Block.IS is an acceleration programme that aims to build an open and collaborative cross-border, cross-sectoral innovation ecosystem that fosters the use of blockchain technology in three vital sectors for the European economy: agrifood, logistics and finance.

Block.IS accelerator supports SMEs and startups from the ICT sector all the way from ideation to commercialisation offering them tailored business and technical support as well as direct funding. To help founders build high-tech venture-backable enterprises, Block.IS offers €2.8 M of total funding through 2 open calls.

Block.IS aims to provide competitive and market-oriented European SMEs access to knowledge, technology, capital, and markets with the aim to place new products/services in the market targeting blockchain technology. The project has three main dimensions:

CONNECT & STIMULATE | CATALYZE | BOOST

BOOST represents an ambitious 3-phase acceleration programme that aims to support the market uptake and impact of the proposed innovation/solutions and it will be repeated for two batches:

INNOVATE > EXPERIMENT > COMMERCIALISE

In each phase, the selected candidates will be offered a set of tech & businesses services and financial support to develop their projects in close collaboration with relevant clusters networks, sector specialists and technology experts.

The selected 45 SMEs (37 from the Open Call and 8 as winners of Challenges) are first challenged to create sound business plans that are presented to an Innovation Event/Clusters-Innovators Assembly during the INNOVATE phase.

These are filtered and Top-23 per acceleration process (46 in total in both acceleration processes) move on to the EXPERIMENT phase where they receive all technical and business support and additional funding.

They will end up with a validated MVP prototype (TRL 4-6) and a business plan, which are used to evaluate/select the Top-10 applications per call (20 in total) towards COMMERCIALISE phase.

This structured holistic approach allows the best and most promising concepts to accelerate, achieve growth and market uptake, while all SMEs receive support and advice to improve their entrepreneurial skills and potential.