Support the creation and consolidation of innovative startups - Calabria Region

The purpose of this opportunity is to support innovative startups from idea generation to scale-up. This is done through a program offering grants for either starting or consolidating businesses. There are two main focuses:

• Initial Investments: This helps startups launch and bring their products or services to market.
• Consolidation: This aims to expand technological capabilities, allowing startups to develop new, highly innovative products or services.

Projects must focus on producing goods and services with significant technological and innovative content. They should address the early stages of a startup's lifecycle, such as:

• Product/service validation
• Business model validation
• Building a user/customer base

Additionally, projects can involve technical and market validation, competitive positioning, and the consolidation and growth of innovative startups. 

Eligible expenses include:

• Costs for new factory equipment and instrumentation, such as plants, machinery, and technological or technical-scientific equipment necessary for the project.
• Installation costs, hardware, software, and cloud computing services.
• Consultancy services that are non-continuative and directly functional to the investment project, such as technological consultancy, project design, development, and certification.
• Marketing expenses like customer profiling, market testing, and web domain purchases.
• Personnel costs up to 20% of direct costs.
• General expenses calculated at a maximum of 15% of direct costs.
• Costs for materials and supplies directly attributable to the project, software licenses, and cloud services.

• Total budget for the grant: 15,000,000€
• Co-financing percentage: Up to 75%
• Minimum funding per company: 70.000€
• Maximum funding per company: 400.000€

Eligibility criteria include:

• Beneficaries must have less of 5 years of activity
• Beneficiaries must have economic-financial capacity related to the project.
• Ability to contract with the public administration without sanctions preventing such contracts.
• Having a local unit in the regional territory, committing to this by the first payment if not already established.
• No serious violations regarding the payment of social security contributions, or possession of certification of credits owed by the Region of Calabria covering these contributions.