Is CORDIS free to use?

Yes. CORDIS is a public European Commission service at cordis.europa.eu; project records, participant lists, reports and result summaries are open, and bulk datasets are published as open data on the EU Open Data Portal.

How do startups actually use CORDIS?

Three main ways: scouting consortium partners by searching who was funded in your topic; checking whether your 'novel' idea was already funded (evaluators will); and mining funded-project abstracts to mirror the vocabulary that wins in your domain.

What is CORDIS?

CORDIS (Community Research and Development Information Service) is the European Commission's public repository of every EU-funded research and innovation project — from the early framework programmes through Horizon Europe. Each record lists the consortium, funding amount, timeline, reports and results. It is free, and it is the single most under-used intelligence tool in EU grant writing.

Three founder use-cases

Partner scouting. Need a consortium for a Cluster 4 call? Search CORDIS for organisations funded on adjacent topics — they have proven grant capacity and evaluator credibility.
Novelty check. Evaluators compare your proposal against what the EU already paid for. Ten minutes on CORDIS tells you whether your "first-ever" claim survives — and lets you position against prior projects explicitly.
Language mining. Funded abstracts are public. The phrasing that won in your domain is a better style guide than any template.

Data access

Beyond the website search, CORDIS publishes open datasets (projects, organisations, deliverables) reusable in your own tooling — VIRA's knowledge layer ingests EU project data the same way.

Official source: cordis.europa.eu.

Written by Tymofiy Badikov, founder of VIRA.space (Virtual Innovation Research Assistant) — operated by Space Tech Gateway Sp. z o.o., Kraków Technology Park. VIRA tracks live European space funding calls and checks your eligibility free: see live tenders.