GRAIL opened its Genesis robotics data funding call on 9 November 2026 at 09:00 CET. The first call offers €1 million for at least 10 projects, with grants of up to €100,000 each. The official application portal lists applications as open until 10 February 2027 at 17:00 CET.
The call supports datasets, data-capture tools and benchmarks for robotics research. For universities and research offices, its conditions combine single-entity applications with payments tied to results and a retention period extending beyond the funded project’s delivery.
Genesis funding and the wider programme
The Genesis call page sets a 100% funding rate and a support programme lasting up to eight months. These are grant ceilings and selection targets, rather than an announcement of awards.
Genesis is the first of three GRAIL cascade funding calls. The wider programme allocates more than €10 million to at least 40 third-party projects covering data generation, industrial validation and adoption. The separate €500,000 ceiling per entity applies cumulatively across the three calls; it is not the maximum Genesis grant.
Single-entity eligibility and exclusions
The call lists universities, research and technology organisations, SMEs including startups, mid-caps and large companies. Applications must come from one legal entity established before the deadline; consortia are excluded. Eligible establishment locations are EU Member States, Iceland, Norway, Canada, Israel, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The Terms and Conditions add ownership and security restrictions. Control from non-eligible countries requires the specified declaration and country-assessed guarantees under the stated exception. Activities, including subcontracted work, must occur in eligible countries.
Exclusions cover applicants under EU restrictive measures, GRAIL partners and affiliates, specified employees and associates, entities in financial difficulty or liquidation, bankrupt companies, and entities excluded from EU funding. High-risk mobile-network equipment suppliers and entities they own or control are strictly excluded. Public bodies, universities and research organisations in EU or associated countries must have a Gender Equality Plan.
Payment retention outlasts the eight-month project
Successful, timely completion of agreed stages triggers the lump-sum milestone payments. However, the terms retain at least 15% of each tranche until approximately nine months after the whole GRAIL project ends. They give 31 May 2031 as its expected end and allow for extension.
For research-office cash-flow planning, the significant distinction is between completion of a Genesis project and release of all its funding: the eight-month delivery period does not determine the retention’s release date.
Data contributions, with topic-specific integration
The portal’s eight topics span robotic manipulation and tool use, egocentric video, low-cost multimodal capture, reasoning about failures and repairs, and generalisation benchmarks. The call therefore reaches teams producing research data and evaluation methods as well as teams developing collection hardware or software.
The Technical Guidelines emphasise quality controls, provenance, annotations and access arrangements. They state that integration with GRAIL models, APIs or testing hubs is not a universal prerequisite. Access depends on availability and agreements; applicants cannot assume unreleased infrastructure will be available when projects begin.
For university data stewards, this makes documented access and research-data licensing part of the contribution’s feasibility. The guidelines link reuse to contractual rights, confidentiality, personal data and third-party rights, rather than promising unrestricted access to every dataset.
Sources
- GRAIL: Genesis Open Call. Checked 2026-11-15.
- FundingBox: Genesis application portal. Checked 2026-11-15.
- GRAIL: Open Calls programme roadmap. Checked 2026-11-15.
- GRAIL: Genesis Terms and Conditions, sections 1 and 3.1. Checked 2026-11-15.
- GRAIL: Genesis Technical Guidelines, sections 2–5. Checked 2026-11-15.
