The European Union has formally approved a €115 million programme intended to help smaller businesses turn promising defence technologies into capabilities that can be tested and used by armed forces. The Council of the EU adopted the regulation for the Programme for Agile and Rapid Defence Innovation, known as AGILE, on 12 October.
The fund is aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises, including start-ups and scale-ups developing emerging or disruptive defence products. It is designed to address a gap between building a prototype and getting a product into operational use, with grants and practical support intended to move development forward more quickly.
From prototype to testing
AGILE will support the development and testing of innovative defence products and technologies. It also covers adapting technologies originally developed for civilian use to defence applications. The programme is intended to complement existing EU defence-industrial instruments rather than replace them.
Its design includes a target of four months from an application call to grant award. Products and technologies supported through the scheme are expected to reach defence forces within one to three years. Those are programme targets, not guarantees for every project.
Member states are expected to help define mission-driven challenges so that funded work addresses capability needs. The programme also provides for faster access to testing and experimentation facilities, a step intended to help smaller firms that may lack the resources or connections to arrange trials independently.
Another strand is matchmaking between participating businesses and major defence companies, with the aim of improving the route for successful products into wider use. The regulation also provides for simplified procurement of products supported by AGILE. The extent to which these measures shorten development and purchasing timelines will depend on how calls are designed and projects are delivered.
Together, these provisions address several points in the innovation chain: identifying a practical military need, paying for development, arranging a test environment and connecting a smaller supplier with potential industrial partners. They do not remove the need for projects to meet the programme’s calls and rules, or for a product to prove itself before it can be taken up.
What happens next
The Council’s adoption is the final legislative approval, following a provisional agreement between the Council and the European Parliament on 15 July and a parliamentary plenary vote on 6 October. Adoption does not mean that the programme is already issuing grants or that any individual company has been selected.
The regulation still has to be signed by the presidents of the Parliament and Council and published in the Official Journal of the European Union. It will enter into force 20 days after publication. A first call for proposals is expected at the beginning of 2027, so businesses will need to await the published rules and application details before seeking support.
With a total budget of €115 million, AGILE is a relatively focused instrument directed at smaller developers rather than a broad procurement fund. Its practical significance will rest on the speed of the grant process, access to testing, and whether participating firms can progress from trials to procurement. The adoption establishes the legal programme, but the first funding round and subsequent project outcomes remain ahead.
