OpenFundsEU

Open-source platform helping individuals, freelancers and SMEs across Europe discover, evaluate and apply for EU funding opportunities.

The Problem

EU funding portals are fragmented, JS-heavy, and difficult to navigate. Billions in available funding go underutilized because smaller actors lack dedicated grant-writing staff or the expertise to navigate the system.

What OpenFundsEU Does

1. Portal Aggregation - Scrapes open calls from EU Funding & Tenders Portal (20+ programmes), Cascade Funding Hub, NLnet/NGI, EIT, EUIPO SME Fund, and national portals
2. Profile Matching - Ranks funding opportunities by relevance to your organisation type, sector, region and size
3. Deadline Tracking - Monitors call statuses, detects changes and cancellations, generates alerts
4. Proposal Assistant - Extracts evaluation criteria from call documents and generates structured proposal outlines

Status

This is an early prototype built during the exploration phase. The scraping engine and browser automation approach have been validated against live EU portals.

What Works

• Browser automation extracts live data from JS-rendered EU portals
• Validated against: EU Funding & Tenders Portal, Cascade Funding Hub, ADR Bucuresti-Ilfov (Romania)
• Directive-driven architecture for modular portal scraping

Architecture

_directives/          # SOPs for each module
  research_funding.md   # Portal scraping + opportunity identification
  eligibility_check.md  # Profile-to-criteria matching
  proposal_writing.md   # Proposal structuring assistance
  deadline_tracking.md  # Call monitoring and alerts
_execution/           # Python scripts (to be built)
output/               # Generated reports

Portals Covered

EU-level (pan-European):

• EU Funding & Tenders Portal (Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, Erasmus+, Creative Europe, LIFE, CEF, EIC, etc.)
• Cascade Funding Hub (FSTP sub-grants)
• NLnet/NGI programmes
• EIT programmes
• EUIPO SME Fund

Aggregators (cross-reference):

• EUFundingPortal.eu
• Grantalist.com
• digitalsme.eu

National portals (plugin system):

• Romania (ADR, MIPE/MySMIS) - reference implementation
• Other EU member states via community-contributed plugins

Tech Stack

• Python (scraping, data processing, API)
• Browser automation (Playwright) for JS-rendered portals
• Open-source LLMs via Ollama for matching and proposal assistance
• Web frontend (planned)

License

AGPL-3.0

Funding

This project is seeking funding through the NGI Zero Commons Fund.