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A challenge to build the next frontier

This is where you build what shouldn’t be possible yet. We’re funding radical AI labs, starting with €125M in non-dilutive funding. No strings, no investors to please, just the freedom to pursue genuine breakthroughs. For labs that go furthest, there’s a pathway to up to €1B in additional backing. Are you ready to shape the next AI frontier?

What if Europe’s next Frontier AI started with you?

What if you had €1 billion – and full permission to build?

What if your lab becomes Europe’s leap?

What’s the challenge?

Create a lab that works on the core technology behind AI, not just another application or feature. Your job is to explore new ways to lay the foundations for powerful models, so Europe is not just adopting the next wave of AI but creating it. The focus is on deep, long‑term questions and concrete technical progress, grounded in a clear sense of responsibility for how this technology will shape everyday life.

Building a new frontier in AI

Frontier AI is the next generation of foundational models that will reshape how entire systems work. We’re talking about core technologies. This means exploring entirely new architectures, training methods, or ways of thinking about intelligence that break from today’s dominant paradigms. This challenge creates the space for European tech leaders to leapfrog to the next S-curve, not just chase the current one.

Massive transformer and diffusion stacks dominate the current S-curve of AI:

  • insane data/compute/energy appetite,
  • scaling laws that favour whoever can burn the most H100s,
  • and architectures and value systems optimised for a US/China context.

If you try to “catch up” on that curve with European budgets and constraints, you lose on cost and speed by construction.

So Next Frontier AI explicitly bets on the next S-curve – call it “electric-drive AI” vs today’s "combustion-engine AI":

  • more sample- and energy-efficient models and training regimes,
  • architectures that play to Europe's strengths, e.g. in industrial data,
  • systems that are controllable, auditable and easier to align with European values from the start.

We do not hard-code a technical thesis. You can optimise and scale SOTA architectures, build agentic systems, work on neuro-symbolic stacks, embodied AI, world models, systems-level breakthroughs in data/infra – as long as you can argue a credible path to frontier-grade capability and a lab that is European at its core.

Creating labs where research and business unite

Frontier AI Labs bridge two worlds usually kept apart: radical fundamental research and entrepreneurial development. Most organisations force you to choose between long-term exploration and building something commercially viable. In this challenge, both happen at the same time. Labs start with maximum freedom to pursue deep research, then transform your work into a viable business on your own terms.

Shaping technology with European responsibility

European values aren't a strict framework; they're an open space for thought and an invitation to shape. This challenge is about developing technology with cultural responsibility, where builders consider what it's built for, who benefits, and how it shapes the world. These values are co-created by those who join. You're not just working on a technical project, you’re driving technology with intention.
 

Why you should step forward

Resources that match your ambition

You get substantial non-dilutive funding for the initial phase – up to €27M per team. Beyond capital, you gain legal, strategic, and operational support that removes the barriers between having an idea and actually building it. SPRIND operates as a company-builder with political leverage, opening pathways through European regulation where others see only barriers. As you demonstrate that your approach works, there's a clear path to up to €1B in additional funding.

The freedom to think freely

You have complete freedom to explore new paradigms, challenge current architectures, and show us where the frontier actually lies, not where conventional thinking says it should be. No VC pressure pushing you toward quick wins or investor-pleasing milestones. No EU-project bureaucracy slowing you down with reporting requirements and predefined methods. It’s streamlined and built for speed, designed to support radical exploration rather than manage it.

A collective movement

You're joining a movement to prove that Europe can define the future of AI on our own terms. Not by catching up or copying, but by creating something genuinely new. This initiative is grounded in an open canon of European values: not a fixed rulebook, but a shared conversation about how technology should be developed, what it should serve, and who it benefits.

Learn more about the application process

What we expect from you

The challenge is not about delivering a finished product in 24 months. It's about proving you can build a lab that's technically ambitious, operationally solid, and ready to scale.

By the end of the programme, you should have working systems – not one hero model, but usable tools that demonstrate a clear technical leap. You'll need a strong, multi-disciplinary team, battle-tested governance, and a clean legal structure. 
Most importantly, you'll need evidence that your approach can scale seriously: early partnerships or customers, investment-grade infrastructure, and a credible roadmap for how €1B in backing could turn your lab from promising pilots into a true frontier operation.

FAQ

Our Timeline

Application period opens
Application deadline
Proposal screening and pitch
Up to 10 teams are funded
Up to 3 winners are announced and backed to raise up to €1B

€125M non-dilutive funding for 10 teams following three stages:

Stage 1

10 Teams
7 months
€3M per team

Stage 2

6 Teams
8 months
€8M per team

Stage 3

3 Teams
9 months
€15.5M per team

We host a series of events in major cities across Europe where you can learn more about the initiative, hear from frontier AI experts, and connect with potential partners in person. Whether you’re looking for tech expertise, strategic thinking, or operational experience, this is where you find the right team.

1. Proposal + pitch: up to 10 teams selected

  • Set up a European legal entity for your team
  • Submit your application by May 29th 2026
  • Pitch your idea to the jury in June 2026

The jury then selects up to 10 teams to enter the funded build phase.

2. Funded build phase (July 2026–Autumn 2028)

The 10 selected teams get serious funding, compute and hands-on support. This is real lab-building capital, not a stipend.

You move through staged gates with down-selection until up to 3 winners remain. At each gate, the jury looks at research agenda, metrics, infra, MLOps, evals, safety, early pilots.

3. Outcome of the challenge

The goal is not a single winning lab, but up to 3 venture-ready labs with pilots, eval suites, infra, teams, and investment-grade data rooms.

  • Competition meets collaboration: you run in parallel with other labs, see what they're doing, sometimes share insights – and still push to outrun them.
  • Freedom over bureaucracy: we cut paperwork where we can. Funding follows progress, not slide decks.
  • Results drive decisions: if your system learns faster, scales better, or shifts real-world metrics, you advance.
Get in touch at nfai@sprind.org

The €1B we mentioned is not a random PR number and not part of the challenge budget. It's the order-of-magnitude scale-up capital each winning lab should be able to raise after the 24-month competition. Think of it as a mega Series A that gets you from serious seed lab to real frontier player.

Everything in Next Frontier AI builds towards that funding round from day one.

What we provide:

From the start, there’s a dedicated Financing Workstream running alongside your technical work so that you’re not scrambling for funds at the end.

  • We work with you to build investment-grade data rooms – metrics, infra, security, safety, governance, compliance, IP – the stuff serious investors and corporates will grill you on.
  • We design the labs to be investable – sane cap tables, governance, legal setup, risk management – so big tickets from VCs, corporates and public instruments are structurally possible.
  • We rally a coalition of capital around the challenge – European and global VCs, corporate venture arms, and infra providers, public banks and funds (EIB, national programs, etc.).
  • The goal is that by 2028, these players don't hear about you for the first time – they've been following you through the challenge.
  • We run structured investor & partner processes – dedicated diligence days, 1:1s, joint workshops with potential anchor customers and compute providers – so that by the end of the challenge, each winner has a concrete path to a €1B round (term sheets / MOUs / structured processes), not just "good vibes".

Each is backed to raise up to €1 bn to launch a frontier lab that can shift Europe’s AI trajectory.

What this means for you as a team:

  • The challenge money (€125M total) pays for mid-scale training, infra and pilots and gets you to "frontier-lab seedling with receipts".
  • The initiative then aims to convert that into a €1B round per winner by making you legible, de-risked and highly visible to a pre-aligned investor & partner crowd.

The bottom line:

We cannot promise "you will receive exactly €1,000,000,000 on date X". But the mission of Next Frontier AI is explicitly to close the missing link – company building plus serious follow-on scale-up financing. If by the end of the challenge our winners don't have a very high-probability path to that kind of round, we haven't done our job.

Anyone with ambition, technical expertise, and the drive to build something genuinely new can apply – whether you're an individual, a duo with a shared vision, or an established team ready to scale. You don't need a polished pitch or a complete team from day one.

Don't have a team yet?

We'll help you find co-founders and partners through active matchmaking events that connect complementary technical, strategic and operational skills. Visit our on-site roadshows in several European cities, or join virtual meet-ups from February to April 2026.

Find an event near you

What kind of teams?


The ideal team has multi-disciplinary teams with serious tech skills:

  • Deep technical backbone: You should have people who have actually trained serious models, run infra, shipped systems, or done adjacent hard things (robotics, large-scale scientific computing, STEM, etc.).
  • Builder mindset: This is for people who are willing to build a company or lab, not just publish a paper. Product sense, ops, and some tolerance for chaos are a plus.
  • Diverse skills, like:
    • research (ML, optimisation, theory),
    • engineering (systems, MLOps, infra, security),
    • data (pipelines, curation, governance), and from Stage 3 of the challenge, at least one person who cares about business/users/customers/GTM.

Team size & composition over time

  • At application: a committed core (usually 3–7 people) with a clear technical thesis and early roadmap.
  • During the challenge: scaling into a multi-disciplinary lab. Think: a few dozen people over time – researchers, engineers, MLOps, data, product, ops. Exact numbers are up to you; we care about functionality, not org charts.
  • If in doubt: if you can credibly argue "we can build and run a frontier-grade system given enough budget and time", you're in the right ballpark.

Exact rules will be explained in the application process, but you should assume:

  • you'll need a European legal entity (UG, GmbH, SAS, Oy, S.r.l., etc.) by the time funding flows,
  • and the lab must be effectively headquartered in Europe.

We'll provide templates and support for cap tables, governance, and contracts, so a lack of prior startup experience is not a blocker.

Compute is part of the challenge budget. The plan is: we try to negotiate bulk deals with (preferably European) HPC / cloud providers. If that's not possible, we will fund you directly.

We prioritise European providers where viable, but we are not dogmatic. If the best option for your setup is a hyperscaler, that’s fine – the goal is to make the labs win, not enforce ideology.

Yes. That's a core design feature, not an afterthought.

Next Frontier AI and our partners provide company-building support:

  • templates for legal structures, equity, IP,
  • help with hiring, HR and finance basics,
  • governance, boards, non-executive advisors,
  • GTM coaching and commercial strategy support,
  • safety & compliance playbooks,
  • support in recruiting MLOps, security, data, product, etc.

We don't expect every PI or staff engineer to suddenly become a perfect CEO. We care that the lab becomes investable and operationally excellent; we'll help you get there.

In principle: yes, as long as it doesn't break state-aid rules, double-fund the same cost block, or create impossible governance.

You can have existing grants, VC money or corporate collaborations; we'll just need transparency so contracts don't conflict.

For follow-on, we explicitly want you to combine: venture capital, strategic corporates, public instruments (EIB, national programs), and other non-dilutive sources.

The exact rules and combinations are spelt out in the application and contracts.

The whole endeavour is built around iterative, milestone-driven progress:

  • You'll run many experiments rather than a single moonshot.
  • Milestones tighten over time: agenda + teams → first scaled runs + evals → pilots → data room + financing.
  • Funding follows progress; we keep room for pivots as long as your thesis remains frontier-relevant and technically credible.

If you're used to "ship, measure, iterate" rather than "five-year grant and a PDF", you'll be at home.

Legal Disclaimer

All information on this site is indicative and subject to change. The final conditions of participation – including eligibility, selection criteria, funding amounts, timelines and any financing mechanisms – will be defined in the official call for applications and the contracts between SPRIND and participating teams.

While Next Frontier AI is designed to enable successful teams to raise up to €1B in follow-on funding, this cannot be guaranteed. SPRIND and its partners will use reasonable efforts to prepare and support such financing rounds, but do not assume any obligation to provide or secure specific investment amounts.

SPRIND reserves the right to modify, postpone or cancel the challenge or parts of the initiative if funding, regulatory approvals or other material conditions cannot be secured. In such cases, already executed contracts and applicable law will determine the handling of any outstanding obligations.