Grant finder for EU calls: Horizon Europe, national schemes, one search

On 24 September 2026 Victano held 664 calls from the EU Funding & Tenders portal: 165 open for applications and 270 announced but not yet open. No national grant scheme is among its 18 sources.

"Grant finder" is what people type when they know money exists and do not know which door it is behind. There are two kinds of door, run by different people, and no official service searches both.

Where are EU calls published?

The EU's own programmes publish their calls for proposals on the Funding & Tenders Portal, run by the European Commission. Horizon Europe is the largest of them. The Commission describes it in one sentence, "Horizon Europe is the EU's key funding programme for research and innovation", and puts the indicative amount for 2021 to 2027 at EUR 93.5 billion. Its calls are set out in work programmes, and the portal is where a call opens, takes submissions and closes.

The same portal carries the other directly managed programmes: Digital Europe, LIFE, Erasmus+, the Single Market Programme, the European Defence Fund and more. One account, one search form, one deadline format.

What the portal does not carry is the money the EU hands to member states to distribute. Cohesion funds, rural development and the recovery plans are spent through national and regional managing authorities, and their calls appear on those authorities' sites, in the national language, on their own schedules.

Where are national schemes published?

Every country runs its own finder. Three official and free examples: the UK's Find a grant service, UK Research and Innovation's list at ukri.org/opportunity, and Germany's federal Förderdatenbank, which indexes federal, state and EU-backed schemes for German companies.

What should a grant search return?

A useful result answers five questions before you open the call document:

1. Who funds it, and under which programme.
2. What it funds: the topic, and the type of action (research, innovation, coordination).
3. Who may apply: company size, country, consortium rules.
4. When: the opening date, the deadline, and whether it has one stage or two.
5. How much: the topic budget, which is on the call's topic page.

A finder that returns a title and a link has done the easy part. The rest is in the call text, and reading it for each result is where an afternoon goes.

What does an assistant do with the EU half?

We recorded one real run on 23 September 2026. An illustrative company (Baltijos IT Paslaugos UAB, invented: a 40-person software firm in Vilnius with cybersecurity work) asked whether there is EU money for an AI service that detects cyber threats for small municipalities and SMEs.

The run stops where the data stops. The shortlist hands over each call's topic page for the budget, eligible countries and consortium rules, because those are written on the page and not in the call record. The whole run, with every tool call and the full deliverable, is on the grant match job page.

What does Victano not hold?

Any national grant scheme. There is no Find a grant, no UKRI, no Förderdatenbank and no national managing authority in the corpus today, and /coverage will show it the day one is added. For the national half, the finders above are the source. Victano also does not state a budget it did not read, and it does not write the proposal.

For the contract side of public money, the bid/no-bid checklist applies the same kind of reading to tenders.

Questions people ask

Is Horizon Europe only for universities? No. Companies apply on their own to the European Innovation Council instruments and as consortium partners across the pillars. Each call states who is eligible, and that line is worth reading before the topic.

Can a grant finder cover both EU and national calls? Only by reading both layers. The EU portal and the national finders are separate systems with separate data, and no official service merges them. Victano covers the EU portal; the national layer is a search you still run yourself.

How often do new EU calls open? On a schedule set by each programme's work programme, so most topics have one or two opening dates a year. On 24 September 2026, 270 calls were announced but not yet open, which is the list to watch when a deadline would be too tight.