The European Commission’s new Apply AI Strategy has officially recognised the EIT AI Community’s AI Founders Club as a model initiative for building a stronger, more connected landscape for AI entrepreneurship across Europe
The AI Founders Club is designed to empower the next generation of innovators by linking early-stage founders with key resources. These resources include mentorship and investment opportunities as well as international exposure.
Building a home for European AI Founders
As part of the broader EIT Community, the AI Founders Club is a unique peer-to-peer and investor-ready programme for Europe’s most promising early-stage AI startups.
It focuses on high-risk, high-reward ideas capable of reshaping industries and advancing the region’s digital leadership.
Through a structured support model, founders get access to expert mentors, investors, and international networks, including the EIT Silicon Valley Hub under the EIT Global Outreach programme. This helps entrepreneurs refine their business models, secure funding, and scale their ventures responsibly within Europe’s trusted AI ecosystem.
By fostering collaboration across borders, the AI Founders Club is helping Europe establish itself as a global hub for AI talent, research, and investment, while also ensuring that growth aligns with EU values of transparency, inclusivity, and ethical innovation.
A bigger ecosystem for AI growth
The AI Founders Club acts as a stepping stone within a broader ecosystem established by the EIT AI Community to support every stage of AI adoption and development. Alongside the Club, many complementary programmes and tools ensure that innovation remains both competitive and compliant.
The AI Challenge connects organisations with AI startups that can address their most essential needs, allowing faster adoption of trustworthy technologies. Meanwhile, platforms such as SkillSync strengthen Europe’s AI skills pipeline by linking training opportunities with industry demand.
Other strategic resources help businesses and public institutions assess their readiness and compliance with emerging EU AI regulations. Together, these initiatives create an end-to-end framework that supports individuals, startups, corporations, and policymakers in advancing responsible AI.
Success from the pilot edition
The 2025 pilot edition of the AI Founders Club supported six new startups, already showing measurable results across diverse sectors.
- Artiwise uses AI to transform unstructured customer feedback into actionable business insights.
- Bit&R introduces young learners to coding by transitioning them from visual programming blocks to full web development languages through interactive games.
- Istya combines predictive AI and air-quality intelligence to reduce building energy consumption by up to 30% while improving indoor well-being.
- Pandatron AI enhances organisational change management with AI-powered coaching that accelerates transformation.
- Thoughtful Oasis delivers interpretable and auditable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems through ontological vector databases, ensuring transparency in AI search.
- WeavAir offers Sustainability-as-a-Service, providing direct measurement and verification of greenhouse gas emissions to support ESG goals.
Europe’s trusted AI future
With recognition from the European Commission, the AI Founders Club stands as a key component in the EU’s mission to build a competitive, inclusive and ethically grounded AI economy.
Following its successful pilot, the programme will expand in 2026 to reach more founders, deepen its international partnerships, and further strengthen Europe’s leadership in trustworthy AI.
