I3FLOAT — 1st Open Call (floating offshore wind)
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I3FLOAT
Free I3FLOAT fit checkI3FLOAT is an Interregional Innovation Investments project building a southern interregional value chain for floating offshore wind. Its first open call funds SMEs that solve a concrete challenge in that sector, from floating substructures, moorings and dynamic cables to installation and operations. The grant is a lump sum with no own contribution, but eligibility turns on something most applicants check last: where your company is established.
- Funding
- Up to €60,000 per SME as a lump sum paid against deliverables. The submission toolkit asks for no co-financing: the word does not appear anywhere in its 35 pages. Payment comes in three steps: 30% after contract signature, 30% halfway after a validated progress report and meeting, and 40% after the final report and meeting. Two SMEs from two different eligible regions can apply together for up to €120,000. Subcontracting is capped at 30% of the budget and travel at 15% of each applicant’s budget.
- Who can apply
- SMEs under the European SME definition, with a completed SME self-assessment and a financial capacity self-assessment. Your headquarters or an affiliated entity must be in a region represented in the I3FLOAT consortium, or you must have been a member of one of its partner clusters by June 2026, or you must be established in a Less Developed Region or an outermost or overseas region. Companies with an ownership connection to an I3FLOAT partner cannot apply. One application per SME: if you appear in more than one, only the last one submitted counts.
- Where you must be established
- All regions of Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy and Poland. In France: Sud-PACA, Occitanie, Bretagne and Île-de-France. In Spain: Andalusia, the Basque Country, the Canary Islands, Cantabria, Madrid and Navarra. Also Primorje-Gorski Kotar in Croatia, Santarém in Portugal and Nitra in Slovakia. On top of that, every Less Developed Region listed in Annex 4 of the toolkit, which brings in large parts of Czechia, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Romania and Slovakia, among others, plus the outermost and overseas regions. Mainland Netherlands and Germany do not appear anywhere on the list. Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba and Sint Eustatius do.
- Scope and maturity
- The call has 11 Specific Challenges, each set by an industry challenge owner: Saitec, Eolink, EnerOcean, EDF Power Solutions, Iberdrola, Navantia Seanergies, Qair, Aventa, CoreMarine, Geodis and Tetrace. Next to those are 44 Open Challenges across seven areas. It funds one proposal per Specific Challenge and up to 10 on the Open Challenges, so up to 21 projects. The expected current TRL is 6 to 8, and a project runs for at most 12 months.
- Programme and selection
- Total budget €2.52 million. Deadline 10 November 2026 at 17:00 CEST, submitted through the GoodGrants platform, in English only: a proposal partly or fully in another language is not eligible. The toolkit describes a written evaluation with no pitch or interview stage. Three evaluators score each proposal out of 110, their average counts, and the threshold is 70. For a Specific Challenge, the challenge owner is one of those three evaluators. Two SMEs from two different regions earn 5 bonus points, and taking part from a Less Developed Region earns 5. On a tie, Impact outranks Excellence, which outranks Implementation. Pôle Mer Méditerranée runs an information webinar on 15 September 2026 from 10:00; you sign up through its Weezevent page.
- Deadline
- 10 Nov 2026— 57 days remaining
- Max grant
- €60,000
- Official source
- https://claner.es/i3float/open-calls/ ↗
Is this the right call for you? 7 conditions decide it
- 01Your company is not established, through its headquarters or an affiliated entity, in one of the eligible regions; you were not a member of an I3FLOAT partner cluster by June 2026; and you are not established in a Less Developed, outermost or overseas region. Mainland Netherlands and Germany are not on the list.
- 02Your company is not an SME under the European definition, or it cannot pass the financial capacity self-assessment.
- 03Your solution does not answer one of the 11 Specific Challenges or 44 Open Challenges in floating offshore wind.
- 04Your application addresses more than one challenge. The toolkit declares such an application not eligible: pick one Specific or one Open Challenge.
- 05Your project needs more than 12 months. The toolkit sets that maximum in its funding terms rather than in the eligibility list, but a plan that does not fit 12 months cannot be funded as written.
- 06Your company has an ownership connection with one of the I3FLOAT consortium partners.
- 07Your application is not written entirely in English.
Not a match on one of these? Then this call is not the one, which says nothing about the next. Calls open continuously: the free Match Report tells you which call does fit, or tells you plainly that none of them do, and our weekly digest tells you when a call you can enter opens.
Can a company from the Netherlands or Germany apply to I3FLOAT?
Not from the mainland on its own. The toolkit’s list of eligible regions names no region in mainland Netherlands or Germany, neither among the consortium regions nor among the Less Developed, outermost or overseas regions. Two routes remain: an affiliated entity in an eligible region, or membership of one of the project’s partner clusters, and that membership had to exist by June 2026. The Dutch Caribbean islands Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba and Sint Eustatius are on the overseas list.
Do you need a consortium for I3FLOAT, or can a single SME apply?
A single SME can apply on its own. An application can also bring two SMEs, from two different eligible regions and never more than two. The pair can receive up to €120,000, €60,000 each, and earns 5 bonus points for cross-regional collaboration. Two SMEs from the same region do not earn those points. Payments go to each SME separately.
What TRL do you need at the start of I3FLOAT?
The toolkit expects a current TRL of 6 to 8 for projects funded under the scheme. That expectation sits in the scope of the call, not in its list of eligibility criteria, so it is not a formal admission check. It sets no separate target level, and a project runs for at most 12 months. A solution that is still at laboratory stage sits below the range the call is written for.
How much of the budget do you have to co-finance yourself?
Nothing. Funding is a lump sum paid against deliverables, and the word co-financing does not appear in the 35-page toolkit. You do not report invoices or timesheets, but you keep the supporting records for five years after the final payment. The money arrives in three steps, 30% after signature, 30% halfway and 40% at the end, so you pre-finance part of the work.
Why do I3FLOAT applications fail even above the threshold?
Because the call funds one proposal per Specific Challenge. Scoring 70 out of 110 makes a proposal fundable, but if a second proposal for the same challenge scores higher, only that one is funded. The challenge owner is one of the three evaluators for a Specific Challenge, so the proposal that wins is usually the one written around that owner’s problem, not the one with the most general case for its technology. The toolkit describes no pitch or interview stage to recover in: the evaluation is written.
Verified against I3FLOAT_1st-Open-Call-Submission-toolkit.pdf (35 pages, published September 2026, retrieved 13 September 2026), region lists from Annex 4. Webinar details from the registration page of organiser Pôle Mer Méditerranée (my.weezevent.com/webinar-i3float), checked 13 September 2026; the webinar had not yet taken place at the time of writing. Official source: https://claner.es/i3float/open-calls/ ↗
We verified this call line by line against its official submission toolkit. The first thing we check is not your technology but your address. A company in mainland Netherlands or Germany, without an affiliated entity in an eligible region and without partner-cluster membership from before June 2026, cannot apply, however strong the project. The second check is fit with one challenge. The call funds a single proposal per Specific Challenge, and the challenge owner helps score it, so a general floating wind pitch loses to a proposal written around that owner’s actual problem. If your solution only loosely touches the sector, or your current TRL is below 6, this call is not worth a week of writing. If you pass both checks, the intake below tells us within 2 working days which challenge you fit.
Ready for I3FLOAT? Starting is free.
One structured intake, specific to this call. We confirm your fit, quote a fixed price, and only then decide together whether we write your I3FLOAT application. No obligation, no sales call.
Prefer your own language? Start the intake in Dutch, French, German, Spanish or Portuguese — we assess in your language and write the application in English.
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Cascade calls are not published in one place. Each consortium announces on its own project website, and aggregators run weeks behind. We monitor the sources directly and send what we find, with our own reading of who it actually fits. No pitch, and one reply takes you off the list, the same day.