“We are becoming more and more independent, we are a private, not-for-profit company based in Belgium and our multi-year contract with the European Commission has come to an end, we will continue to have a collaboration contract but our business is increasingly in services and investments in startups,” Federico Menna, CEO of EIT Digital, tells Startupbusiness. “We also participate in many European calls both directly and by providing consultancy to third parties who wish to participate since we have developed significant expertise in this regard.
Recently EIT Digital announced the new scaleup championship sponsored by GEA Digital and the Unite project to bring the deeptech world closer to the world of healthcare, other activities concern the training of European officials on topics related to digital innovation and beyond, the establishment of partnerships with private and public actors from various sectors, and the expansion of the territorial presence in Europe: “we opened the office of Bolzano at the NOI Park, which complements those already operating in Italy in Trento and Milan, and we are working to expand to the south of the country by focusing on Bari, where the Politecnico became our partner in August 2024, and Cagliariwhile in Europe we started operations in Greece in Athens and Thessaloniki, and then Cluj-Napoca in Romania and we are currently working on Kosice in Slovakia and Riga in Latvia, plus others such as Ireland“.
EIT Digital has so far invested in 396 start-ups with an overall total value of around EUR 400 million: ‘they are all early-stage start-ups and on average our share is 10 per cent, so we can calculate the value of the overall investment at around EUR 40 million, we have two potential exits planned for 2025, and of course we invest in start-ups that we consider interesting from all over Europe, both among those that have participated in our venture programmes and those that instead come from independent development processes.
The European Institute of Technology, which is headquartered in Budapest, is made up of several entities that deal with various sectors, there are for example EIT Manufacturing, EIT Health, EIT Urban Mobility, EIT Food and others, each operating as an independent entity and starting with a multi-year contract with the European Commission and depending on the year in which they were founded, they must then evolve, as is the case with EIT Digital, which from 2025 ends its structural framework contract with the European Commission: ‘we have a very solid development plan, I have hired the position of CEO two years ago when there were half as many people working for EIT Digital as there are today, about 90, including 15 in Italygrowth we have made with our own resources and activities on the market, in the 2023 we have a turnover of EUR 36 million, 2024 we will close it with slightly higher growth, and we aim to reach EUR 50 million turnover in 2025“.
These predictions are also supported by the fact that, in Italy alone, EIT Digital won the Ferrovie dello Stato’s innovation tender and the Lombardy Region’s call for tenders to provide training on generative AI to school teachers; it also runs master schools with five Italian universities: the Polytechnics of Milan, Turin and Bari, the University of Trento and the University of Bologna; and it has a deal flow exchange agreement for start-ups with Invitalia.
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