How to Find Companies That Received EU Funding: A Practical Guide

Whether you are researching competitors, qualifying a sales prospect, checking a potential partner, or investigating public spending, the question is the same: which organisations actually received EU money, how much, and for what?

The answer exists — the EU publishes recipient data more systematically than almost any other public funder in the world — but it is spread across at least five separate registers, each with its own scope, update cycle and blind spots. No single search covers everything. This guide walks through each source, what it covers, how to search it, and where it will mislead you if you don't know its limits.

First, understand how the money flows

Roughly speaking, the EU budget is spent through two channels, and each channel has its own transparency register:

• Direct and indirect management: the European Commission (or its executive agencies) signs grants and contracts itself — research grants, LIFE projects, Digital Europe, external aid. These recipients appear in the Financial Transparency System (FTS), and research projects additionally in CORDIS.
• Shared management: member states distribute the money through national and regional authorities — cohesion funds and agricultural payments. The Commission's own FTS documentation notes that "up to 75% of the EU budget expenditure is managed by both the European Commission and Member States" — and none of it is in FTS. For cohesion policy, the aggregated recipient data lives in Kohesio; for national subsidies and state aid, in the state-aid transparency register and national portals.

Public procurement (where an authority buys rather than grants) is published separately again, on TED.

With that map in mind, here is each register in detail.

1. Financial Transparency System (FTS) — who got money directly from the Commission

What it covers: all commitments from the EU budget under direct and indirect management, plus the European Development Fund — grants, procurement contracts, prizes and expert fees, from 2007 onwards. Search it at ec.europa.eu/budget/financial-transparency-system.

How to search:

1. Open the search interface and enter the beneficiary name (try variants — legal names, abbreviations, local spellings; there is no entity resolution, so "Siemens AG" and "SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT" may be separate rows).
2. Filter by year, country, programme or responsible department (DG).
3. Export results, or download the full annual datasets — one XLSX file per year, published as open data under CC BY 4.0 (the dataset is catalogued on data.europa.eu).

Each record shows the beneficiary's name and location, the committed amount, the budget line and programme, the responsible department, the subject of the grant or contract, and the funding type (grant, procurement, etc.).

Limitations to know:

• Annual lag. FTS is published once a year: data for a given financial year appears by 30 June of the following year. A grant signed in January 2026 may not be visible in FTS until mid-2027. This is the single most important constraint for anyone using FTS as a live signal.
• Commitments, not payments. Amounts are legal commitments; actual disbursement may differ.
• Privacy redactions. Procurement contracts below EUR 15,000 are not published, natural-person beneficiaries are removed two years after the end of the commitment year, and some names are withheld for security or commercial-interest reasons (all per the FTS about page).
• No shared management. CAP payments and cohesion funds are absent by design.

2. CORDIS — research and innovation grants in detail

What it covers: every project funded under the EU's research framework programmes — Horizon Europe (2021–2027), Horizon 2020, and predecessors — with far richer detail than FTS: project objectives, participant lists, per-participant EU contributions, topics, deliverables and report summaries. Search at cordis.europa.eu/projects.

How to search:

1. Search by organisation name, project acronym, keyword or topic code.
2. Open a project fact sheet: you'll see total cost, EU contribution, coordinator, all participants with their individual contributions, start/end dates and the project objective.
3. For systematic work, skip the search UI and use the bulk open-data files: the full Horizon Europe project dataset is published as monthly-refreshed CSV/JSON/XLSX archives (e.g. cordis-HORIZONprojects-csv.zip, catalogued on data.europa.eu). The organization table gives one row per participant, including its EU contribution — this is where recipient-level amounts live.

Limitations to know:

• Monthly update cycle. The bulk datasets refresh roughly monthly, and newly signed grants take time to appear — CORDIS is weeks-to-months behind the actual grant signature, though far fresher than FTS.
• Research programmes only. Digital Europe, LIFE, EIC Fund equity investments and cohesion money are not in CORDIS. (EIC Accelerator grant components are.)
• Reuse is permitted — CORDIS data is CC BY 4.0 with attribution, per the CORDIS legal notice.

3. Kohesio — cohesion policy beneficiaries

What it covers: projects co-financed under shared management by the European Regional Development Fund, the Cohesion Fund, the European Social Fund and the Just Transition Fund. According to the data.europa.eu data story on Kohesio, the platform contains more than 1.7 million projects and roughly 500,000 beneficiaries for the 2014–2020 period, and is being progressively extended with 2021–2027 projects. Search at kohesio.eu.

How to search:

1. Search by beneficiary name, project keyword, country or region.
2. Each project page shows the beneficiary, total and EU-co-financed budget, fund, programme and location.

Limitations to know:

• Kohesio aggregates the "lists of operations" that managing authorities are obliged to publish; under 2014–2020 rules those lists must be updated at least every six months, and Kohesio's own FAQ acknowledges additional processing delay on top. Treat it as a periodically refreshed archive, not a feed.
• Data quality mirrors the source lists — names are not deduplicated across countries, and amounts follow national reporting conventions.

4. TED — public contracts, not grants

What it covers: TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) is the online Supplement to the EU's Official Journal, publishing over 3,000 public procurement notices every working day (about TED). It answers a different question: not "who received a grant" but "who won a public contract". Contract award notices name the winning supplier, the buyer, and (often) the contract value.

How to search:

1. Use the expert search to filter by notice type (contract award notices), buyer country, CPV product code and date.
2. For systematic monitoring, use the free, keyless Search API v3 or the daily bulk packages.

Limitations: TED only covers procurement above the EU thresholds (see our companion piece on grants vs procurement); below-threshold contracts are scattered across national portals. And a company that received a grant will not appear on TED unless it separately wins a public contract.

5. State-aid transparency and national registers

When a member state grants aid to a company under EU state-aid rules, individual awards exceeding EUR 100,000 must in most cases be published within six months of granting, per the Commission's aid-beneficiaries page. The central lookup is the State Aid Transparency Public Search, which records beneficiary name, region, sector, aid amount range, instrument and granting authority.

National sources fill remaining gaps: France publishes subsidy datasets on data.gouv.fr, the Netherlands' RVO publishes an open subsidy register, and Germany's Förderdatenbank — a common point of confusion — is a directory of funding programmes, not a register of recipients.

A worked routine: checking one company

1. FTS — search name variants; catch direct EU grants and contracts up to the last published year.
2. CORDIS — search the organisation; catch research grants, including recent ones FTS hasn't published yet, with per-project amounts and objectives.
3. Kohesio — catch regional/cohesion co-financing.
4. State Aid Transparency Public Search — catch national aid above EUR 100,000.
5. TED — check whether the company wins public contracts (a different signal, but often the more commercially interesting one).

Expect the same organisation to appear under different name spellings in each register, and expect the freshest events to be missing from the slowest registers.

When a tool helps

Manual lookups work well for checking one company. They stop working when you want the reverse query — "show me every organisation in my territory that received funding in the last 90 days" — or when you need name variants merged into one entity, or grant events matched to likely purchasing windows. That is a data-engineering problem: five registers, five schemas, five update cycles. It is the problem SubsidySignal was built to solve — we ingest FTS, CORDIS, Kohesio, TED and national registers continuously, resolve entities across them, and turn funding events into account-level signals for B2B sales teams. But even if you never use a tool, the five registers above are public, free, and reusable under open licences — and every claim a vendor makes should be checkable against them.

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Sources: Financial Transparency System · CORDIS and CORDIS open data · Kohesio and its data story · TED · State aid transparency. All EU datasets cited are reusable under CC BY 4.0 / Commission Decision 2011/833/EU with attribution.