Bpifrance Flagships Challenge

Funding to support the development of advanced and sovereign subsystems for solutions in robotics, intelligent machines, and/or drones, in response to the needs of high-stakes sectors.

Created in 2013, Bpifrance is a French public investment bank that assists French companies by offering financing solutions to support their projects (creation, development through innovation, expanding into new markets in France or abroad, equity investment, takeover or external growth, etc).

Under the France 2030 framework ADEME offers the Flagships Challenge, a programme which aims to support the development of advanced and sovereign subsystems for solutions in robotics, intelligent machines, and/or drones, in response to the needs of high-stakes sectors. Its ambition is to create a new dynamic of co-development between emerging and established stakeholders in order to accelerate the development, industrialisation, and commercialisation of leading European sovereign products.

This call for projects aims to:

• Support the development of advanced, sovereign subsystems for solutions in robotics, intelligent machines and/or drones in response to the needs of sectors where the stakes are high. A subsystem is defined as a functional and autonomous unit that contributes to a specific part of the overall capabilities of a robot, an intelligent machine or a drone. Each subsystem is designed to perform one or more specific tasks and can be developed, tested and optimised independently before being integrated into complete systems.
• To create a new dynamic of co-development between emerging players and major players, in order to develop, produce and commercialise (from technology readiness level (TRL) 4 to 7/8 or beyond) leading European products that are independent of external dependencies.

This call for proposals follows a two-phase process:

• Phase One: Lasting six months, this phase aims to prepare the essential elements for the design, development and validation of the project prior to the actual start of operational development.
• Phase Two: Lasting between 24 and 30 months, this phase covers operational development and implementation.

In both phases, the project must be led by a consortium capable of creating the conditions for a development dynamic that is intended to be scaled up to the European level, by involving emerging stakeholders.