EU export grants beyond LIAA for Latvian SMEs (2026)

Ask a Latvian founder what export funding exists and you’ll hear one word: LIAA. Fair — LIAA administers most of it. But the actual 2026 map has three layers worth knowing, and two of them get far less attention than they deserve: free Enterprise Europe Network services, the Export Support Activities Plan (60% co-funding, up to €40,000 a year)^[1], and — for a small minority — Horizon Europe and the EIC. Everything else you’ll find in funding roundups is either a closed programme, a programme for other countries, or money that has nothing to do with export.

And here is the honest frame this article is built on: grants reimburse spending; they don’t create customers. EU money is excellent at halving the cost of things you were going to do anyway — exhibitions, certification, market research. It is terrible at speed. If what you need is signal — does anyone in this market want what I sell? — chasing a grant first is often the slower, more expensive path. We’ll do the math below.

The 2026 export funding map — and what’s not on it

The map is short: EEN for free services, the Export Support Activities Plan for actual money, and Horizon/EIC for deep tech. Knowing what’s not on the map saves you more time than knowing what is.

What’s closed. The programme most founders remember — “Starptautiskās konkurētspējas veicināšana”, the old scheme that reimbursed up to 80% of export marketing costs — stopped accepting payment requests on 30 June 2023 because its funding was exhausted. Over its lifetime it supported 3,211 companies with a €41.37 million budget. If a consultant pitches you “the 80% LIAA programme” in 2026, they’re selling you 2022.

What’s for other countries. EU4Business shows up in almost every generic “EU funding for SMEs” listicle. It is the EU’s private-sector support initiative for Eastern Partnership countries — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine. A company registered in Latvia is not its audience. Cross it off.

What’s actually open. The 2021–2027 EU funds period runs export support through LIAA’s SME innovative business development programme (roughly €73 million across all its directions), of which the Export Support Activities Plan is the piece an exporting SME can touch directly. Plus EEN, which costs nothing. Plus EIC, which is real money for the few companies it fits.

One caveat that applies to everything below: programmes change and funding pots run dry mid-year — the old 80% scheme died exactly that way. Verify current call status on liaa.gov.lv and business.gov.lv before you plan around any number here.

Enterprise Europe Network: the free layer most founders skip

EEN is free, it’s hosted in Latvia at LIAA, and almost nobody uses it deliberately. The network spans more than 600 member organisations in over 60 countries, and its services — advice on foreign markets and EU legislation, cooperation-partner search, matchmaking and brokerage events, help identifying which EU funding fits your case — are provided free of charge to SMEs.

What it’s genuinely good for:

• Regulatory and market questions with a factual answer. Labelling requirements in Germany, VAT treatment of your service in Sweden, what certification a Polish buyer will ask for — EEN advisers either know or can route the question to the partner office in that country.
• Distributor and partner search. The network runs a partnering database of companies actively looking for suppliers, distributors and technology partners. Response quality varies, but the price is zero.
• Matchmaking events. Sector B2B events where meetings are pre-scheduled. For a founder who has never sold abroad, one day of speed-dating with foreign buyers is a cheap education.

What it won’t do: build your pipeline. EEN connects you to companies that registered interest in being found. Your actual buyers — the ones with the problem you solve, who never heard of the database — are not in it. Treat EEN as free research and legal-question infrastructure, not as a lead source.

The Export Support Activities Plan: where the actual money is

This is the main instrument in 2026: 60% co-funding of listed export activities, up to €40,000 per company per year as de minimis aid, capped at 30% of your previous year’s net turnover. It’s administered by LIAA through business.gov.lv under the EU funds 2021–2027 SME programme.

The eligible activity list, with per-activity caps, is concrete:

• Participation in international exhibitions, conferences and trade fairs
• Marketing materials — up to €5,000
• Product certification and conformity assessment for a target market
• Organising an international conference in Latvia — up to €12,000 per event
• Trademarks and branding strategy — up to €5,000
• Advertising campaigns for a product launch — up to €5,000
• Market research — up to €8,000
• Telemarketing services for finding cooperation partners — up to €8,000

That last line deserves attention, because it’s the closest the eligible-cost list gets to outbound sales work: the state will co-fund 60% of structured partner-search outreach. Together with the market-research line, a company can in principle get several thousand euros back on the research-and-contact phase of market entry.

Who qualifies: SMEs by the EU definition (Regulation 651/2014) that score the minimum on quality criteria, have completed at least one financial year, and have no tax debt above €1,000. Some sectors are excluded — wholesale/retail trade, financial intermediation (fintech excepted), commercial real estate, gambling, tobacco, primary agriculture and fishing. And the parent programme deliberately targets medium-high-tech, high-tech and knowledge-intensive service sectors — if you’re a plain trading company, read the criteria before you spend a week on the application.

How it works mechanically — and this matters for your cash flow: you register on business.gov.lv, submit an activity plan, LIAA evaluates it (up to 24 working days), you sign an umbrella agreement, then you execute and pay for the activities yourself, and claim reimbursement afterwards with a payment request. This is not money up front. It’s a discount you collect later, with documentation.

Timing: applications are accepted until 31 December 2026 — or until the funding runs out, whichever comes first. Given how the predecessor programme ended, “whichever comes first” is not a theoretical clause.

For the digitalisation side of EU funds — CRM, sales-automation platforms, the measure we used ourselves — see our separate LIAA support guide.

Horizon Europe and the EIC: real money, wrong tool for most

The EIC Accelerator offers up to €2.5 million in grant plus up to €10 million in equity — and for perhaps 95% of exporting Latvian SMEs it is simply not the relevant instrument. It funds breakthrough, high-risk innovation by startups and SMEs (under 250 employees) in EU and Horizon-associated countries, with several application cut-offs during 2026. Competition is brutal, the process runs through a full pitch-and-jury cycle, and “we want to sell our existing product in Germany” is precisely what it does not fund.

When it is relevant: you have genuinely novel technology, you need capital to finish and scale it, and export is a consequence of the product rather than the goal of the application. In that case the money is transformative — and EEN advisers, among others, help companies figure out whether they’re a realistic fit before they burn six months on an application.

For everyone else, the honest summary of Horizon Europe in an export context is one sentence: it funds innovation, not market entry, and pretending your market-entry plan is innovation wastes everyone’s time.

Stacking: de minimis is your real ceiling

Here is the part almost every funding roundup skips: most SME grants — the export plan included — are de minimis aid, and since 1 January 2024 the ceiling is €300,000 per single undertaking over any rolling three-year period (Regulation (EU) 2023/2831, in force until 2030; the previous limit was €200,000).

Three practical consequences:

1. Everything draws from one pot. The export activities plan, digitalisation support, training grants — every euro of de minimis aid from any programme counts against the same €300,000. “Stacking” instruments is allowed; exceeding the ceiling is not, and the ceiling is per company, not per programme.
2. “Single undertaking” includes linked companies. If your holding structure has three SIAs under common control, they share one ceiling. Plan group-wide, not entity-wide.
3. The window rolls. The three years are counted back from each new grant, not by calendar or fiscal-year buckets. Before planning 2026 applications, have your accountant pull your current de minimis balance — a grant you took in 2024 is still on the books.

For a typical small exporter, €300,000 over three years is a generous ceiling and never binds. For a company that has taken a large digitalisation grant, it can quietly block the export plan application — better to discover that in an afternoon than in a rejection letter.

When grants are not worth chasing

The uncomfortable math: for early-stage export questions, the grant route is often slower and net-more-expensive than just buying the answer.

Take the most outreach-adjacent line in the plan — telemarketing partner search, €8,000 cap at 60%. Best case, you get €4,800 back. To get it, you: prepare and submit an activity plan, wait up to 24 working days for evaluation, sign the agreement, procure and pay the full amount yourself, execute, compile the payment request with documentation, and wait for reimbursement. Realistically you’re spreading founder-attention across two to four months of administration — before any buyer has said a word to you. And the reporting obligations don’t end when the money arrives.

Compare the question you were actually trying to answer: will anyone in this market talk to us? A 22-day Sales Pilot (€1,500) answers it with a verified list, localized copy in the market’s language, and real reply data — we run outreach in five languages (EN/RU/LV/DE/ES) and our campaigns get 5–9% reply rates against an industry median around 1%. Market Testing (€3,000) answers a harder question — which of two segments deserves your year — in the same timeframe. Neither requires an activity plan, an umbrella agreement, or a 24-day evaluation queue.

The rule we give clients after 14 years and 500+ campaigns in this business:

Use grants for capital, not for signal. Exhibitions, certification, conference stands, branding — capital-heavy items you’ve already decided on, where 60% back is pure margin. Validation — does this market want us at all — should be bought fast and cheap, because its whole value is that it arrives before you commit capital.

The worst pattern we see is the inverse: a founder spends spring on an application, autumn on an exhibition stand co-funded at 60%, and only then discovers — standing at the stand — that the market wanted a different offer. The grant paid for the lesson, but a €1,500 pilot in March would have taught it cheaper and six months earlier.

A practical sequence for 2026

If you’re a Latvian SME planning export in 2026, the sequence that uses each layer for what it’s good at:

1. Ask EEN the factual questions first — it’s free. Regulation, certification, market structure in your target country. Zero cost, and it de-risks everything downstream.
2. Buy signal before capital. Run a small, fast validation — ours is a 22-day Sales Pilot at €1,500, or Market Testing at €3,000 to compare two segments — and let real replies pick your market and message.
3. Point grant money at the capital-heavy items the pilot justified. Once you know the market and the offer, the export plan’s 60% on exhibitions, certification and marketing materials is excellent value — apply while the 2026 window is open, and remember funds can run out before 31 December.
4. Check your de minimis balance before you promise anyone anything. One afternoon with your accountant; it’s the ceiling that actually binds.

Grants and outreach aren’t rivals — they’re different tools with different clocks. The founders who do 2026 well will use the free layer, validate cheaply, and let EU money amplify a motion they’ve already proven. If step two is the one you want run with structure and real data, that’s the pilot we’ve built our whole service around.