In our work with founders and growth companies, one pattern comes up again and again in the creative sector: the work is strong, the team is talented, the market is real – but the company has never seriously looked at public funding. There is often a quiet assumption that grants, loans and incentives are “for tech startups” or “for industry”, not for a music label, a film production house, a photo studio, a games studio or a design agency.

That assumption costs money.
The creative economy is one of the largest and most strategically relevant sectors in both Germany and Austria, and the funding landscape reflects that. There are programmes built specifically for music, film, video, photography, gaming, design and digital media, alongside the broader innovation, digitalisation and growth instruments that creative companies are just as eligible for as anyone else.

This article is a practical overview of what exists, what to watch out for, and how to think about funding if you run a creative business.

Why creative businesses should take funding seriously
The creative and cultural economy is not a niche. In Germany, roughly 238,000 companies and freelancers make up the sector, employing around two million people and generating about €123 billion in gross value added, more than mechanical engineering, financial services or the chemical industry. In Austria, the creative industries account for over 80,000 companies, more than 214,000 employees and around €31 billion in annual turnover – that’s 13.3% of all businesses in the country.

Governments know this. That is exactly why public funding exists: it is a way for the state to support innovation, jobs, cultural value, digital transformation and international competitiveness and the creative economy delivers on all of these.

For a creative business, the practical effect is simple. Funding can cover a meaningful share of a project you are planning anyway – a new production, a market launch, an international expansion, a digital product, a studio investment. It reduces financial risk and frees up cash flow. Most of it is non-dilutive, meaning you don’t give away equity to receive it.

In our experience, the issue is rarely eligibility. It is awareness, positioning and timing.

The main types of funding, in plain terms
Before looking at specific programmes, it helps to understand the four basic forms funding takes. Most creative businesses will use a combination.

Grants are non-repayable money tied to a specific project. They typically cover anywhere from 25% to 80% of eligible project costs, depending on the programme and your company size. This is usually the most attractive instrument for creative companies, and it is where most sector-specific funding sits.

Subsidised loans are low-interest financing, often via public banks, designed for growth and investment when a grant doesn’t fit. They have to be repaid, but on far better terms than a commercial bank would offer.

Tax incentives reward certain activities – most notably research and development – through the tax system rather than a separate application. Austria’s research premium (Forschungsprämie) refunds 14% of eligible R&D spending and is one of the most generous in Europe; Germany has its equivalent in the Forschungszulage. These matter more for creative businesses than people assume: software, tools, formats and technical development often qualify. (Sources: Germany, Austria)

Sector-specific funds are the dedicated pots for film, games and music. These are the programmes most creative companies should know first, because they are built around how creative production actually works.

What’s available, sector by sector
This is where it becomes concrete. Below is a practical map of the most relevant instruments across the main creative fields, in both Germany and Austria.

Film, video and audiovisual
Film is the most heavily funded creative sector, and it is going through a significant moment in Germany. Federal incentive funding through the DFFF and the German Motion Picture Fund is being roughly doubled to around €250 million for 2026, with total federal film support of about €310 million and funding quotas raised to 30%. A planned tax incentive model is still under political negotiation, so this is a space where what’s available genuinely changes from year to year. On top of the federal level, every German Land runs its own regional film funding.

In Austria, the picture is similarly active. FISAplus, the federal incentive scheme administered alongside ABA / Film in Austria, is funded with €50 million for 2026, complementing the work of the Austrian Film Institute. For producers, Austria has become an increasingly attractive location precisely because of these instruments.

For audiovisual companies, the message is: production funding, incentive schemes and regional film funds can be stacked, and the amounts are substantial. But they are also competitive and procedurally demanding.

Gaming
Games funding is one of the clearest success stories and one of the most generous instruments in the entire creative economy. Germany’s federal games funding, administered by the DLR Projektträger on behalf of the research ministry, has €125 million budgeted for 2026. It covers between 25% and 50% of development costs – up to 50% for startups, 45% for SMEs and 25% for large companies – for projects with a minimum budget of €300,000. Crucially, the grant doesn’t have to be repaid whether the game becomes a hit or a flop.

There are two things every studio should note. First, the application must be submitted before the project starts, and it includes a cultural test and a mandatory pre-submission review. Second, there are excellent regional and early-stage options too, for example, Gamecity Hamburg’s Games Lift incubator and the prototype funding of up to €80,000 per project run through the Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft.

In Austria, games sit within the broader creative-industries funding architecture, particularly the aws programmes described below, which explicitly include gaming.

Music
For music companies, labels, publishers and self-releasing artists, dedicated funds exist on both sides of the border.

In Austria, the Austrian Music Fund (Österreichischer Musikfonds) is open to songwriters, performers, producers, publishers and labels based in Austria, across all genres. It funds up to 50% of production costs for albums and multi-track releases, with separate support for music videos (up to €5,000), marketing (up to €3,000), an impulse programme (up to €7,000 per year) and tour support for domestic touring. Alongside it, Austrian Music Export helps artists and music companies build international visibility.

In Germany, Initiative Musik is the central federal vehicle, and from March 2026 it is launching a reworked international export funding programme for music companies under its German Music Export brand, with fixed application rounds and flexible budgets for international positioning, branch events, co-writing formats and marketing abroad.

Photography, design, fashion, architecture and digital media
These fields rarely have a single dedicated “fund”, but they are well served by cross-sector creative-industries programmes – and this is where a lot of money goes unclaimed simply because companies don’t realise they qualify.

In Austria, the standout is aws Creative Impact / aws Seedfinancing – Innovative Solutions, which provides up to €400,000 for creative companies developing innovations with broader social or economic impact. It explicitly covers gaming, design, fashion, architecture, digital media and the exploitation of film and music. In Vienna, the Vienna Business Agency (Wirtschaftsagentur Wien) runs dedicated creative-industries project and market-entry funding, an innovation grant, a founder stipend and the Vienna Media Initiative for media projects, a genuinely deep regional offering for creative businesses.

In Germany, the picture is more decentralised. The federal creative-industries initiative and its competence centre signpost the options, while regional players run their own grants and competitions throughout the year, for example the Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft (Germany’s largest municipal creative funder) and Saxony-Anhalt’s “Digital Creativity” programme, which is aimed squarely at design, games, film and music companies. Broader innovation instruments like the IGP programme for new business models are open to creative companies too.

The funding most creative businesses forget exists.

Sector funds are the obvious place to look. But when we map the full landscape the bigger surprise is how much general business, innovation and start-up funding is open to creative companies who never think to apply.

A few categories are worth knowing about specifically:
Start-up and founder grants are widely available and frequently list the creative industries as eligible. Examples include the Gründungsstipendium NRW, Saxony’s InnoStartBonus, Lower Saxony’s NBank founder stipend, Berlin’s GründungsBONUS and Pro FIT early-stage funding, and Hamburg’s InnoFounder (up to €75,000) and InnoRampUp (up to €150,000). Austria has the equivalent through aws JumpStart and regional start-up schemes in Vienna, Tyrol and Salzburg.

Digitalisation grants are some of the easiest wins. Programmes like Digitalbonus Bayern, Hessen’s DIGI-Zuschuss and equivalents in most German states, plus Austria’s KMU.DIGITAL, typically cover up to 50% of investments in software, e-commerce, cybersecurity or AI tools – a photo studio, a design agency or a label all qualify for the same support a manufacturer does.

Subsidised consulting can fund the strategy work itself. Germany’s BAFA “Förderung unternehmerischen Know-hows” covers 50–80% of professional business consulting, and most regions have similar coaching grants.

Loans and guarantees round it out. The KfW ERP loans in Germany and the aws ERP loan and aws guarantees in Austria are explicitly open across sectors, including the creative economy, for growth, investment and succession.

The pattern is clear: creative businesses don’t only have “creative funding”. They have access to the entire economic-development toolkit – they just have to be positioned correctly to use it.

A common mistake is to think only nationally. For many creative businesses, EU programmes are not only relevant but specifically designed for them.

Creative Europe is the EU’s flagship programme for the cultural and creative sectors, with a budget of €380 million for 2026 across three strands: Culture (everything except audiovisual), MEDIA (the audiovisual sector, including elements of gaming) and a cross-sectoral strand. Its 2026 call for European Cooperation Projects alone carries €60 million and is expected to fund around 150 projects spanning music, heritage, architecture, literature, design and fashion, with a deadline of 5 May 2026. On the audiovisual side, MEDIA’s co-development support funds projects at a rate of 70%.

Beyond Creative Europe, creative companies can also tap into Horizon Europe (especially around cultural heritage and digital innovation), the Digital Europe Programme and regional ERDF/EFRE funds.

The catch with EU funding is that it usually rewards cross-border cooperation and partnerships. That makes it more complex to structure, but also a powerful way to fund ambition that goes beyond a single national market.

What to watch out for
Knowing the programmes is the easy part. In our experience, this is where most creative businesses lose funding they could have won.

Apply before you start. This is the single most painful and most avoidable mistake. In most programmes, including games funding the application must be submitted before the project begins. If you sign contracts, issue invoices or start work too early, those costs can become ineligible. Talk about funding while the project is still being planned, not after the budget is committed.

You can combine programmes, but never double-fund the same cost. Stacking instruments (say, a regional grant plus a federal loan plus a tax incentive) is often possible and can dramatically improve a financing mix. What is almost always forbidden is funding the same cost item from two sources. Combinations work only with a clean separation of costs, which means the financing plan has to be structured deliberately from the start.

“Not explicitly listed” doesn’t mean “not eligible”. Many programmes don’t name the creative industries in their guidelines, yet are fully open to them, eligibility is then decided case by case. The flip side is that you can’t assume; a quick eligibility check before investing time in an application saves a lot of wasted effort.

Don’t let the “creative” framing hide the substance. Creative companies are sometimes too modest about the innovative or technical side of their work. A new production pipeline, a data-driven distribution strategy, a proprietary tool, a new format or business model – these are exactly what evaluators are looking for. The innovation doesn’t only need to exist; it needs to be made visible to someone who doesn’t know your field.

Match the programme to the project, not the other way around. A games studio, a touring band and a design agency need very different instruments. Picking the wrong programme can cost weeks or months. The right question is never “which grant sounds attractive?” but “which instrument fits this project, this company and this timing?”

Treat the budget as part of the case. Every cost should be clearly linked to a project activity. Vague positions, ineligible expenses and budgets built from internal assumptions rather than the programme’s cost logic are a frequent reason applications come back weaker than they should.

Show impact beyond your own company. Public funding is tied to broader goals, cultural value, jobs, international competitiveness, digital transformation, sustainability. “This helps our business” is rarely enough on its own. Show what changes if the project succeeds.

Don’t underestimate documentation. Approval is not the finish line. Many programmes require ongoing reporting, cost tracking and timesheets, especially where personnel costs are funded. Keeping this up to date monthly is far easier than reconstructing it at the end.

Why a specialist partner matters, especially in the creative sector.

There is a specific reason expert support is valuable for creative businesses, beyond the general benefits of having a funding partner.

The creative economy sits at an awkward intersection. Its funding landscape is unusually fragmented – split across culture ministries, economic-development agencies, sector funds, regional bodies and EU programmes, each with its own logic and language. With well over 200 distinct funding lines across Germany and Austria alone, the hard part is rarely the lack of options; it’s knowing which two or three actually fit your project, company and timing. At the same time, creative founders are usually brilliant at their craft and far less interested in funding mechanics, eligibility rules and reporting requirements. That’s a perfectly reasonable place to be, but it’s exactly the gap where good projects fail to get funded.

A specialist partner doesn’t just “fill out forms”. The real value is in assessing whether a project is fundable in the first place, choosing the right instrument from a confusing landscape, structuring the project to match the evaluation logic, sharpening the narrative so the innovation and impact are visible, preparing a realistic and eligible budget, and managing the process from strategy to submission and through the reporting that follows.

For a creative business, that can be the difference between leaving money on the table and financing a project that moves the company forward.

Where to start
If you run a creative business in music, film, video, photography, gaming, design or any related field and you are planning a production, a launch, an investment or an international move in the next year, it is worth checking the funding potential early. The best time to look is before the project starts, not after.

At Kodex Capital, we help creative companies turn projects into fundable ones. We assess eligibility, identify the right national, regional and EU instruments for your situation, and support the full application process, from strategy to submission. We are listed as subsidised business consultants at WKO Vienna, BAFA and KMU Digital, and our focus across the DACH region means we know how the creative funding landscape actually works in practice.

Book a free consultation or complete our short Funding Assessment, and we’ll review your project and come back to you with an initial evaluation.