Jano Costard

Had a great time talking to @eric_is_weird about @SPRIND, what we look for in program managers & "Jano’s obsessions with SPRIN-D’s administrative processes, such as their speed with “Fourteen days time-to-money” freaktakes.com/p/an-interview…

@freeeralc @IlirAliu_ @SPRIND We get rid of it for them.

@IlirAliu_ @SPRIND Impressive! Hope French teams can move fast despite the bureaucracy. 🔥

Europe moves slow. Unless...you design it differently. Killing bureaucracy: 14 days from deadline to signed contract! That’s how @SPRIND runs the €125M Frontier AI Challenge. • no 100-page proposals • fast selection focused on builders, not writers This is the mindset behind what’s happening in Paris. You can complain about Europe. Or you can apply. Next station: 🇫🇷 March 19, 2026 luma.com/nfai-paris Dr. Jano Costard (@jncstrd) is the Head of Challenges at SPRIND, where he designs and runs the agency's innovation competitions... including the €125M Next Frontier AI initiative. Thanks for the Interview, Jano! More info: Next-Frontier.ai

Europe needs to start building if we want to play a role in future AI. It's not just on innovators, government needs to support the brightest at the speed and scale needed to be competitive on a global scale. Cutting red tape & speeding up processes is what Challenges are about.

How do you stop a rogue drone - without shooting it down? Europe’s innovators are about to show us. Meet the 12 teams of SPRIND Funke ANTI-DRONE RESPONSE 2.0 buff.ly/CnQSA58

@DominikWKH Agententätigkeit 🤔

To my fellow German speakers: we need a word for agency.

SPRIND’s Next Frontier AI! 📍 Paris, Mar 19, 2026 – Secure your spot! Join our interactive roadshow: meet the team, explore challenge criteria & connect with collaborators before applications open. Europe’s AI talent, now powered for global impact. buff.ly/37Ir5ZB

Der SPRIND Innovationswettbewerb "Fully Autonomous Flight 2.0" geht in die nächste Runde buff.ly/wSbS8FM

Das sind die 7 Teams, die in der zweiten Stufe dieses SPRIND-Innovationswettbewerbes jeweils weitere 350.000 Euro für die Weiterentwicklung von autonom fliegenden Drohnen erhalten buff.ly/701ZJsh

New paths to decentralised, heterogenous, and federated #AI Training: the SPRIND Composite Learning Challenge enters Stage 2! Here are the 5 teams that get additional € 530,000 from SPRIND to further develop their technologies buff.ly/0GMjz8Z

@tkalil2050 @RenPhilanthropy Congrats, Tom! Awesome start, excited for the next steps.

See what we got done in 2025! Thanks to hard-working, entrepreneurial members of the @RenPhilanthropy team, the philanthropists, foundations, and government agencies that backed us, and the brilliant scientists and innovators we were able to support. Full speed ahead in 2026!

@JochenBittner @DIEZEIT Die Bundesagentur @SPRIND hat dazu eine €40M Challenge gestartet um Technologiemetalle zu erschließen und direkt europ. Industrie zugänglich zu machen. Das in Partnerschaft mit @NSF, die das gleiche in den USA umsetzen sprind.org/taten/challeng…

Nach der Ölkrise der 1970er und der Gaskrise ab 2022 ist Europa zum dritten Mal in eine Abhängigkeitsfalle gelaufen: in die von Seltenen Erden aus China. Warum schlafwandelt die EU immer wieder in denselben Fehler? Der Text dazu diese Woche in @DIEZEIT

❓Wie steht es um die deutsche Innovationskraft❓ Dazu hat das ZDF heute journal SPRIND Direktor Rafaael Laguna befragt: buff.ly/4ySVIxu

@Simon__Grimm It's a shame. Everyone knows it's dysfunctional but way too little is done to make it right.

EU funding is correlated with a long-term decline in company revenue:

@tymrtn @DominiqueCAPaul @andreasklinger @SPRIND No, it will be way broader. All details will be in the call that's coming mid Dec

@jncstrd @DominiqueCAPaul @andreasklinger @SPRIND So, it’s only for LLM model devs right? 🤔

Europe’s biggest AI grant just dropped. Non-dilutive. Multi-stage. Made for Start-ups. Here’s how it works: • Stage 1: 10 teams get €3M each • Stage 2: Narrowed to 6 teams, each gets €8M • Stage 3: Final 3 teams get €15.5M What I love about this design: they cast a wide net first, then double down over time. No government "picking winners" or random academic consortia. They just let teams build and performance decide. It’s open to any European entity - SAS, Oy, SRL, GmbH, whatever - and it doesn’t matter whether you’re pre-funding or have already raised. And what's most also really cool IMO: There’s also a fast-track call in the next 6 weeks where smaller or newer teams can get €500k to validate a concept. Huge opportunity. The programme is run by people who actually understand frontier AI. It's led by one of the early OpenAI employees (disclaimer: we wrote a paper together), together with Germany’s agency for breakthrough innovation (SPRIND). There'll be a lot of haters who will say government grants are the wrong tool, and yeah, no shit. But in terms of what governments have in their power to catalyse model lab creation, this is an amazing step.

@tymrtn @DominiqueCAPaul @andreasklinger @SPRIND True. Expect applications for the early bird program to open mid December.

@jncstrd @DominiqueCAPaul @andreasklinger @SPRIND It’s not open for application yet tho

@codewithimanshu @DominiqueCAPaul The smaller players, the odd ones, people that might not have huge track record yet, that's who we explicitly look for in our programs. We give many of them a chance, fund them, knowing that only very few will be successful but their success will be so worth it.

@DominiqueCAPaul Wow, that's some impressive work, Radiance! Though, faster rendering could mean more data leaks, no?Dominique, that's a huge boost for AI startups, but I wonder if it'll truly help the smaller players, you know?

@Duarteosrm @DominiqueCAPaul In a program like this, which is a @SPRIND Challenge, it takes on average 14 days between deadline and selection as well as contract signed. So, money in the bank in less than 3 weeks.

@tymrtn @DominiqueCAPaul @andreasklinger Agreed! This is completely different, though, it's not really a grant, it's a @SPRIND Challenge. For starters, we have a time-to-money of 14 days on average. So, 2 weeks between deadline for application and funding contract signed. No bullshit bureaucracy.

@DominiqueCAPaul @andreasklinger AI grant consultant is pretty effective. What you need for an EU grant is to not need one.

Ich sprach im @SPRIND Podcast über Vergangenheit & Zukunft von Innovationswettbewerben, wie wir mit 14 Tagen time-to-money schneller finanzieren als andere öffentliche Institutionen weltweit und warum @SPRIND mehr Challenges durchführt als @DARPA. ➡️ sprind.org/worte/podcasts…

We @SPRIND join forces with @NSF to create breakthroughs for recovering tech metals from waste streams. nsf.gov/tip/updates/ns… Our Challenge just launched, info at sprind.org/en/actions/cha… 🇺🇲🤝🇪🇺