Eurostars Explained: How UK SMEs Access Eureka's International R&D Funding

Eurostars is the Eureka network's flagship funding instrument for innovative SMEs running international R&D projects, and UK companies are still fully eligible to apply for it, even though the UK sits outside the EU. The catch is how it's funded: your UK costs are paid by Innovate UK out of a national pot, not by Brussels, which changes how you should think about deadlines, budgeting and risk compared with a domestic Innovate UK grant.

What Eureka and Eurostars actually are

Eureka is an intergovernmental network of over 45 countries that funds market-focused, collaborative R&D. Eurostars is its best-known programme: a joint call, co-funded by the European Union through Horizon Europe and by each participating country's own funding body, aimed specifically at R&D-performing SMEs building an innovative product, process or service with genuine commercial potential.

The structure that trips people up is this: you submit one application, assessed against one set of criteria, but the money that lands in your account comes from your own country's funding body under its own national rules. For a UK company, that funding body is Innovate UK.

How UK companies participate, post-Brexit and post-association

Two separate facts get conflated here, and the difference matters for how you plan a Eurostars application.

First: the UK re-associated to Horizon Europe from 1 January 2024, under a protocol to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement announced on 7 September 2023. That association lets UK organisations apply directly to Horizon Europe's own calls and receive EU funding on the same terms as an EU member state.

Second, and this is the part that catches applicants out: Eurostars doesn't work that way. Horizon Europe association didn't change how UK participants are funded on Eurostars projects. UK participants continue to be funded nationally, through Innovate UK, exactly as they were before association. Horizon Europe co-funds the Eureka secretariat and evaluation process, not your individual UK grant. So a UK company applying to Eurostars in 2026 deals with two systems in parallel: the international Eureka/Eurostars evaluation, run centrally, and a UK-specific eligibility and funding check, run by Innovate UK through the Innovation Funding Service.

Practically, this means UK eligibility rules (company age, headcount, one-live-project limit) sit alongside, not instead of, the international consortium rules. Miss either set and the application fails, however strong the technology.

Consortium requirements: who you need on board

Eurostars is not a solo-applicant scheme. You cannot submit as a single UK company; the requirement is a genuine international consortium, and the rules are specific rather than a vague "find a partner":

• The project must be led by an innovative SME. For a UK-led project, Innovate UK requires that SME to be the one managing the project (Eureka's own term for this role is "main participant" rather than "project lead", which is worth knowing when you're reading the guidance, since Innovate UK and Eureka don't always use the same vocabulary).
• The consortium needs organisations from at least two Eurostars countries, with at least one coming from an EU member state or a Horizon Europe associated country. The UK itself counts as a Horizon Europe associated country, but you still need a genuine second country in the mix; a UK-only project isn't eligible.
• SMEs from Eurostars countries must account for 50% or more of the total project budget.
• No single participant or country can be responsible for more than 70% of the total project budget, which is the rule that most often forces a rethink of an unbalanced two-partner consortium.
• Large companies, universities and research organisations can join a consortium, but only on a self-funded basis where UK entities are concerned; only UK-registered SMEs receive Innovate UK funding.

Finding a credible partner in another Eurostars country, then agreeing scope, IP and budget split with them before a deadline, is the part of Eurostars that most differentiates it from a domestic grant, and it's usually the part that takes applicants longest to underestimate.

Funding available to UK SMEs

Innovate UK's terms for UK participants have stayed consistent across recent Eurostars calls:

Treat the overheads and subcontracting figures as indicative rather than fixed: Innovate UK republishes the exact terms with each new call on the Innovation Funding Service, and they have shifted slightly between calls before. Always check the live competition page for the call you're actually entering rather than reusing last year's numbers.

Assessment leans heavily on commercial credibility, not just technical novelty. Eureka's published criteria ask for a clear, disruptive innovation; a deliverable business plan with real market potential; sound, practical financials and timelines; and demonstrable value for money. A technically excellent project with a thin go-to-market story does not score well here.

The Eurostars call calendar

Eurostars runs two calls a year. As of 28 September 2026, Call 11 has closed: it opened on 9 July 2026 and closed on 10 September 2026 at 14:00 CET. If you're reading this now, that window has passed.

The next opportunity is Call 12, which opens on 17 December 2026 and closes on 4 March 2027 at 14:00 Brussels time, submitted through the Eureka project management platform alongside the parallel Innovate UK competition on the Innovation Funding Service. Given the consortium-building work described above, the realistic planning window starts well before the call even opens: partner conversations, scope alignment and a first-pass budget split all take longer across three or four organisations in different countries than they do within a single UK team.

Is Eurostars right for your project?

It's worth being honest about who this actually suits, because the consortium requirement rules out more companies than it rules in.

Eurostars is a strong fit if your product genuinely needs, or would clearly benefit from, an international market and an international R&D partner: shared technical expertise you can't source domestically, or a route into a market where a local partner materially improves your chances of commercial success. It's a weaker fit if your project is UK-market-only, if you don't already have a credible international lead, or if you're weighing it up purely because the funding cap looks attractive. Assembling and managing a genuine multi-country consortium under a hard deadline is a real cost in time and coordination, and a project that doesn't need international collaboration on its own merits will struggle to write a convincing case for why it has one. If that's your situation, a domestic route through Innovate UK's technology-focused competitions is very likely the better use of your time; our overview of who's eligible for Innovate UK funding is a reasonable place to sanity-check that first.

If Eurostars is genuinely the right shape for your project, the two things worth doing early are lining up a serious international partner and getting an honest read on whether your business case, not just your technology, will hold up against Eureka's assessment criteria. That's exactly the kind of judgement call GrantHero is built for: we help you work out whether a competition is actually worth your time before you commit weeks to it, and where a case is worth making, our platform plus experienced grant reviewers help you build a stronger one. See current plans and pricing for what that looks like in practice.