FundingBox Accelerator [FBA] is a polish non-profit private entity supporting, promoting and launching technological & innovative ‘scale-ups’ (start-ups and tech SMEs) initiatives in Europe. FBA was created, in 2012, as the innovation and business accelerator arm of ‘The Funding Box Group’. It drives innovation by bringing its understanding of economic and industrial challenges as well as its global connections to the smart ecosystems around entrepreneurship. FundingBox Platform, with over 16.500 (October 2018) innovators, makers, and entrepreneurs registered, which facilitates cross-border interactions across ecosystems by building communities around innovative technologies. Through its proprietary acceleration program (IMPACT POLAND), it provides ‘scale-ups’ with resources to swiftly move from product concept to product demonstrator.
In order to support ‘scale-ups’ in finding additional support to fund their innovative projects, FBA started to participate in EU projects including Cascade Funding or Financial Support to Third parties. Today, FBA is the European Leader in managing Financial Support to Third Parties, having distributed up to 62M€ by participating in 14 projects including FSTP since 2014. FBA is the coordinator of 6 of them and 2 of them have already finalized with ‘Excellent Progress’ by the European Commission.
FBA is also an active partner in the Digital Innovation Hubs [DIH] strategy promoted by EC in April 2016, both at the European and national levels. Currently, FBA is coordinating the ‘I4MS- Going to Market Alliance’ initiative, the Coordination and Support Action which will support the DIHs funded under I4MS initiative for digital transformation of manufacturing SMEs and Mid-Caps at European Level. FBA is also part of the ‘HPC4 Poland RDIH’, an I4MS Regional Hub aimed to support the take-up of High-Performance Computer cloud-based modeling and simulations, for the Polish manufacturing sector. FBA is also present in the EC Working Group “Implementing the Digitising European Industry actions”.
FBA has an active presence in main EU Ecosystems supporting the digitization of Manufacturing SMEs, such as ICT Innovation for Manufacturing SMEs [I4MS] and Smart Anything Everywhere [SAE] Initiative, EuRobotics, EU Clusters, FIWARE and ECSO (Cybersecurity PPP). The strategic positioning of FBA in the European ecosystem is due to the synergies and intensive interchange of knowledge and experiences by belonging to ‘The Funding Box Group’. A group that integrates enterprises from Denmark, Spain, and Poland, fostering the mainstreaming and interchange of innovative initiatives between countries.