Gazzelle accelerator, 5th open call for manufacturing challenges

Gazelle Accelerator aims at supporting existing companies, SMEs, Start-ups and Scale-ups, by accelerating their international business and innovation capacities.

The project is specialized in manufacturing and Industry 4.0. The programme is co-funded by the EIT Manufacturing and coordinated with international partners like Aerospace Valley, LINPRA – Engineering and Technology Industries Association of Lithuania, RoboHouse, Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems and Automation, Atos FastTrack Ventures, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini.

The key dates of the 5th Gazelle Accelerator programme

• 5th Open call for Start-ups and SME’s applications: 6 April – 6 May
• Community booster camp: 16 May – 10 June which will include:
  • Mentorship: 16 May – 27 May
  • Workshops: Innovation workshop at 30th of May and Investment workshop at 31st of May
  • Coaching sessions: 31 May – 3 June
  • Market and Industrial days: 14 June – 8 July
  • Investors and finance days: 14 June – 8 July
  • Value chain development days: 14 June – 8 July
  • Follow-up program: 9 July – 30 September

English is the official language for Gazelle Accelerator open call.

Gazelle Accelerator opens its fifth Call to technologies and its Use Cases, which originate from interviews conducted with end-users to define the technologies of their interest and target specific challenges they are currently facing.

It is expected from the solutions to fulfil the following requirements:

• The solution must be affordable, and it should have a cost advantage over its competitors.
• The solution must be flexible and adaptable.
• The solution must address security issues.
• The solution must be characterized from High TRL.

All applicants have to meet the conditions set out in Horizon Europe conditions to be eligible for funding in order to be considered eligible for the Gazelle Accelerator programme.

Participants should be considered as:

• SME: Based on the definition provided by European Commission in https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/sme-definition_en SMEs are defined as:
  • Staff headcount is less than 250, and
  • Annual turnover is less than or equal to €50m or annual balance sheet total is less than or equal to €43m.
• Start-up: Based on the definition provided by European Start Up network in
  https://europeanstartupnetwork.eu/vision/
  • A start-up is younger than five years and develops into a small medium size company before becoming a cooperation
  • Businesses are set up, and at one point, owned and run by the founders
• Scale-up: (Based on the definition provided in the following link
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaleup_company#cite_note-:0-1) it is a company who has an average annualized return of at least 20% in the past 3 years with at least 10 employees in the beginning of the period.

The participants must not have a conflict of interest with the partners in the Gazelle Accelerator consortium.

For the application preparation, the applicants are requested to apply through the questionnaire https://form.dragnsurvey.com/survey/r/a504418f powered by Dragn Survey. They will be required to answer some fields related to the programme and submit the application form.