simply handing a 3-page data overview to the evaluators?

The obvious answer would be that evaluators want to be sold on a story. The legitimacy of that process is questionable but it becomes entirely ridiculous if the evaluators use AI to distill the bloated proposal back into raw data and condense it into its concentrated form once again. If the EIC evaluators indeed use AI in such a way, especially in Step 1 of the EIC Accelerator, then what is the point of this whole process?

Generic Sections Are Redundant

The conclusion is that the entire grant evaluation process in its current form is, at worst, wasteful and unnecessary, or, at best, a bloating process followed by a lossy compression. Any section of the proposal that is generic should be removed to mitigate this. The gender and diversity sections, the explanation of why EIC funding is needed and others should be removed since they are generic and do not contain any real company opinions or data. They simply parrot what the EIC wants to hear. They are an intelligence test (i.e. can you say the right thing?) rather than a screening for a quality (i.e. do you really believe this?).

If an AI proposal writer does not require applicant input for a certain section in order to write it then this section should be removed entirely since this is a clear sign that it is generic. The entire section can be written based on experienced prompts irrespective of the applicant's data.

Why should you turn a concentrated summary into a bloated text using AI just for evaluators to condense it down again using AI as well? Clearly, this expansion and contraction will do the source material no justice, just like translating a book to Japanese and back to English using Google Translate would significantly degrade the quality.

But there must be a reason for it, surely.

It’s Bureaucracy All The Way Down

Currently, EIC Accelerator proposals are graded like a school essay by the evaluators. Evaluators do not view themselves as scouts aiming to find incredible companies and technologies; they are pedantic teachers who want to teach the ways of the business model while being semi-experts themselves. The result is that bad companies with great writing skills or extensive support from professional writers and consultants often get to the interview, while incredible companies without support fail.

Evaluators will ignore the incredible traction (i.e., letters of intent from large companies that usually do not hand out letters of intent or demonstrators with key industry leaders) just to pedantically point out a missing detail:

“You have not exactly quantified the USP here, so it's a NO GO.”

Evaluators (not all but many, obviously) often do not understand that the commitment from large customers who have no reason to bet on a startup is worth more than a systematic breakdown of numbers. There are signals of excellence that are worth more than the EIC's evaluation criteria but, if an evaluator only tries to grade a student's paper then these will be missed.

There are many examples of evaluators looking for technical errors in essay writing rather than genuinely trying to scout a good business. This could be the fault of the evaluators or the EIC, but a better approach would allow evaluators to start with a simple question:

“Is this a company you find impressive and can imagine as part of the EIC portfolio?”

As a consultant, that is always the first question that needs to be asked. No company is perfect but if the overall impression is a yes then flaws have to be overlooked. That is because every EIC Accelerator winner has flaws.

Why are evaluators not doing the same? It should be the most important question. Yes, it is highly subjective, but that is the point of evaluations in the first place. The EIC has long backed the inconsistent and random comments from evaluators while blocking all criticisms. The EIC even removed the rebuttal functions (i.e., responding to evaluator comments) to avoid any feedback and to double down on shielding the inconsistencies.

Yet, proposals are still graded as essays, and evaluators follow a checklist (i.e., Evaluation Summary Report - ESR). But any AI could do this job better since it would have no subjective taste and would just check the boxes, literally like a robot.

Note: ChatEIC will soon prototype an AI evaluator that grades proposals in a comprehensive manner.

Of Wasted Time and Intelligence Tests

The EIC is going down a road filled with bureaucracy (i.e., including evaluators, jury members, and business coaches) that is not aligned with the startups they (try to) support. Every company that is of high quality and in need of funding cannot spend 8-15 months trying to obtain EIC Accelerator funding with a success rate of under 5%. That is simply not a good use of anyone's resources if they are short on cash.

Companies that have no urgency and plenty of time, on the other hand, will happily spend as much time as they have to in order to succeed in the program. Even though the EIC claims that companies do not need consultants to be successful in the EIC Accelerator, the former type of company does not have the time to do it themselves and often does not have the money as well.

The EIC even grades criteria such as urgency and timing, which are evaluated harshly, but the evaluators are completely oblivious to the fact that the process to obtain the grant takes more than eight months—after which any advantage in timing might have expired. Even worse, evaluators will comment that "the timing is now perfect" but they reject them because they did not add enough milestones to the proposal for project tracking which means they have to reapply 7 months later.

This is not an exception, it is the norm.

As it stands, the EIC Accelerator proposals are half assessment and half intelligence test:

• Can you use the right words (i.e., de-risk, crowd-in, diversity, gender, new market, new value chain)?
• Do you know the bureaucratic rules (i.e., Technology Readiness Level - TRL, EIC Fund, budget, deliverables, milestones)?
• Can you ignore what we say (i.e., randomly different ESR/Jury recommendations on every submission)?

The Dirty Business Of Government Funding: No Such Thing As Free Money

These are things that startups should not have to deal with. So, what will the future look like? One can only guess, but it may look something like this:

The EIC will continue to use consultants, evaluators, and jury members—likely more than ever before, since its budget is high enough to justify the expense. If AI were to replace evaluators and jury members, then those roles would convert into support (i.e., business coaches, program managers, ambassadors, scaling club, etc.).

It will integrate AI in the evaluation (likely already happening) to support the process. Likely, the AI integration will not work properly and will complicate and randomize the process even more, not simplify it. The EIC will also have trouble finding the right providers since virtually all flagship LLMs are non-EU, and the EIC might not be able to swallow that disgrace especially since the EU's left policies are on a collision course with the US's latest right shift.

Mistral would be one of the few viable options or the EIC could use an EU-based tech company that uses Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT), and xAI (Grok) models as an intermediary to save face.

AI tools such as ChatEIC and others will become normal for applicants but they will also dramatically increase the submission numbers. The rise in submissions will prompt the EIC to spend more on evaluators and coaches while diluting the quality of the process even more and wasting more budget on non-funding activities.

To intelligently respond to the number of submissions, the EIC is either forced to integrate AI effectively in evaluation processes, or the evaluators will use AI without the EIC’s approval to ease the workload. Whatever the case might be, it will be interesting to watch.

A future article will investigate options for AI evaluations of EIC Accelerator proposals since these would differ in their approach compared to human evaluators. There is a great opportunity to improve the entire process using AI since it could remove all the generic and bloated content to focus only on what is essential.

These tips are not only useful for European startups, professional writers, consultants and Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME) but are generally recommended when writing a business plan or investor documents.

Deadlines: Post-Horizon 2020, the EIC Accelerator accepts Step 1 submissions now while the deadlines for the full applications (Step 2) under Horizon Europe are:

The Step 1 applications must be submitted weeks in advance of Step 2. The next EIC Accelerator cut-off for Step 2 (full proposal) can be found here. After Brexit, UK companies can still apply to the EIC Accelerator under Horizon Europe albeit with non-dilutive grant applications only - thereby excluding equity-financing.

Contact: You can reach out to us via this contact form to work with a professional consultant.

AI Grant Writer: ChatEIC is a fully automated EIC Accelerator grant proposal writer: Get it here.

EU, UK & US Startups: Alternative financing options for EU, UK and US innovation startups are the EIC Pathfinder (combining Future and Emerging Technologies - FET Open & FET Proactive) with €4M per project, Thematic Priorities, European Innovation Partnerships (EIP), Innovate UK with £3M (for UK-companies only) as well as the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants with $1M (for US-companies only).

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