The SNCI lends from €5,000 to €250,000 on a creation or transmission project, capped at 40% of it, and up to €25,000,000 on its medium and long-term loan, which runs to a maximum of 15 years. The structure matters more than the ceilings, though.
The SNCI is a co-financier: it takes a share of a project beside a commercial bank rather than in place of one, and several of its products are applied for at your own bank rather than at the SNCI at all. Founders who miss that arrive at the right institution with the wrong expectation.
A note before the figures. Where secondary summaries disagree with the SNCI's own published tables, snci.lu is the live document, and the tables it publishes for direct loans and indirect loans are where the amounts below come from.
The structural fact founders miss
The Société Nationale de Crédit et d'Investissement is a public-law banking institution whose mandate is financing Luxembourg businesses, not maximising a margin on them. That mandate is why its money is worth chasing, and the co-financing model is how it reaches you: your bank stays in the deal and keeps a share of the risk, and the SNCI's participation lifts the total package — amount, duration, terms — beyond what a young company would extract from the bank alone.
Which also means the SNCI does not rescue a project the bank has already declined for reasons of substance. It changes the arithmetic of a financeable project; it does not manufacture one. If the bank's objection is to the plan rather than to its own exposure, that objection travels.
The SNCI markets its lending under proStart, proDevelop, proInnovate and proTransfer. Those are packaging labels. Underneath them the loans keep their own names, and it is the loan name — not the programme name — that fixes the amount band, the share and the route.
Every product, with its band and its share
Every SNCI loan is defined on several axes at once: how much it will lend, how much of your project that amount is allowed to represent, and whether the request goes to the SNCI or to your own bank.
Reading the ceiling alone is how founders end up sizing a request against a limit that could never have applied to a project their size. The table below carries all of it, with the loans named as the SNCI names them rather than as the programmes brand them.
| Loan | Where it sits in the SNCI tables | Amount the SNCI lends | Cap on the SNCI's share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creation and transmission loan | Direct intervention | €5,000 – €250,000 | 40% |
| Medium and long-term loan (PMLT) | Direct intervention | €25,000 – €25,000,000 | — |
| Innovative enterprise loan (PEN) | Direct intervention | up to €1,500,000 | 35% |
| R&D and innovation loan (PRDI) | Direct intervention | up to €250,000 | 40% |
| Financing abroad | Direct intervention | up to €2,500,000 | — |
| Equipment credit | Indirect intervention | €12,500 – €2,500,000 | — |
| Indirect development loan (PID) | Indirect intervention | €12,500 – €25,000,000 | — |
A dash means this guide carries no percentage for that product. Read it as unknown rather than as unlimited, and get the SNCI's share on that product in writing before you size the rest of the stack around it.
Read the floors as attentively as the ceilings, because the floors are what actually exclude small projects. The creation and transmission loan starts at €5,000, the equipment credit at €12,500, the indirect development loan at €12,500, and the medium and long-term loan not until €25,000.
A modest fit-out or a machine purchase can sit below the floor of the product you assumed you wanted while sitting comfortably inside another product's band — and the gap between those products is also the gap between applying at the SNCI and applying at your bank.
The band and the share are separate constraints, and whichever bites first is the one that governs.
On the creation and transmission loan the 40% cap is what binds a small project: the SNCI's participation cannot exceed that proportion of the total, so the project has to be big enough for that share of it to clear the €5,000 floor before the loan is available at all, and bigger again before the €250,000 ceiling is the thing stopping you.
Founders size the loan they want and work backwards; the SNCI sizes the project and works forwards.
The conditions that disqualify people late
The conditions below do more damage than any ceiling, because they tend to surface after the plan has hardened.
The creation and transmission loan carries a minimum equity condition of 15%. A purchase financed entirely on borrowed money does not qualify, which is exactly the plan someone buying a small business tends to arrive with.
What that percentage is measured against — the total project, the acquisition price, the balance sheet after closing — is a question to put to the SNCI rather than to infer from the number, and the answer moves how much cash you have to find.
The innovative enterprise loan carries an age condition: a company of no more than 8 years. If yours is anywhere near that boundary, confirm with the SNCI the date the age is measured on before you plan the file around it. The assumption is free to make and expensive to be wrong about, and there is no version of this where finding out later is cheaper.
Where a loan beats a grant, and where it does not
A loan is repayable and a grant is not, which is the obvious difference and not the useful one. The useful difference is that grants cap and compete while debt is sized against the project in front of it: the medium and long-term loan reaches €25,000,000, so for an asset-heavy plan the loan side is usually where the real money sits.
The R&D and innovation loan is the counter-example. It tops out at €250,000 and covers at most 40%, which is modest against what a real development programme costs, so any serious R&D plan needs R&D co-funding or bank money standing beside it. Whether a specific cost line can carry both a grant and SNCI participation is a stacking question, and it is one you settle before the file is written rather than after.
There is also a product for financing abroad, with a ceiling of €2,500,000. What counts as an eligible foreign project is worth establishing with the SNCI early, because that answer decides whether the file is worth assembling at all.
Which door you knock on, and in what order
The commonest sequencing error is treating the SNCI as the opening move. For the equipment credit and the indirect development loan it cannot be: those are applied for through your own bank, which means the credit conversation you have to win is the one at your bank, and the SNCI's participation generally sits inside a file a bank has already taken a view on.
Arriving at the SNCI to ask for money routed through a bank rather than applied for directly wastes time you did not have.
Even on the direct loans the bank is rarely optional. On every product where a share cap is published, that cap sits well below the whole project, so something else is financing the remainder — equity, aid, or the bank. Deciding which, before anyone reads your numbers, is what separates a file that moves from a file that circulates.
Neither institution publishes a decision clock, so treat financing as a phase of the project with its own duration rather than as a formality at the end of one. The practical consequence is that the bank relationship should be open and the account working before the investment decision is urgent, not after.
Common questions
These are the questions founders ask once the ceilings stop being abstract, usually at the point they realise the bank alone will not carry the project.
Can a new company get an SNCI loan?
Yes. The creation and transmission loan runs from €5,000 to €250,000 at up to 40% of the project, with a minimum equity condition of 15%, and the innovative enterprise loan is open to companies of no more than 8 years, up to €1,500,000 and 35%. Newness is not the obstacle; an unfinanced remainder is.
Do you apply to the SNCI or to your bank?
Either can be right, and the product decides. The equipment credit and the indirect development loan go through your own bank; the creation and transmission loan, the medium and long-term loan, the innovative enterprise loan, the R&D loan and the financing-abroad product are direct. Either way a bank is normally in the deal, because where the SNCI publishes a cap on its share it is a fraction of the project rather than the whole of it.
How long can an SNCI loan run?
15 years is the maximum term on the SNCI's direct interventions, and the medium and long-term loan is the product that reaches it. Shorter products exist; nothing direct runs longer.
What actually sinks an application?
Adjectives where amounts belong, and a project file that does not match the one your bank is holding. Assessors read for a quantified investment schedule, a repayment story that survives a bad quarter, and consistency across every version of the plan in circulation. Inconsistency between the bank file, the SNCI file and any aid application is the most reliable way to stall every one of them at once.
What to have ready before you ask
- An investment schedule with amounts and dates, itemised, not summarised.
- The financing plan for the whole project — equity, bank, SNCI, aid — with the remainder after the SNCI's share explicitly allocated to someone.
- Your equity contribution identified and available, tested against the 15% condition if the creation and transmission loan is the target.
- The product chosen by amount band and route, so you know before the meeting whether you are talking to the SNCI or to your banker.
- Any age or eligibility condition confirmed in writing with the SNCI rather than assumed from a table, including this one.
Most of the work sits upstream of any meeting: assembling the project file and the annexes that travel with it once, so that the bank, the SNCI and every aid application read identical numbers, is what keeps the rest of it moving. For asset-heavy businesses the loan side is frequently the larger part of the answer, and it is the part that rewards being ready before anyone asks.