Two health calls that everyone calls a grant, and neither is

EIT Health takes options over your equity before a single euro moves. Almost every summary of these calls leaves that out.

Two EIT Health instruments close on the same day in September: the Transformative Healthcare Instrument, worth €300,000 to €500,000, and the Innovation Uptake Call, worth up to €650,000. Both are described almost everywhere — in listings, in aggregator summaries, and in the answers the major AI assistants give when you ask them directly — as non-dilutive grants. They are not, and the difference is the sort of thing a founder would want to know before spending three weeks on an application.

Every successful applicant to the Transformative Healthcare Instrument signs a Grant-to-Options-to-Equity Agreement, and signing it is a condition for the release of any funding at all. The investment is capped at the grant awarded. Conversion is mandatory at your next qualified financing round of €4,000,000 or more, at the lower of the current share price or the round price minus a 20% discount — the discount does not apply if that round closes within six months of signing. If no such round happens, conversion follows at the maturity date. You can settle everything beforehand with a buy-out payment of €2,000,000. The agreement attaches to the company rather than to the project, and where a holding structure applies, the parent signs.

The Innovation Uptake Call splits by the size of the company leading the consortium. A micro or small Commercialising Entity signs the same convertible structure, converting at a 20% discount, with a maturity date of 15 January 2030 in that call's template. A medium or large one signs a Revenue Sharing Agreement instead: no options and no equity, but a commitment to share revenue from the funded innovation once sales pass €10,000 within five years of project end, capped at the grant received plus a mark-up of at least 15%.

None of this makes the instruments bad. Capped, discounted convertible paper from a European health institute is not a punitive deal, and for a company that clears the €2 million prior-investment bar it can be considerably cheaper than the equity it would otherwise sell. The problem is being surprised by it. A cap table has a way of mattering two rounds later, and an option that converts at your next €4 million round is a term your existing investors will want to have seen in advance, not discovered in the grant agreement.

There is a smaller detail we could not reconcile, and it is worth flagging because it shows how thin the published layer is: the Transformative Healthcare Instrument's contract template sets the maturity date at 15 January 2029, while the official FAQ for the same call says 15 January 2030. One of the two is wrong. If the maturity date matters to your planning — and if no qualifying round is likely, it decides when conversion happens — that is a question to put to the programme rather than to a summary.

The wider lesson is not about EIT Health. It is that the terms which decide whether an instrument suits you are exactly the ones that fall out of a summary: what you sign, what it costs you later, and what happens if the thing you are counting on does not occur. Those live in the call documentation and the contract annexes, which is where an answer has to come from, and where far too few of the answers circulating actually come from.

From our practice · Eucade