Zürich-based Daedalean, a startup developing autonomous dynamic flight control systems, was selected as one of the European deeptech champions and will receive a €2.3 million EIC Accelerator grant from the European Innovation Council. It is listed among the 75 SMEs and startups who will receive funding under the pilot phase of the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator.
The projects were selected from the 1852 applicants, which makes them the top 4% of the European tech champions. The total funding raised by Daedalean has now exceeded €17 million
Daedalean became one of the latest recipients of the grant awarded by the European Commission under its EIC Accelerator Pilot programme. The EIC Accelerator is the new SME instrument – a funding program for Small and Medium Enterprises launched in June 2019 as part of Horizon 2020, the EU’s Framework Program for Research and Innovation.
The program is highly competitive. Only 180 projects of the 1852 filed were invited for interviewing, and only 75 of them will receive financial support. The project proposed by the Swiss startup to the EIC jury in Brussels is the next phase of its development of the autonomous flight control instruments aimed to enable safer and denser use of the airspace by eliminating dependencies on humans. The eventual goal of the company is bringing full autonomy to the air, which is considered the key enabler for the urban air mobility market emerging at full scale in the near future. “For Daedalean, receiving such an award marks its technology and the path to the market being assessed as disruptive and potentially having a huge impact for the European air mobility industry,” says Anna Chernova, the co-founder of the company. The EIC Accelerator jury noted in their evaluation summary report on Daedalean, “This is a highly strategic technology for the European market.”