Driving Sustainable Innovation: Sensmet’s EU-Funded Projects
At Sensmet, we are committed to advancing real-time water chemistry and liquid process monitoring to support Europe’s green transition and industrial sovereignty. We are proud to highlight two key EU-funded projects driving our technology validation and global commercial scale-up: the EIT RawMaterials Booster and the EIC Accelerator 'AquaSpec'.
EIT RawMaterials Booster
Project Overview
Supported by the EIT RawMaterials Booster initiative, this project focuses on expanding the capabilities of Sensmet’s patented Micro-Discharge Optical Emission Spectroscopy (µDOES®) technology. The project targets fully automated, multi-metal quantitative measurement directly in aqueous solutions, specifically tailored for continuous process monitoring of critical battery minerals—such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and rare earth elements (REEs).
Why It Matters
Securing a resilient, sustainable, and transparent supply chain for critical minerals is essential to reaching Europe’s clean energy targets under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act. Traditional laboratory methods (like ICP-OES) rely on manual sampling and suffer from multi-hour or multi-day feedback delays. By bringing optical emission spectrometry directly online, µDOES® delivers continuous chemical intelligence at the point of value creation, optimizing hydrometallurgical yields, reducing chemical waste, and accelerating circular economy practices such as black mass recycling.
Investment Amount: €1,500,000
Core Focus: Continuous battery metal analysis and recycling process optimization
Acknowledgment
This activity has received funding from EIT RawMaterials, supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, under the Horizon Europe research and innovation framework.
Read the news article about the investment >
EIC Accelerator 'AquaSpec'
Project Overview
AquaSpec is a flagship initiative funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator under Horizon Europe. Building on early industrial validation, the AquaSpec project scales Sensmet’s breakthrough continuous measurement system into a mass-manufacturable, field-deployable commercial product designed for rigorous industrial water and liquid chemical monitoring across international markets.
Why It Matters
Real-time elemental analysis of liquids represents a major bottleneck across strategic manufacturing, municipal water treatment, and environmental monitoring. The µDOES® technology solves this challenge by generating controlled electric micro-discharges directly inside a liquid sample stream—flash-heating microscopic volumes to temperatures exceeding $10,000 °C to produce instant atomic emission spectra. This provides industrial operators with laboratory-grade elemental concentrations every few minutes, enabling closed-loop process control and immediate detection of chemical fluctuations.
Grant Amount: €2,500,000
Grant Agreement ID: 101298437
The EIC in a nutshell
The European Innovation Council (EIC) was established by the European Commission in 2021, following a successful three-year pilot phase. It has a mission to identify, develop and scale up breakthrough technologies and disruptive innovation. It has a budget over €10 billion for the period 2021-2027.
The funding and support is organised into three main funding schemes covering all technology readiness levels:
- EIC Pathfinder for advanced research to develop the scientific basis to underpin breakthrough technologies
- EIC Transition to validate technologies and develop business plans for specific applications
- EIC Accelerator to support companies (SMEs, start-ups, spin-outs and in exceptional cases small mid-caps) to bring their innovations to market and scale up.
The Accelerator provides a combination of grant support and direct equity investments in companies through a dedicated EIC Fund, which also provides a platform for co-investments with other investors.
For all schemes, the direct financial support is augmented with access to a range of Business Acceleration Services.
The strategy and implementation of the EIC is overseen by the EIC Board of twenty individuals from the innovation ecosystem; academia, business, investment, ecosystem builders. The EIC also employs dedicated Programme Managers with high-level expertise in their fields to set the challenges and proactively manage portfolios of projects towards technological breakthroughs.
Acknowledgment and EU Disclaimer
Co-funded by the European Union under EIC Accelerator Grant Agreement No. 101298437. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
