120 10 APRIL 2020 • VOL 368 ISSUE 6487 sciencemag.org SCIENCEPHOTO: EPIGUARDT
he EpiShuttle, a hospital gurney en-
closed in a bubble of plastic and stud-
ded with sealed access ports, keeps
contagious patients isolated while
on the move—eliminating the need
to disinfect ambulances and helicop-
ters after each run. EpiGuard, the Norwe-
gian startup behind it, is racing to satisfy
the hundreds of orders that have been
placed amid the coronavirus pandemic, says
founder Fridtjof Heyerdahl, a doctor who
began to develop the equipment after the
2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
The company owes its growth to the Euro-
pean Innovation Council (EIC), a little-knownbut ambitious EU agency that aims to do for
startups and spinoffs what the grantmaking
European Research Council does for basic
research. Without EIC support, “our organi-
zation would have been so tiny, we wouldn’t
have been able to ramp up,” Heyerdahl says.
Last year, EpiGuard won a €2.5 million grant
from EIC. Now, EIC is offering the company
a more radical form of government support.
On 13 March, Heyerdahl was invited to ap-
ply for an EIC equity investment, which could
give EpiGuard up to €15 million—and the Eu-
ropean Union a stake in the company.
EpiGuard was one of the beneficiaries
of EIC’s 3-year pilot program. But in Janu-
ary 2021, EIC is set to become a major partof Horizon Europe, the European Union’s
proposed €94 billion R&D program for
2021–27. The European Commission wants
€10.5 billion of that to go to EIC; national
governments will settle on the final num-
bers in the coming months.
Frustrated by Europe’s lack of home-grown
tech giants, Commission officials hope EIC
will help small tech firms grow in Europe,
instead of being lured away to Silicon Valley.
“The aim here is to close the big gap that ex-
ists between Europe and the United States,”
says Mark Ferguson, Ireland’s chief scien-
tist and EIC board chair. But one challenge
will be backing risky but promising startups
without becoming “the financiers of last re-
sort for all the failing companies that aren’tgoing to do very well,” says Christopher Tucci,
a professor of technology management at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Laus-
anne, who advised the Commission while it
drafted Horizon Europe.
A lack of venture capital (VC) has slowed
tech growth in Europe. According to the
Commission, in 2016 venture capitalists in-
vested just €6.5 billion in European start-
ups, compared with €39.4 billion in the
United States. VC funds in Europe are also
barely one-third the size of U.S. funds. That
limits their ability to help small companies
scale up past the so-called “valley of death,”
says EIC board member Kerstin Bock,
whose Berlin-based consultancy, Openers,gives advice to startups. “When it comes to
the growth stage, scaling companies, there
might not be that many [investors] that are
risk takers,” she says.
EIC is meant to remedy the problem
through a combination of grants, high-risk
equity investments, and one-off cash prizes
for competitions. (The EIC pilot is now of-
fering €10 million for the winning design of
a cheap method to launch small satellites
into orbit, and €5 million for cheap batter-
ies for electric vehicles.) It offers two main
award types: the Pathfinder, which provides
grants up to €4 million for early-stage tech
development, and the Accelerator, which
offers grants up to €2.5 million and equity
investments of up to €15 million for compa-
nies trying to scale.
It is also forgoing a standard requirement
of most EU research grants: that applicants
form consortia, which forces them to share
findings with other participants. Danaë
Delbeke, CEO of Belgian firm Indigo, was
pleased that she could apply for EIC money
as a small company acting alone, in stealth
mode. “We are in a very, very competitive
field,” says Delbeke, who spun out Indigo
from photonics research at Ghent Univer-
sity and the Interuniversity Microelectron-
ics Centre. The firm won an Accelerator
grant to develop a subcutaneous sensor to
simultaneously monitor glucose, ketones,
and lactase in diabetic patients.
Bock says EIC will help companies that
need more time and money to get market
ready, such as medical device and biotech-
nology companies, which have to satisfy
complex regulations and certifications. It
will also target firms developing “disrup-
tive” technologies, and is hiring program
managers who can identify them—experts
in fields like artificial intelligence, clean en-
ergy, and nanometrology.
Georg Licht, an economist at the Leibniz
Centre for European Economic Research,
says picking disruptive technologies early
isn’t easy. Once it’s clear a technology is
disruptive, it’s already too late for public in-
vestment, because “if they can be sure, then
it’s clear also to the private sector.”
EIC’s most radical idea may be equity
investment, something the Commission,
which runs EIC, has never done before (al-
though since 2014 it has acted as guarantor
for some investments made by the indepen-
dent European Investment Bank). EIC in-European Union gets in the venture capital game
Flush with cash, new EU innovation agency buys shares in disruptive technology startups
SCIENCE FUNDINGBy Nicholas WallaceNEWS | IN DEPTHA new European agency has funded Norwegian startup EpiGuard, which makes gurneys that isolate patients.