COP-PILOT First Open Call

COP-PILOT First Open Call

Open Date: 03 March 2026
Close Date: 04 May 2026 (22:00 CET)
About the open call
This first Open Call is your chance to directly contribute to this groundbreaking work.
We are seeking innovative actors to develop and test their solutions within the COP-PILOT platform, tackling real-world challenges defined within our clusters.
By joining the COP-PILOT 1st Open Call, the 8 selected projects will receive comprehensive support designed to accelerate their growth and impact.
Funding Available
COP-PILOT Open Call 1 will distribute up to €200,000, covering 100% of eligible costs (no co-financing required)
Eligible organisations
Eligible applicants are a single SME or an SME-led consortium of at least 2 partners (there is no maximum number of partners, and they don’t need to be from different countries).
While the leading partner must be an SME, the other eligible partners can be as defined below:
- Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
- Large enterprises
- Research institutions and universities
- Non-profit organisations
- Public entities (where permitted)
Average duration
8 months execution + 2 months for reporting
Number of grants awarded
8
Description
As a Horizon Europe Innovation Action program, COP-PILOT is focused on developing a Collaborative Open Platform (COP) framework that enables end-to-end orchestration of services across diverse industry sectors
Main goal
At its core, COP-PILOT integrates novel AI-driven tools and automation solutions with robust security features to facilitate the onboarding and management of complex applications. The project prioritizes modularity, ease-of-use, and industry-standard interoperability, leveraging multi-tiered data processing, policy-driven optimization, and dynamic reasoning for service orchestration. Through hierarchical orchestration and resource slicing, COP-PILOT enables scalable, reliable, and SLApreserving deployment of vertical services, making it possible to meet the precise needs of each sector while supporting cross-domain collaboration.
Main outputs
COP-PILOT will conduct large-scale pilot programs in real-world environments across several European countries. These pilots will demonstrate the platform’s impact on logistics, smart cities, sustainable energy grids, and agricultural transformation, highlighting how collaborative edge ecosystems can optimize supply chains, improve industrial efficiency, and deliver tangible societal benefits. By enabling sectors to interact seamlessly and innovate collectively, COP-PILOT is set to drive the next wave of digital transformation and market growth through edge intelligence. To conclude, the platform looks to integrate novel AI-driven tools, SLA-preserving automation, and secure infrastructure while piloting these real-world applications across sectors like energy, smart cities, agriculture, vineyards and mining to drive cross-sector collaboration, innovation, and societal impact.

Open Call Coordinator
Check out: https://cop-pilot.eu/open-calls