EIT Culture & Creativity is proud to announce the four projects selected to participate in the first round of our Short Innovation Call 2025, supporting high-impact initiatives that seek to address pressing challenges in one of our five focus sectors: fashion, gaming, architecture, cultural heritage and audio-visual media.
Through this call, we will support innovation projects led by small and medium-sized enterprises, with the goal of accelerating the commercialisation and market adoption of innovations tackling pressing challenges that come with globalisation, digital transformation, emerging technologies and environmental sustainability. The projects will have a maximum duration of six months.
Beyond financial support, EIT Culture & Creativity may offer selected projects additional services to enhance long-term sustainability, such as market access support, investor pitch sessions, networking opportunities, and collaboration within the broader ecosystem of the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT).
Here are the four companies and projects that will receive up to €59,500 in funding through this call.
Participant: Agent Pekka
Project title: PULP Pekka Unique Licensing platform
Country: Finland
Sector: Audio-visual media
Project description: A digital licensing platform that will simplify licensing for publishers, agencies and brands. This portfolio of over 50 internationally recognised illustrators will become a scalable, revenue-generating marketplace.
Challenge addressed: The platform simplifies content discovery, rights management, and licensing transactions, addressing a key challenge in the creative content industry. It will address key gaps in the premium illustration licensing market by combining traditional agency curation with the efficiency of digital platforms. Leveraging AI capabilities, the platform will offer artist popularity analytics, trend forecasting, client behavior analysis, optimized pricing, and sophisticated search functionality. Interaction data will continually enhance the platform, refining matches between clients and artwork. Overall, the platform will provide a solution that expands market access for illustrators while meeting increasing demand for premium visual content.
Participant: Style-Wrapped Limited
Project title: TAILR-AI: AI-Powered Fabric Consistency
Country: Ireland
Sector: Fashion
Project description: TAILR-AI introduces a digital tool for predictive analysis and validation of fabric behaviour during the design and prototyping stages. By digitising fabric testing and delivering real-time performance insights, the solution helps brands reduce emissions, improve decision-making accuracy, and accelerate development across the fashion supply chain.
Challenge addressed: Fabric inconsistency is a critical challenge in fashion manufacturing, contributing to costly sampling processes, production delays, and inconsistent garment quality. Brands face substantial financial losses and material waste due to fabrics that fail to meet expected performance standards. In the context of high-end and luxury fashion, where textiles are produced in small batches, even minor discrepancies can disrupt entire collections.
The industry has relied on outdated, manual processes to assess fabric suitability for far too long. TAILR is tackling this problem by using AI to predict fabric behaviour before production, ensuring brands only work with materials that meet their technical requirements.
Participant: CODA Lightweight Design SL
Project title: MAGNA+
Country: Spain
Sector: Architecture
Project description: Magna+ offers an environmentally responsible solution aligned with circular construction principles. A timber gridshell system for sustainable, lightweight, and rapidly deployable architectural structures, designed as an alternative to carbon-intensive materials such as steel, concrete, and aluminium.
Challenge addressed: The gridshell system will significantly reduce construction-related emissions, costs, and material waste. The modular design enables efficient transport, on-site assembly, and flexible reuse — making it particularly suited to temporary architecture, cultural infrastructure, and emergency applications.
Magna+ will introduce scalable, climate-resilient innovation in the European Union’s construction market.
Participant: Jonas Holm Jæger
Project title: UTRY, Virtual Dressing Room
Country: Denmark
Sector: Fashion
Project description: A virtual dressing room optimising garment production for zero-waste manufacturing. The project will reduce e-commerce clothing returns, aiming for lower CO₂ emissions and higher conversion rates, turning more visitors into customers. UTRY introduces a cross-brand virtual dressing room that uses 3D avatars and advanced sizing algorithms, allowing customers to digitally try on garments before purchase. The technology is fully integrable with e-commerce platforms and has demonstrated the potential to reduce returns by up to 36% and increase conversion rates by up to 20%.
Challenge addressed: High return rates in online fashion retail, driven largely by uncertainty around sizing and fit, contribute significantly to CO₂ emissions and represent €66 billion in annual losses for European retailers. Fewer returns will lead to a decrease in emissions within the fashion sector.
We will be sharing more on the results of our Short Innovation Call (including the selected participants for Segment 2) and our Main Innovation Call in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
