The European Data Incubator (EDI), which offers a fund of 5 million euros to support SMEs and new companies specialising in Big Data technologies, has opened its first call today – 28th March.

The EDI initiative, funded by the European Commission through the Horizon2020 programme, is a great opportunity for entrepreneurship: it will provide companies with a large technological infrastructure, data and non-refundable financing.

A single company could be awarded up to 100,000 euros of non-refundable financing by applying to this call, which will remain open until the 27th of June. Up to 45 teams will be selected to participate in an event in Berlin for the first acceleration phase of the initiative called “Explore”.

The 16 best teams will enter the second “Experiment” phase in which they will be required to draw up a business plan, a viable minimum product, and will be evaluated at different milestones.

The top 6 teams will pass into the final “Evolve” phase, focused on promoting investment. For each phase different amounts of funding are committed: 5,000 euros for each of the 45 teams in the first phase, 80,000 for each of the 16 second phase teams, and 15,000 euros for each of the 6 finalists.

EDI will allow the participation of teams of entrepreneurs who have not yet established an SME. In the near future the incubator will be promoted in the EU-Startup Summit event on the 24th of April in Barcelona and will have a stand at the FIWARE Global Summit in Porto on the 8th and 9th of May.

Interested companies must complete a form and choose between a series of “challenges”, including: the equipment for the proposal, proposed product or service, Big Data technologies used, potential business, growth strategy, etc. The documentation of the call is now available.

During the process, the participating companies will have the coaching and support of ZABALA to successfully launch their products and services onto the market.

Supporting Entrepreneurship to Boost Big Data

The main objective of the European Data Incubator project (EDI) is to promote Big Data among European companies. The University of Deusto leads the consortium of the initiative that comprises 20 entities from 10 European countries including ZABALA Innovation Consulting which participates as coordinator and evaluator of the calls for the project. The EDI will help and support companies and start-ups to avoid the obstacles they encounter when trying to develop data exploitation strategies.

The incubator will host private data from a wide range of organizations. The data providers are the Efe news agency, Elektro Ljubljana, Emasesa, Energa, Migros, Sonae, Jot Internet Media RACC, Technische Universität Berlin, Ubimet, Vía Verde, Virtual Energy Solutions, Volkswagen Navarra, VRT and Yapikredi who will define the business challenges to be addressed. The EDI consortium (University of Deusto, ZABALA Innovation Consulting, F6S, Engineering Ingeneria Informatica and Etventure Startup Hub) will evaluate and support new companies and SMEs that wish to promote these initiatives.