NOSTRADAMUS — Open Call 1 (farm decision-support software)
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NOSTRADAMUS
Free NOSTRADAMUS fit checkNOSTRADAMUS is a Horizon Europe project, coordinated by the ERATOSTHENES Centre of Excellence in Cyprus, that combines satellite and IoT data into decision tools for cereal farming. Its first open call funds five 12-month projects in which a company builds a digital application on top of the project’s data platform and demonstrates it at one of five pilot sites. The grant covers 100% of the project costs, but three conditions decide whether it is worth applying: the code you write has to be published as open source, nothing is paid in advance, and there are only five grants.
- Funding
- Up to €50,000 per project as a lump sum that must represent 100% of the project costs; a proposal that asks for more is ineligible. Five projects will be funded, with two more on a reserve list. The guide does not state the total budget of the call. There is no advance payment: the grant is paid in four tranches after each sprint has been reviewed and approved, 10% after month 2, 25% after month 4, 40% after month 10 and 25% after month 12, each within 30 days of your payment request. One passage in the guide gives 20% for the second tranche; the tables in the guide, the sub-grant agreement template and the FAQ all give 25%.
- Eligible costs
- Personnel, travel that the project requires, equipment depreciation, software, hardware and data, access to infrastructure, communication, and other goods and services, plus indirect costs at a flat 25% of direct costs. Subcontracting is not eligible. The budget has to include travel to the mandatory events at your demonstration site. Because the grant is a lump sum, the guide says there are no financial audits of your costs; checks focus on the technical work.
- Who can apply
- A company applying alone has to be a start-up or SME (fewer than 250 employees and turnover up to €50 million or balance sheet up to €43 million) or a small mid-cap (fewer than 499 employees and turnover up to €100 million or balance sheet up to €86 million), legally established in an EU Member State or a country associated to Horizon Europe. You can also apply as a consortium of two: the company leads and builds the solution, and the second partner is a research organisation or an organisation representing end users, such as a farmers’ association or cooperative, that tests and validates it. Natural persons, unincorporated start-ups, larger mid-caps and large companies cannot apply.
- The five topics
- You pick exactly one. Topic 1: sustainable crop production and optimisation of cereal-based systems under changing climate and soil conditions. Topic 2: nutrient and soil health management, with soil fertility indicators and precision fertilisation models. Topic 3: water efficiency and drought resilience, using the project’s Early Warning System and IoT soil moisture monitoring. Topic 4: predictive pest and disease management to reduce pesticide dependency. Topic 5: an application that combines at least two of the first four. Your topic fixes your demonstration country: Serbia or Slovenia for topics 1 and 2, Germany or Switzerland for topic 3, Cyprus or Germany for topic 4.
- What winning commits you to
- A 12-month programme in four sprints: two months of mandatory training (at least 10 hours of guided sessions), two months of design with local stakeholders, six months of development and validation, and two months of demonstration. The solution has to start at TRL 4 or higher and reach TRL 7 through a demonstration at your primary pilot site, with at least one on-site or hybrid event for a minimum of 10 participants and one training session for end users. Transfer to the second country in your pair is shown with data only, without travel. The source code developed in the project goes into a public repository under an OSI-approved open-source licence. A report is due within a week after each sprint, and the FAQ adds a monthly social media post, a podcast appearance, a demonstration video and a practice abstract.
- Timeline and how you submit
- Open since 29 September 2026, closing 2 December 2026 at 17:00 CET, through the F6S platform only. You submit an online form and a technical proposal of at most 20 pages on the official template, in English; pages beyond 20 are not evaluated. The guide’s timeline, which it says may change except for the deadline, shows the eligibility check by 31 December 2026, evaluation by 31 January 2027, online interviews by 26 February 2027, results by 31 March 2027 and onboarding in April 2027. Questions sent after 30 November 2026, 17:00 CET, may not be answered.
- Deadline
- 2 Dec 2026(closes 17:00 CET)— 59 days remaining
- Max grant
- €50,000
- Official source
- https://nostradamus-project.eu/open-call-1/ ↗
Is this the right call for you? 8 conditions decide it
- 01You would apply alone but are not a company. A sole applicant has to be a start-up, SME or small mid-cap; a research organisation or a farmers’ association can only join as the second partner of a company.
- 02Your company is a larger mid-cap (500 employees or more) or a large enterprise, an unincorporated start-up, or you would apply as a natural person. The guide says these proposals are rejected automatically.
- 03Your organisation is not legally established in an EU Member State or a country associated to Horizon Europe, or has no valid VAT number where national law requires one.
- 04Your organisation appears in more than one proposal, alone or as a partner. All proposals involving that organisation are then disqualified.
- 05You are a partner in the NOSTRADAMUS consortium or formally linked to one.
- 06Your solution starts below TRL 4, or the proposal asks for more than €50,000.
- 07Your proposal is not in English, not on the official template, incomplete, or not submitted through F6S before 2 December 2026, 17:00 CET.
- 08The product you propose is already receiving EU funding elsewhere for the same work. Earlier grants from the sister projects OpenAgri or AGRARIAN are allowed, but only if you can show that the new work is distinct.
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.
Do you have to open-source your software to get NOSTRADAMUS funding?
Yes, for the code you develop in the funded project. The technical specification requires that source code developed within the funded activities is made publicly available in a version-controlled repository, with documentation, under a recognised open-source licence; the FAQ specifies an OSI-approved licence and gives MIT and Apache 2.0 as examples. The rule is "as open as possible, as closed as necessary": pre-existing IP, personal data and confidential or security-sensitive information can be kept out, but you have to justify each restriction. The results remain your property. This is a requirement of the programme, not one of the eligibility criteria, so it will not get you rejected at the first check; it is what you commit to in the proposal and the sub-grant agreement.
Do you need a consortium for NOSTRADAMUS Open Call 1, or can a single SME apply?
A single company can apply on its own. It has to be a start-up, SME or small mid-cap. The alternative is a consortium of exactly two: the company leads and develops the solution, and the second partner is a research organisation or an organisation representing end users that tests and validates it. The €50,000 ceiling is per project, not per partner. Each organisation can take part in only one proposal.
What TRL do you need at the start of NOSTRADAMUS Open Call 1?
At least TRL 4, and this is an eligibility criterion: a solution that starts lower is rejected at the first check. By the end of the twelve months the technical specification expects TRL 7, a system prototype demonstrated in an operational environment at one of the NOSTRADAMUS pilot sites. The proposal template has a table in which you state and explain both levels, and the consistency of that TRL path is part of the Alignment score.
How much do you have to co-finance, and when is the money paid?
Nothing: the grant is a lump sum that covers 100% of the project costs. The catch is timing. There is no advance. You are paid in four tranches after each sprint is approved: 10% after month 2, 25% after month 4, 40% after month 10 and 25% after month 12. Subcontracting is not eligible, so the work is done by your own team, and the proposal template asks you to show that you can finance the work ahead of each payment.
Which demonstration site do you have to use?
It follows from your topic. Topics 1 and 2 are demonstrated in Serbia or Slovenia, topic 3 in Germany or Switzerland, topic 4 in Cyprus or Germany, and for topic 5 you choose one country from those of the topics you combine. You pick one primary site for the field work, a demonstration event with at least 10 participants and a training session. The other country in the pair is covered by a desk-based transferability assessment using the project’s data, with no travel. You do not have to be based in the country of your site, but the travel has to be in your budget.
Why can a top-scoring NOSTRADAMUS proposal still not be selected?
Because scoring is not the last step. Each of the four criteria (Alignment, Excellence, Impact, Implementation) needs 3 out of 5 and the total at least 12 out of 20. The top three proposals per topic are then invited to a 30-minute online interview, and missing it means rejection. In that interview the consortium’s representatives check whether your application is technically compatible with their platform, whether it can run at the demonstration site, and whether it competes with or conflicts with the IP of a consortium partner. The guide lists those, together with topic balance and unresolved ethical or data protection risks, as grounds for passing over the highest-scoring proposal in favour of the next one.
Verified against Nostradamus-OC1-Annex-1-Guidelines-for-Applicants-v_1.0.pdf (37 pages, version 1.0; the guide carries no printed date) with Annex 1.1 Technical Specification v1.0, the Annex 2 Technical Proposal template, the Annex 2.1 application form model, the Annex 3.1 Declaration of Honour, the Annex 5 Sub-grant Agreement template and the FAQ v1.0 of 29 September 2026, all as published on nostradamus-project.eu/open-call-1 and checked 1 October 2026. The guide gives 20% for the second payment in one passage (section 6.2.1) and 25% in its tables; the agreement template and the FAQ give 25%. The application form model prints 29 September 2026 as the deadline on its cover, which is the opening date; the guide gives 2 December 2026. The total call budget is not specified in the guide. No applicant info session was found at the time of writing, and the guide awards no points for matchmaking. Official source: https://nostradamus-project.eu/open-call-1/ ↗
Three checks come before any writing. The first is open source: the code you develop in the project has to be published, and only IP you already own can stay closed, with a justification. If the value of your company is the software you would write in these twelve months, and you cannot draw a clear line between what exists today and what the project adds, this grant costs you more than it pays. The second is cash: 10% arrives after month 2 and the largest tranche, 40%, only after month 10, while subcontracting is not allowed, so your own team carries the work for most of the year. The third is fit: there are five grants, by default one per topic, and after the written scoring the consortium’s own technical leads check in an interview whether your application really uses their Data Cubes and IoT Observatory, whether it works at the demonstration site, and whether it competes with a partner’s own IP. A farm app that would run just as well without the NOSTRADAMUS platform is not worth a week of writing here. If you pass all three, the free fit check below tells us which topic you belong in. Writing the application for one company is €2,450, exclusive of VAT: for a business customer elsewhere in the EU the reverse-charge mechanism applies once you supply a valid VAT number, and for a Dutch customer 21% is added. That price includes preparing you for the 30-minute interview if you are invited. It starts with an Application Plan at €450, excluding VAT, which counts in full toward the €2,450 if you sign within 30 days of receiving it. An application with a second partner is quoted before we start. No success fee.
Ready for NOSTRADAMUS? 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 NOSTRADAMUS application. No obligation, no sales call.
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