Challenges
Next Frontier AI
Europe's competitiveness in AI innovation remains far behind that of the USA and China. While OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek invest billions in foundation models, Europe lacks the industrial backbone to independently develop, operate, and scale next-generation AI systems. The consequence: strategic dependency in key sectors – industry, healthcare, public administration, security.
The SPRIND Challenge Next Frontier AI aims to change that: a structured, three-stage innovation competition over 24 months that bridges the gap between cutting-edge research and commercialisation. The goal is not the incremental development of existing models – we are looking for creative approaches that push the algorithmic boundaries of today and have the potential to far surpass the expected evolution of existing AI approaches.
The Challenge identifies approaches that, with sufficient funding, can lead to genuine breakthroughs, while simultaneously ensuring the development of talented teams with high-performance processes. The result: not just technologically relevant artefacts, but commercial entities with research, deployment, and operational excellence – the seeds of European Frontier AI Labs.
Next Frontier Robotics
While robots today master repetitive tasks in controlled settings, they still fundamentally struggle with novel tasks, changing conditions or unstructured environments. Widening demographic shifts, a growing labor shortage, and rising competitiveness urgently drive the need for robotics systems that can tackle physical tasks reliably while safeguarding safety and sovereignty.
Global competitors in the US and China are investing billions into closed robotics systems, placing Europe at risk of strategic dependence without its own frontier innovations. While Europe retains a world-class manufacturing foundation and research footprint, shaping the next era of robotics demands immediate action to scale next-generation hardware and the intelligent systems to operate them. The SPRIND Challenge Next Frontier Robotics accelerates this leap by backing exceptional teams with moonshot approaches that move beyond incremental optimizations to deliver true capability leaps.
Together, we are building a modular, interoperable European robotics ecosystem ready to adapt to the complexity of real-world tasks.
Recoding Medicine
European hospitals, biobanks, and research institutions hold health data of exceptional depth — imaging archives, longitudinal cohort studies, multi-omics repositories, clinical registries. The raw material for AI-driven breakthroughs in medicine is already here. It remains largely untapped.
The central obstacles are easy access, curation, and the lack of structured collaboration between data holders and AI talent. Researchers with the right methods do not have the right data; institutions with valuable datasets lack the capacity and the incentive to make them available. Existing initiatives close only part of the gap. What is missing is an instrument that makes the creation and curation of high-quality, low-barrier health datasets, AI tools, and benchmarks its central goal — and demonstrates their economic value. This is where Recoding Medicine comes in.