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EIT Manufacturing liquidation: what it means for female-run startups in Europe

The EU just left 100+ startups waiting for money they were already promised. Not rejected. Not declined. Promised. And now there is a liquidator involved, a fraud investigation ongoing, and the CEO of the collapsed organisation is already in Brussels, hat in hand, asking for money to set up a new legal entity.

I need you to sit with that for a moment. Because if you are a female founder in Europe who has ever applied for an EU grant, written a 40-page funding proposal, or spent weekends on compliance paperwork, this story is about you too.

TL;DR: EIT Manufacturing liquidation

EIT Manufacturing (EITM), an EU-backed body distributing grants of up to €500,000 to manufacturing startups, filed for liquidation on March 25, 2026, after the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) found serious irregularities and the EIT froze payments. Over 200 companies, many of them SMEs and bootstrapped startups, are now waiting for €15 million in promised funding that may never arrive. One Maltese startup spent €40,000 of its own money on a project that EITM greenlit months after payments were already frozen. This is not a one-off scandal.

What Actually Happened: The EIT Manufacturing Collapse Timeline

Let’s break it down, because the sequence matters.

EIT Manufacturing was founded in 2019 as one of nine Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) under the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. Its Accelerate programme handed out grants from €50,000 to €500,000 to manufacturing startups across Europe. Real money, real recipients, real projects.

In 2024, OLAF, the EU Anti-Fraud Office, launched an investigation into EITM’s activities between 2020 and 2022. The EIT responded by freezing all payments to EITM. From June 2024 onwards, not a single euro moved from the EIT to the organisation that was supposed to pass it on to startups.

EITM said the OLAF findings were about mismanagement of documentation, not mishandling of funds. The EIT called them “serious irregularities and breaches of obligations.” The legal distinction matters to lawyers. It means nothing to a founder staring at an empty bank account.

In October 2025, the EIT allocated €163 million to EITM in principle. Founders exhaled. Then, in December 2025, a second OLAF report landed, finding that irregularities went beyond what the first report identified. The EIT refused to issue a letter confirming the €163 million allocation, which EITM needed to secure a bridging bank loan. No letter meant no loan. No loan meant no runway.

On March 25, 2026, EITM filed for liquidation. Outstanding obligations: €15 million. Affected beneficiaries: over 200. Public clarity: essentially zero. According to Sifted’s coverage of the collapse, EITM’s own website still showed an active anti-fraud reporting email address at the time of liquidation. You could, in theory, have reported suspected fraud to EITM while EITM itself was under a fraud investigation.

And here is the piece that stopped me cold. EITM CEO Caroline Viarouge announced, after filing for liquidation and amid an active fraud investigation, that the organisation is exploring setting up a new legal entity to continue supporting manufacturing innovation, and returning to Brussels to ask for more public funding.

According to Science|Business reporting on EITM’s plans, the argument is that the new entity would have reformed governance, new leadership, and no connection to the irregularities of 2020 to 2022.

The 200 companies waiting for €15 million do not get a new legal entity. They get a liquidator.

Why This Hits Female Founders Harder

Female entrepreneurs in Europe are disproportionately dependent on non-dilutive public funding. The reason is structural, not personal.

According to EU data on VC funding gaps, roughly 2% of European venture capital goes to all-female founding teams. For mixed teams, the figure is around 10%. The rest goes to male-led startups. This is not a secret. This is the funding backdrop against which female founders in the EU make every financial decision.

When traditional VC routes are effectively closed to you by structural bias, EU grants start to look less like a nice-to-have and more like the only available option for non-dilutive capital. That changes the risk calculus completely.

I have been running Fe/male Switch, a startup game and community for women entering entrepreneurship, for several years. I hear from founders across Europe every week. The pattern I see repeatedly is this: a female founder with a real product, a working prototype, and a legitimate market, who turns down angel investment or delays equity rounds because an EU grant is “coming.” That grant then becomes the budget cornerstone, and everything else gets built around it.

When that grant does not arrive, or arrives six months late, or evaporates because the intermediate body filed for liquidation, the damage lands harder on bootstrapped female founders than it does on startups with multiple capital sources. Bootstrapping means your cash cushion is thin. It means every €40,000 mistake is existential.

This is also why I wrote about EU-funded programmes that claim to support female entrepreneurs but route one third of each startup’s grant to pre-selected consultants the founder never agreed to work with, while asking other female founders to deliver free workshops. The structural dysfunction runs from the top all the way down to the programmes specifically designed to help us.

The Real Human Cost: A Maltese Startup, €40,000, and People Who Were Going to Be Hired

David Sciberras, co-founder of ELM Fabrication Ltd in Malta, built a 2m x 2m x 6m 3D printer capable of printing boats and furniture from recycled plastic. EITM committed €217,000 to the project, 70% of total costs, through its Accelerate programme.

EITM gave ELM the green light to start the project in January 2025.

The signed grant agreement never arrived.

In April 2025, EITM called an emergency meeting and told ELM to stop spending. At that point, ELM had already committed €40,000 of its own capital. EITM requested a cost breakdown and pledged to reimburse €28,000 in the first or second quarter of 2026. That promise was made while EITM had been receiving zero funding from the EIT for seven consecutive months.

Let me repeat that. Seven months of frozen payments, and EITM was still greenlighting new project starts and making promises about future reimbursements.

David Sciberras told WhosWho.mt: “Many European startups in our cohort had to file for bankruptcy after counting on large sums of money that never arrived.”

ELM survived because Sciberras and co-founder Nicholas Borg Calleja ran an extremely lean operation. No salaries. No unnecessary hires. They still lost the people they were planning to bring on. And they found out the money was not coming the same way everyone else did: through the press.

I know how this feels, because I have come close to something similar with CADChain. CADChain is my deep-tech startup that secures intellectual property for CAD and 3D models using blockchain. We applied for multiple grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands, and in Malta. Some we received. Some took so long to arrive that we had already pivoted the project. Some consumed more in compliance time than they delivered in cash.

The hidden cost nobody talks about is the compliance load. I wrote about this in my Sifted piece on EU funding nightmares: approximately 50% of activity in EU-funded projects goes towards writing reports. ELM did not even reach the reporting stage. They were preparing compliance cost breakdowns on request while EITM was quietly heading towards bankruptcy.

That is not an administrative oversight. That is a governance failure with a human cost attached to it.

The Hidden Structural Problem Every Bootstrapper Needs to Understand

Here is the diagnosis I keep arriving at, no matter which corner of the EU funding ecosystem I look at.

The organisations running EU-funded programmes are evaluated on process compliance, not founder outcomes. Reports filed. Events held. Funds disbursed. Governance structures in place. That is what gets measured.

Nobody at the EIT level is evaluated on whether ELM Fabrication’s 3D printer made it to market. Nobody is measured on whether the female founder who turned down an investor because her EU grant was “confirmed” actually got funded. The incentive structure rewards documentation and penalises disruption, which means the path of least resistance is always to protect the institution.

When OLAF flagged irregularities at EITM, the EIT froze payments. From a compliance standpoint, that is the correct response. From a founder standpoint, it meant 200 companies lost access to money they were already promised, with no appeal mechanism, no alternative source, and no timeline for resolution.

Jan Palmowski, secretary general of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, told Times Higher Education that the collapse raised serious questions about the EIT model itself. “Such a KIC defaulting on its obligations obviously can never happen again, and it should never have happened. And that really raises the question whether the complex structure of the EIT is fit for purpose.”

The complex structure is the point. Long funding chains, from the EU Commission to the EIT to the KIC to the cascade grant recipient, create multiple layers where accountability gets diluted. At each layer, the institution has more power than the founder. At the end of the chain, where you are, the power is essentially zero.

This same structural pattern shows up in the Epic-X Acceleration Programme I covered on Mean CEO, where pre-selected consultants receiving €1,000 per hour were baked into the grant structure before a single founder applied. The founder had no say in who got one third of her own grant money.

The system protects itself at every layer. The people paying the price are always the ones who built something real.

EU Funding in 2026: What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Here is the budget context, because the numbers are genuinely alarming.

Funding element	Amount	Status
EIT total allocation (October 2025)	€1 billion	Distributed across 9 KICs
EITM requested allocation	€163 million	Never confirmed in writing
EITM outstanding obligations	€15 million	Owed to 200+ beneficiaries
EIT budget post-2027	Unknown	Not named in proposed 2028-2034 EU budget
EIC/Innovation ecosystems proposed	€38 billion	May cover KIC functions; unconfirmed
Female founders share of EU VC	~2%	Structural baseline (EIB data)

The EIT received €1 billion in October 2025 and could not provide a letter confirming €163 million was available for EITM. The letter, not new money, a letter, would have allowed EITM to secure a bank loan to keep operating.

Also worth noting: in the proposed EU budget for 2028 to 2034, the EIT is not mentioned by name at all. The eight remaining KICs are now operating under a parent body whose oversight model has been publicly questioned, whose name appears alongside the word “fraud” in every major research publication this week, and whose next multi-year budget allocation is not yet confirmed.

If you are building a three-year runway on the assumption that KIC-funded programmes will still exist and pay out in 2027 and beyond, you are building on uncertain ground.

The Checklist: What to Do Before You Commit to Any EU Grant

I still apply for EU grants. I applied for them with CADChain. I applied with Fe/male Switch. For some programmes, the non-dilutive capital is genuinely worth the cost of the application. But the checklist I use now looks completely different from the one I used in 2021.

Here is what I check before committing a single hour of founder time to an EU grant application.

Who actually holds the money? Map the full chain from the EU Commission down to your grant agreement. Is there an intermediate body between you and the source of funds? Is that body a KIC, a consortium, an accelerator programme? If yes, what happens to your payment if that intermediate body faces an investigation? Get the answer in writing before you apply.

Is there a signed grant agreement before any spending starts? ELM’s €40,000 loss came directly from starting project activities on a verbal green light before the contract was signed. No email, no promise, no verbal commitment from a programme officer replaces a signed grant agreement with a payment schedule attached. This is non-negotiable.

What triggers each payment tranche? The standard EU structure is roughly 40% upfront, 40% at midterm, 20% on final report. Know exactly what triggers each release, who has final sign-off authority, and what happens if the funding body is unable to process the payment at any stage.

Is this grant your only capital source for the period? If yes, keep a parallel funding track open at all times. A grant from a multi-layer consortium is a promise, not a runway. If that promise evaporates, you need an alternative that does not require you to restart a six-month application cycle from scratch.

What is the compliance cost in time, not just money? Before you apply, estimate the reporting hours honestly. If 50% of your project activities will go to compliance, factor that into your cost-of-grant calculation. For a €50,000 grant that consumes 200 hours of founder time at any reasonable hourly rate, the economics may not be what they appear.

Has this programme or its parent body had any recent investigations, audits, or governance changes? Search the programme name plus “OLAF,” “audit,” “investigation,” and “irregularities” before you apply. This information is public. You should know it before you commit.

If a programme asks you to contribute expertise or content for free, ask for the full budget breakdown first. If they have public money for coordination and dissemination but cannot pay you as a contributor, that tells you everything about where their priorities sit. I wrote this rule from personal experience. Fe/male Switch has been approached more than once by EU-funded programmes wanting free workshop content from me while paying pre-selected consultants four figures per hour from the same grant budget.

What Good EU Funding Infrastructure for Female Founders Would Look Like

The EITM collapse was not caused by the founders. It was caused by governance failures in 2020 to 2022, under previous leadership, in a model that concentrates too much financial control in too few institutions with too little direct accountability to the people those institutions claim to serve.

Viarouge herself said it plainly: the KICs need a stable, transparent, and simplified framework with clear governance. She is right. And that framework does not currently exist.

Here is what it would need to include.

Direct relationships between the funding authority and the startup beneficiary, with consortium bodies in a coordination role rather than a gatekeeping role. A legally mandated contingency clause in every grant agreement explaining what happens to promised payments if the intermediate body faces investigation or insolvency. A dedicated recovery mechanism for founders caught in institutional disputes they had no part in creating. And performance metrics for KICs that measure whether the companies they backed built something, hired people, and grew revenue, not just whether the reports were filed on time.

Also, and this should not need saying but apparently does: no new legal entity created from the wreckage of an organisation under active fraud investigation should be eligible for new public funding until every outstanding obligation from the previous entity is settled in full.

The fact that this is not already a rule tells you exactly how the current system was designed, and for whose benefit.

Safe Alternatives: Where Female Entrepreneurs Can Look Right Now

The EITM collapse does not mean you should stop pursuing EU funding. It means you should pursue the right channels with clear eyes.

Direct EU programmes carry significantly lower risk than KIC cascade grants, because there is no intermediate body between you and the funding authority.

The EIC Accelerator now has six cut-off dates per year instead of three, which means more entry points for well-prepared startups. In the first 2026 results (October 2025 cut-off), 61 startups from 17 countries were selected, with total proposed funding of €467 million. The EIC has explicit gender diversity targets, which improves the odds for female-led companies.

Eurostars, run by the EUREKA Network, targets R&D-intensive SMEs at earlier stages than EIC Accelerator, with more flexibility on TRL (Technology Readiness Level). Call 11 opens July 9, 2026.

National programmes co-funded by EU structural funds often have shorter chains, faster payment cycles, and lower compliance loads than supranational KIC programmes. In Poland, the Green Business programme includes a dedicated call for female-led SMEs. In Malta, the Malta Enterprise grant schemes have paid out faster and with less friction than most EU-level alternatives I have used.

And there is a lesson from how I build my other projects. Learn Dutch with AI and Healthy Restaurants in Malta are both built with a team of AI agents, without a single euro of EU grant money. No compliance reports. No payment tranches. No waiting for a letter from a parent institution. The revenue comes in when customers decide to pay, which is the most direct and honest form of market validation that exists. Building products that generate their own income is not the glamorous answer, but it is the resilient one. When your revenue does not depend on an institutional promise, institutional failures do not put you out of business.

SOP: How to Evaluate an EU Grant Opportunity in Under 30 Minutes

This is the exact process I use. You can run it on any programme before committing a single hour to an application.

Step 1 (5 min): Map the funding chain. Who issues the grant? Who is the parent institution? Is there an intermediate body? Write down every name in the chain and who controls each payment release.

Step 2 (5 min): Search for red flags. Search: “[Programme name] OLAF investigation.” Search: “[Parent body] audit irregularities.” Search: “[KIC name] payment delays.” Look at the most recent results. If anything concerning comes up, go deeper before proceeding.

Step 3 (5 min): Read the payment schedule. Find the section of the grant terms that describes when money moves, what triggers each tranche, and who has final authority. If this information is not clearly available before application, that is a red flag.

Step 4 (5 min): Calculate the real cost. Estimate the total hours your team will spend on: application, compliance during the project, midterm reports, final report. Assign a cost per hour. Subtract that from the grant amount. Is the net value still worth it?

Step 5 (5 min): Check the parent institution’s budget status. For any KIC programme, check whether the parent body is named in the next EU budget cycle. For programmes running under the current Horizon Europe framework, check whether they have confirmed funding past 2027.

Step 6 (5 min): Decide. If the chain is clear, the red flags are absent, the payment structure makes sense, the net value is positive, and the parent institution has confirmed future funding: apply.

If any of those conditions is missing: apply only if you have a parallel capital track that covers the full project period without the grant.

Mistakes to Avoid: Hard Lessons From Inside the EU Funding System

I will keep this direct, because these mistakes have cost real founders real money.

Starting spending before the signed agreement arrives. ELM spent €40,000 on this mistake. Do not do it. No exceptions. Not even if the programme officer verbally confirms the project is approved.

Building a cash flow model that requires the grant to arrive on time. EU payment cycles slip. Build in a minimum three-month buffer, and treat any tranche that arrives on the promised date as a pleasant surprise rather than a plan.

Treating consortium grant programmes as equivalent to direct EU programmes. They are categorically different in risk. A KIC cascade grant has an extra layer between you and the money. That layer can fail. Treat it accordingly.

Accepting “in-kind” programme terms without a budget audit. If a EU-funded accelerator or programme asks you to deliver content, workshops, or expertise, and cannot tell you exactly what budget line covers participant compensation, walk away. Or at minimum, ask for the full project budget before you agree to anything.

Scaling headcount or signing leases on the basis of a grant that is not yet in your account. Some of the 200 EITM beneficiaries signed leases. Some hired people. Some turned down other investors. All of that happened on the basis of a promise from an institution that was already in serious financial trouble.

Ignoring the OLAF track record of any programme you apply to. This information is public. It is searchable. There is no excuse for not knowing it.

What Female Entrepreneurs Should Watch in the Next 90 Days

The EITM story is still developing. A few things are worth watching closely.

First: whether the EIT actually pays the 200 beneficiaries through the liquidation process, and how long that takes. The EIT said it would cooperate with the liquidator and was “particularly mindful” of startup impact. Watch what that means in practice.

Second: whether EITM’s proposed new legal entity receives any signal of support from Brussels. If it does, the message to EU institutions is that the consequences of this kind of collapse are manageable. If it does not, there is a chance the governance reform conversation becomes real rather than rhetorical.

Third: the EU budget negotiations for 2028 to 2034. The EIT is not currently named in the proposed budget. The €38 billion allocated to “innovation ecosystems” may or may not cover KIC activities. MEPs are pushing for EIT continuity, but nothing is settled. If you are planning grants in 2027 and beyond through EIT channels, this is the conversation to follow.

You can follow the real-time analysis of how this develops at Mean CEO’s blog, where I track EU funding developments from the perspective of someone who has applied for, received, and been burned by the system at multiple stages.

FAQ: EIT Manufacturing Liquidation and What It Means for Female Founders in Europe

What is EIT Manufacturing and why did it collapse?

EIT Manufacturing (EITM) was one of nine Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) funded by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), itself a body under the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. EITM distributed grants from €50,000 to €500,000 to manufacturing-focused startups across Europe through programmes including Accelerate. The collapse was triggered by an OLAF (European Anti-Fraud Office) investigation that began in 2024, covering activities between 2020 and 2022. OLAF found serious irregularities in how projects were selected and funded under previous leadership. The EIT froze payments in June 2024. A second OLAF report in late 2025 found the irregularities were broader than initially identified. The EIT refused to issue a confirmation letter that would have allowed EITM to secure a bridging bank loan. Without the loan, EITM filed for liquidation on March 25, 2026, leaving over 200 beneficiaries waiting for €15 million in promised grants.

Will the 200 startups get their money back?

Uncertain, as of April 2026. The EIT stated it would cooperate with the appointed liquidator and had authorised some targeted payments to the most vulnerable beneficiaries, including startups. EITM CEO Caroline Viarouge stated that the EIT, as the grant authority, should step in and pay the beneficiaries directly. The legal and financial mechanism for this is not yet confirmed. Startups in this position should document all communications, project costs, and signed or unsigned agreements, and seek legal counsel about their rights as creditors in the liquidation proceedings. Following the Sifted and Science|Business coverage of the story will give you the most current information as it develops.

How does EIT Manufacturing’s collapse affect EU grants for female founders specifically?

Female founders in Europe depend on non-dilutive grants disproportionately because VC funding remains structurally inaccessible to women-led startups at scale. EU data consistently shows that all-female founding teams receive around 2% of European VC funding. This means EU grants represent a larger share of the capital stack for female founders than for their male-led counterparts, and a failed grant has a harder impact on a bootstrapped female-led startup than on a startup with multiple capital sources. The EITM collapse also matters symbolically: programmes targeting female entrepreneurs in manufacturing and deep tech were part of EITM’s portfolio. Founders who relied on those programmes are now among the 200 waiting.

What is the difference between an EIT KIC grant and a direct EU grant like EIC Accelerator?

The key difference is the number of institutional layers between you and the money. In a direct EIC Accelerator grant, the European Innovation Council is the direct funding authority, and the legal relationship is between the EIC and your company. In a KIC cascade grant, the EIT funds the KIC, which then funds the programme, which then funds your company. Each extra layer adds a potential point of failure. The EITM collapse is a KIC-level failure. The EIT froze KIC-level payments to protect EU funds. Your company, at the bottom of the chain, had no recourse and no appeal mechanism. Direct EIC programmes carry their own risks and complexities, but the chain between the funding authority and your company is shorter. For bootstrapped startups, shorter chains mean lower institutional risk.

Should female founders in Europe stop applying for EU grants after this?

No. The EITM case is not an argument against EU grants. It is an argument for applying with full information and proper due diligence. The EIC Accelerator, Eurostars, and national programmes co-funded by EU structural funds are different instruments with different risk profiles. The checklist in this article gives you a 30-minute evaluation process you can run on any programme before committing. The core principle is this: never build your runway around a single grant from a multi-layer institutional structure, keep a parallel capital track open, and never spend your own money before a signed grant agreement is in your hands.

What is the OLAF investigation and what does it mean for startup founders?

OLAF, the European Anti-Fraud Office, is the EU body responsible for investigating fraud, corruption, and serious irregularities involving EU funds. When OLAF opens an investigation into an EU-funded body, the standard institutional response is to freeze payments to that body. This protects public funds. It also means that any startups receiving grants through that body lose access to their money for the duration of the investigation, regardless of whether those startups did anything wrong. In the EITM case, the freeze lasted from June 2024 to the liquidation in March 2026, nearly two years. Startups had no appeal mechanism and no alternative payment source. Checking whether a programme or its parent institution has any current OLAF investigations should be a standard step in your due diligence process before applying.

What happened to the EITM startups that spent their own money first?

ELM Fabrication, the Maltese startup documented in this article, spent €40,000 of its own capital after EITM gave a verbal green light to start the project in January 2025. That project start came seven months after the EIT had frozen all payments to EITM. ELM received no reimbursement. Their €217,000 grant agreement was never signed. Some other startups in the EITM cohort, according to David Sciberras, filed for bankruptcy after building their plans around funding that did not arrive. ELM survived by running lean, not paying founders salaries, and not pre-scaling headcount. They have since opened an equity round and moved their product launch to Q4 2026. The lesson is that the standard EU model, which routinely requires startups to spend first and get reimbursed later, concentrates the risk entirely on the founder when the funding body fails.

What should a female founder do if she was directly affected by the EIT Manufacturing collapse?

First, document everything: all correspondence with EITM, all project cost records, all payment commitments made in writing, and any grant agreements, signed or unsigned. Second, contact a legal advisor who specialises in EU commercial law and insolvency to understand your position as a potential creditor in the liquidation proceedings. Third, reach out to your national startup agency or Enterprise Europe Network contact, as they may have information about targeted support measures being organised for EITM beneficiaries. Fourth, connect with other affected founders. Sciberras in Malta is public about his experience. There are likely others in your region and sector. Collective visibility increases the chance that the EIT prioritises direct payments to startup beneficiaries. And if you are willing to share your story publicly, contact Mean CEO as I am documenting founder experiences from this collapse.

Are the other EIT KICs (EIT Digital, EIT Health, EIT Urban Mobility, etc.) safe?

The EIT and its spokesperson have been explicit that the EITM situation is a specific case and does not affect the financial stability of the other nine KICs. Jan Palmowski at the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities also said he did not think the collapse should be read as a systemic risk indicator for other programmes. That said, all eight remaining KICs operate under the same parent body whose governance and oversight model has now been publicly questioned, and whose own budget past 2027 is uncertain. If you are applying to any KIC programme, the due diligence checklist in this article still applies. Map the full funding chain, check for any ongoing investigations, understand the payment structure, and keep a parallel capital track open.

What alternative funding sources should female founders in Europe be building alongside EU grants?

The safest approach is a diversified capital stack. National grants, particularly those run directly by national enterprise agencies rather than EU intermediaries, tend to have shorter payment chains and fewer institutional risks. Revenue-based financing and bootstrap-friendly bank products are increasingly available in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Nordics. Equity crowdfunding remains underused by female founders in Europe relative to its potential. Angel networks with explicit female-founder mandates, including networks in Malta, the Netherlands, and Germany, are worth building relationships with regardless of immediate funding need. And building products that generate revenue from day one, as Fe/male Switch, Learn Dutch with AI, and Healthy Restaurants in Malta all do, gives you a capital source that cannot be frozen by an OLAF investigation. Revenue does not need a confirmation letter. It arrives when your customer decides your product is worth paying for. That is, ultimately, the most reliable form of non-dilutive capital there is.

About Violetta Bonenkamp

Violetta Bonenkamp, known as Mean CEO, is a serial entrepreneur based between the Netherlands and Malta. She is the founder of CADChain, a deep-tech startup securing intellectual property for CAD and 3D models using blockchain, named one of the Top 100 Women in Europe by EU Startups in 2022. She also founded Fe/male Switch, a startup education game for women entering entrepreneurship, and runs multiple bootstrapped digital projects including Learn Dutch with AI and Healthy Restaurants in Malta. She has applied for and received EU grants at multiple levels across the Netherlands and Malta, and writes regularly about the real experience of EU funding from the founder perspective at Mean CEO’s blog. She holds an MBA from Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and four other higher education degrees across linguistics, education, and European higher education policy.

This article was written in April 2026 and reflects the status of the EIT Manufacturing liquidation as of that date. The situation continues to develop. Follow blog.mean.ceo for updates.