A FundingBox & OnePass vision of the EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy: simplification & seamless access to funding

A new vision on access to public funding and investment opportunities

An approximation to facilitate access to public funding and EU-wide cross-border investment opportunities with simplicity, transparency, and trust.

On May 28, 2025, the EC published the EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy, aiming to encourage all startups to choose Europe to start and scale. This Strategy defines Europe’s path to strategic autonomy, being reshaped by powerful new policy visions, and startups are at the center of this transformation. 

In this post, we show FundingBox’s vision, experience, and contributions on how we have been working over the last +10 years to facilitate access to public and private funding for startups, aligning with the mandates of the Strategy to seek for simplification, seamless access to finance, and trust building within the European startup ecosystems.

Among the diverse areas addressed by the Strategy, and within the stated need for an innovation-friendly regulation, the 28th Regime remains one of the most remarkable actions for startups, which aims to provide a single set of rules for companies. This action is indeed facing challenges, such as regulatory fragmentation and administrative burdens, as, e.g., cascade funding (see below) has contributed to this over the last years. As stated in the Strategy, “it will simplify applicable rules and reduce the cost of failure.” The action will also include  “an EU corporate legal framework, based on digital-by-default solutions”. 

Aiming for simplicity in doing business

Following innovation-friendly regulation needs, it is also worth mentioning the proposal for a European Business Wallet as the cornerstone of “doing business simply and digitally in the EU, establishing a digital identity for all economic operators and providing a framework for sharing verified data and credentials to enable seamless digital interactions between economic operators and public administrations across the Union”.

From these two specific actions (the 28th Regime and the European Business Wallet) we can extract two clear drivers for the EC: SEAMLESS SIMPLICITY and DIGITAL TRUST, where we, as FundingBox Group and OnePass, as our main tech solution for startups, have a few words to say, and contribute:

• Seamless simplicity: easy application process and access to funding in a simplified way for startups is one of the main missions of FundingBox. 

• How did we achieve this? Basically, through cascade funding, probably the best EU invention since the Erasmus programme, because it is aimed at overcoming some of the barriers identified by the Strategy, reducing paperwork (for example via lump-sum payments with less reporting) and reducing the time-to-grant significantly (vs traditional EU funding). Thanks to our experience on this instrument, we became a European leader in providing access to EU  public grants through a simplified application process and funding distribution driven by milestone delivery (tend-to-zero reporting) and lump-sum funding, which is “by design”. 

• Today, we are still expanding our portfolio of Champion startups (+2000) and funding (€230M cascade funding under management) and will continue to focus on simplifying our processes, aligned with the forthcoming 28th Regime’s proposed actions. 

• Apart from that, we are working on our “digital-by-default” own solution, as the Regime proposes, which is OnePass, where startups can still get access to our publicly funded open calls, via our refined Application Tracking System product (coming soon), and private investors, via our AI-powered matchmaking solution, OnePass Bridge (already available) that contributes to facilitate yet another driver of the strategy: Digital Trust.

• Digital trust, with solutions such as the proposed European Business Wallet. A similar solution is provided with OnePass Bridge for Investors, which aims to discover vetted startups, allowing them to invest with confidence, because every startup within our ecosystem can be verified and accredited. This verification and accreditation will come with the “OnePass Startup Wallet”. This powerful solution enables seamless digital interactions among European service operators (accelerators and service providers for startups such as FundingBox), startups, and investors, exactly as the European Business Wallet aims to as well.
  At FundingBox, we are pioneers in this space, as we have been already endorsed by the EC, via EBSI (the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure), because OnePass has been supported as one of their use-cases, so named “SME financing”, to enable cross-border investment of startups by creating a TRUST framework using verifiable credentials, e.g. a “Funding Wallet” to verify and accredite startup to streamline their access to finance. It is worth mentioning that this initiative is also in line with the objectives of the different actions proposed by the Strategy in response to the need for BETTER FINANCE FOR STARTUPS AND SCALEUPS. 

Therefore, we, FundingBox and the EC, through the 28th Regime, and the European Business Wallet, among other key actions of the EU Strategy, share common missions at EU level towards industrial autonomy, competitiveness and impactful entrepreneurship, putting startups and innovation at the center of all our activities.

Additionally, in conjunction with OnePass as a tech solution, we are also contributing to enhancing EU tech sovereignty. We are fully aligned and share a common vision to simplify access to public and private funding and finance, and to build a fundamentally European-based digital trust.

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