EIC Tech Report 2026: 25 Deeptech Signals Shaping AI, Climate Tech, Biotech and Healthcare
Published on 30 March 2026, the European Innovation Council (EIC) Tech Report 2026 sets out to spot promising technologies before they become established markets. The horizon-scanning report draws on more than 13,380 proposals submitted between Q2 2021 and Q1 2025 and narrows them down to 25 emerging technology signals with early indications of scaling potential. Read together, those signals point to a clear shift: some of the most important deeptech advances are now happening not only in software, but in materials, industrial systems, biological manufacturing and clinical hardware.
Where the next deeptech wave is really being built
Read beyond the headline numbers and a clearer pattern appears: much of this activity is infrastructure-led.
That becomes clear in the digital chapter, where the EIC highlights 2D materials for advanced memory, MXene manufacturing, quantum repeaters, Zero Trust AI architectures, and in-space servicing robotics.
What stands out here is the emphasis on memory, materials and system resilience, rather than on foundation models. Two-dimensional materials such as molybdenum disulphide and hexagonal boron nitride are being explored for low-power memory and neuromorphic architectures, while quantum repeaters and secure AI infrastructures sit in the same cluster of strategic building blocks. The report’s digital chapter is less about consumer-facing AI and more about the underlying hardware and network layers on which future systems will depend.
That wider shift is already visible in the market. Graphenea works on graphene materials, while IQM Quantum Computers is one of the better-known European companies building quantum hardware. They are not cited in the report, but they do help show how value is accumulating around the deep infrastructure layer.
AI’s next battleground: trust at the system level
Another fresh signal is the report’s focus on Embedded Zero Trust Architectures for distributed and federated AI systems.
The broader AI discussion has been dominated by scale: bigger models, larger data centres, faster chips. The EIC gives equal weight to trust, attestation and secure orchestration. Its signal on Embedded Zero Trust Architectures argues that distributed AI systems will need security built in at semiconductor, system and orchestration level, especially when sensitive data cannot be centralised.
That matters well beyond public-sector procurement or compliance. If AI is to be used across healthcare, manufacturing and public infrastructure, then secure model execution and verifiable data handling stop being technical extras. They become part of the product.
Climate tech moves from products to systems
The clean-tech chapter contains some of the most underreported signals in the document.
Rather than focusing on batteries or solar, the EIC highlights microbial biomining, low-energy desalination, electrochemical water purification, thermoelectric materials, and passive cooling combined with gravity-based storage in buildings.
What stands out here is how strongly the innovation lens has moved from “green products” to resource systems.
Take microbial biomining. The report highlights the use of microorganisms to recover secondary metals and support bioremediation. Elsewhere in the chapter, it points to low-energy desalination, electrochemical water treatment, thermoelectric materials and passive cooling combined with gravity-based energy storage in buildings. Taken together, these are not isolated climate technologies. They are attempts to redesign how industry deals with heat, water, waste and materials.
That is a useful corrective to the way climate tech is often discussed. In this report, the strongest signals sit closer to industrial infrastructure than to consumer sustainability.
Biology turns into an engineering platform
The biotech chapter may be the most commercially surprising part of the report.
Among the 25 signals are mycelium-based whole-food production, perennial crops, microbiome therapeutics, computational protein design, and automated manufacturing for cell therapies.
The strongest pattern here is that biology is being treated less as a narrow life-sciences category and more as an engineering platform.
Mycelium-based fermentation, perennial crops, microbiome therapeutics, computational protein design and automated manufacturing for CAR cell therapies all appear in the same chapter. That matters because it brings food, therapeutics and industrial biotech into one frame: biology as something that can be designed, optimised and scaled.
Some of that shift is already visible in the market. Infinite Roots, formerly Mushlabs, is building food products around mycelium fermentation, while Cradle develops software for protein design. Again, they are not named in the report, but they are relevant examples of the commercial activity around the signals the EIC has highlighted.
The new health frontier is physical, portable and precise
The health signals deserve particular attention because they move beyond digital health dashboards into intervention technologies.
The EIC points to biohybrid microrobots, robotic surgical workflows, non-invasive brain interfaces, and portable ultra-low field MRI systems.
The MRI signal is especially striking because it points to imaging outside the traditional hospital setup. Portable, ultra-low field magnetic resonance imaging is one of the clearest examples in the report of advanced medical hardware moving closer to the point of care.
Hyperfine, which markets a portable MRI system, offers one visible example of that direction. The same chapter also points to brain interfaces and surgical robotics, reinforcing the idea that some of the most important healthcare advances are happening in devices and intervention tools rather than in software dashboards.
The key takeaway
The report’s methodology is worth noticing too. From 411 signals identified in the first stage, expert panels narrowed the field to 25. That process does not produce a definitive map of the future, and the report is explicit that the list is a curated snapshot rather than a ranking or prediction. It does, however, show where several lines of innovation are converging at once: AI with hardware, biology with automation, climate with industrial systems, and healthcare with robotics.
Several of the startups and companies referenced here are already translating those signals into real products and platforms. MoveTheNeedle.news will publish follow-up articles next week on a selection of these startups, looking more closely at how they are building in areas such as quantum hardware, protein design, portable imaging and industrial climate systems.
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