Spain's €180M for AI in business: what if your SME doesn't qualify

Spain’s Ministry for Digital Transformation has resolved the RedIA and RedIA Salud grant calls with a total investment of €180 million for 372 artificial intelligence projects, Minister Óscar López announced on August 31 at AMETIC’s 40th Digital Economy and Telecommunications Meeting in Santander. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona, the headline matters less to us than the fine print: 70% of the funded projects belong to SMEs, but grants start at €400,000 — a threshold that leaves most small businesses out.

What was actually announced

The resolution splits the funding into two lines:

• RedIA, backed by €130 million in FEDER (EU regional development) funds, finances the adoption of AI across production processes and value chains in different sectors.
• RedIA Salud, endowed with €50 million, funds 72 projects applying AI across every stage of care: prediction, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.

Awarded grants range from €400,000 to €5 million per project, putting this call well above what a typical SME needs — or can manage. These are funds designed for sizeable R&D projects, requiring co-financing capacity and teams able to write and justify a complex technical proposal.

Why “70% SMEs” isn’t what it sounds like

Seven out of ten funded projects belonging to SMEs is a good headline for the official narrative, but it doesn’t change the underlying math: with a €400,000 minimum per project, only mid-sized companies with the financial and technical capacity to take on a project of that scale get in — not the bulk of Spain’s business fabric, dominated by microenterprises. If your company turns over a few hundred thousand euros a year, this call — already resolved, at that — isn’t your entry point into publicly-funded AI. And that’s fine: there are other paths better suited to that scale.

What an SME that doesn’t meet the minimum can do

Use the grants built for its size

Kit Digital remains the most accessible public funding route for SMEs and freelancers taking their first steps with AI, covering up to €6,000 per service. We covered what it covers and how to apply in a separate post: it won’t replace a €400,000 project, but it covers very specific use cases — chatbots, task automation, analytics — with a much lighter application process.

Don’t wait for the next grant round to start

Nothing requires public funding to get started with AI. A scoped pilot — automating customer support, tidying up internal documentation, supporting a specific sales or operations process — typically costs a fraction of that €400,000 floor and starts delivering results in weeks, not the year and a half it can take for a call of this size to be resolved.

Get ready for when it does fit

Calls like RedIA repeat. If your company grows toward a size where a project worth several hundred thousand euros starts to make sense, the groundwork — a well-defined use case, clean data, and a technology partner who already knows your business — gets done beforehand, not while drafting the grant application.

How we approach this at Evicron

Our AI consulting always starts from the real size of the problem, not the size of the grant on offer. We’ve been applying AI across more than 200 projects for companies in twelve sectors throughout Europe since 2019, almost always without public funding involved: most of our clients are SMEs that need concrete results before a 400,000-euro technical proposal. If you want to know what AI project actually fits your company’s size — with or without grants — get in touch: the first discovery session is free and we reply within 24 hours.

Sources: Infobae, “El Gobierno destina 180 millones a 372 proyectos de IA en las empresas y en la salud”, MuyComputerPRO, “Óscar López anuncia inversiones de 180M€ en proyectos de IA en el 40 Encuentro AMETIC”.