Cascade funding (financial support to third parties)

A consortium wins a large grant, and part of its job is to redistribute money in small tickets through its own open calls. The formal name is financial support to third parties. For an SME this is the least painful route into EU money: applications run to a few pages, decisions come in weeks rather than a year, and there is no consortium to assemble.

The amount per recipient is capped (usually around €60,000 unless the work programme sets a higher ceiling for that topic) and real tickets typically land between €10,000 and €200,000. There is no co-financing to find in most schemes, and the reporting is proportionate to the sum rather than to the framework programme it descends from.

The catch is discovery. These calls are announced on the funded project's own website, not on the Funding and Tenders Portal, so they are scattered across hundreds of project sites with no index and short windows. A call can open and close inside six weeks without appearing anywhere you were watching.

Selection is run by the project, not the Commission, and the criteria are the project's own within limits set by its grant agreement. That means a human you can talk to, published evaluation criteria that are often narrower and more concrete than a Horizon topic, and a genuine chance for an applicant with a specific technical fit rather than a broad consortium.

Treat it as a first rung rather than a destination. The money is small, but a completed cascade project produces exactly what a later application needs: a European reference, a partner network inside a funded consortium, and evidence that your organisation can deliver under EU reporting.