SPRIND Challenge: Next Frontier AI

Funding for teams to build Europe-based frontier AI labs.

Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen (SPRIND – German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation) acts as a forum between the German government, industry, and research representatives. The main objective of the federal corporation is to support breakthrough innovations.

The Next Frontier AI Challenge aims to create three European frontier AI labs that can stand at eye level with today’s global leaders. Through the challenge, the initiative supports 10 teams over 24 months to build seed-stage frontier labs. 

The challenge has the following focus points:

• More sample- and energy-efficient models and training regimes.
• Architectures that play to Europe’s strengths (eg in industrial data).
• Systems that are controllable, auditable and easier to align with European values from the start.

The Next Frontier AI initiative supports teams through the following activities:

• Providing a dedicated Financing Workstream.
• Support to build investment-grade data rooms (eg metrics, infra, security, safety, governance, compliance, IP).
• Promote the design of investable labs to be investable (eg sane cap tables, governance, legal setup, risk management).
• Rally a coalition of capital around the Challenge: European and global VCs, corporate venture arms, and infra providers, public banks and funds (EIB, national programs, etc).
• Structured investor and partner processes: Dedicated diligence days, 1:1s, joint workshops with potential anchor customers and compute providers.

Projects can optimize and scale SOTA architectures, build agentic systems, work on neuro-symbolic stacks, embodied AI, world models, systems-level breakthroughs in data/infra etc.

The programme is divided into three stages:

• Stage 1: 10 teams are funded for a period of 7 months.
• Stage 2: 6 teams are funded for 8 months.
• Stage 3: 3 teams are funded for 9 months.

Each winning lab should be able to raise an order-of-magnitude scale-up capital of €1 billion after the 24-month competition.