AGILE, formally Accelerating Groundbreaking Innovation for Defence in Europe, would let single small firms apply without a consortium and target grants within four months, a deliberate contrast to the heavier European Defence Fund.
The European Union just opened a different kind of door to its defence budget. The €115 million AGILE programme, moving through the EU's legislative machinery this month, is built for a buyer Europe has spent a decade saying it needs and rarely funded at the right speed: a single small company, working alone, that can deliver in months rather than years.
AGILE, which stands for Accelerating Groundbreaking Innovation for Defence in Europe, is the EU's newest defence procurement instrument and the first explicitly designed for small and mid-sized companies (European Commission DG DEFIS programme page). The Council adopted its negotiating mandate on the programme on 3 June 2026, clearing the way for trilogue with the European Parliament under the ordinary legislative procedure (European Council press release). The Commission expects AGILE to be operational from early 2027 (Euronews).
What separates AGILE from the European Defence Fund is not the budget. EDF remains the EU's main R&D vehicle and its pot is far larger. The difference is structural. EDF requires consortia, multi-country partnerships, and patient timelines measured in years. AGILE does not. A single SME, a start-up, or a scale-up can apply on its own, claim up to 100% of project costs, and submit expenses incurred up to three months before a call closes (European Commission DG DEFIS programme page). The Commission has set a four-month target from call to grant and a one-to-three-year target from award to technology in the hands of EU armed forces (European Commission DG DEFIS programme page).
The €115 million envelope will fund roughly 20 to 30 projects across AI, drones, robotics, quantum, and cybersecurity (European Commission DG DEFIS programme page). The "up to 100%" figure is a ceiling, not a per-project guarantee. The real binding constraints are the project cap and the overall envelope. For a small founder weighing whether to redirect staff time into an EU defence bid, the combination of low paperwork and a fast clock is the point.
AGILE does not sit alone. It is one piece of a three-tier EU defence innovation stack, deliberately placed between EDF for research and development and EDIP for production and procurement at scale. EDIP, the European Defence Industry Programme, was adopted on 8 December 2025, with Parliament backing it 457 to 148 and 33 abstentions (European Parliament press release). Its 2026 to 2027 work programme totals roughly €1.5 billion across sub-lines including European Defence Projects of Common Interest, a Ukraine Support Instrument, joint procurement, equity support via FAST, and the BraveTech window for Ukrainian and European start-ups (Public Affairs Bruxelles). The first EDIP funding calls opened on 31 March 2026.
EDIP also embeds the EU's first explicit "Buy European" rule for defence components: non-associated third-country components cannot exceed 35% of the estimated total component cost (Public Affairs Bruxelles). That local-content ceiling does not yet appear in AGILE's design, and it is one of several decisions still open in trilogue. The Ukraine Support Instrument figure itself is reported as €300 million in the Parliament legislative tracker and as €260 million in the Commission's EDIP work programme breakdown (Public Affairs Bruxelles; Trending Topics). The discrepancy is small but worth flagging for anyone modelling the actual cheque sizes.
The political backdrop is the EU Defence Industry Transformation Roadmap, published in November 2025, which explicitly called for "speed, agility and risk-taking" in how the bloc funds defence innovation (Euronews). AGILE is the first concrete instrument built to that brief. Whether the four-month clock and the no-consortium rule survive contact with EU procurement reality, and whether the first selection round produces dual-use suppliers that EU armed forces then buy from, is the test that matters next.
The watch list for the rest of 2026 is short: trilogue conclusions on AGILE's final text and budget, the publication of the first call for proposals, and the first named award winners. Each is a checkpoint a reader can hold the programme against once the money starts moving.