European tech innovation sees investment in Belgian AI and Dutch agency

In Belgium, the Ghent-based scale-up Dropsolid AI has been awarded €603,540 in innovation support from the Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO). This funding will support a two-year research and development project valued at €1.7 million, focused on creating an open-source Digital Experience Platform. The goal is to enable the secure collaboration of AI agents on European cloud infrastructure or private servers, allowing companies to utilize AI without losing control over their proprietary data.

As part of this initiative, Dropsolid AI plans to hire ten full-time R&D experts immediately, with a long-term goal of creating more than thirty new jobs by 2032.

In the Netherlands, political support is growing for the National Agency for Disruptive Innovation (NADI). During budget negotiations in The Hague, there is potential to increase the agency's budget from the €500 million originally reserved in the coalition agreement to as much as €1 billion. Modeled after the American DARPA and the German Sprin-D, NADI aims to provide a starting capital of at least €300 million with annual government contributions of €150 million over five years. The agency is intended to support long-term technological breakthroughs by funding multiple high-risk programs simultaneously.