Position paper — Horizon 2026–2027

Architecting a Leverage-Native Ecosystem

Why EU innovation funding still can't see the builder working alone — and four changes that would fix it.

The EU funds innovation. It does not fund the person who needs no institution around them to build it.

One in three startups founded in 2024 had a single founder — and they received under 15% of the capital raised. That gap is not a market outcome. It's a structural bias public policy is currently widening, not closing.

This is a code-first policy framework, written and maintained in the open, proposing four concrete changes so EU public capital can finally reach the builders it's meant to serve.

30% of all startups founded in 2024 had a single founder Carta, 2025

14.7% of available capital went to those solo founders Carta, 2025

2.7% overall success rate of the EU's flagship EIC Accelerator EISMEA / Rasph, 2025

Four structural changes

Decouple eligibility from headcount. Measure output per capita, not employees hired.
Eliminate the mandatory consortium clause for early-stage solo applicants. Fund the builder, not the bureaucratic structure around them.
Replace process-based compliance with milestone-driven, output-verified disbursement.
Deploy code-first micro-grants (€50k–€100k), evaluated on demonstrated execution rather than speculative prose.

The full framework, the evidence behind it, and the list of everyone who's co-signed it all live in one place — a GitHub repository, kept current in the open.

Read the framework Add your name — how to sign via pull request