Sensmet wins €2.5m award from the EIC Accelerator fund

Photonics Finland member company Sensmet, the Finnish developer of a unique water quality monitoring technology, has been awarded a €2.5m grant in the latest round of the EIC Accelerator. The EIC award is recognised as a mark of excellence, and builds on a recently announced additional investment of €1.5m.

Sensmet CEO, Dr Toni Laurila (Photo credit: Sensmet)

Key points:

• Strategic impact: Continuous monitoring of lithium, cobalt, and nickel enables more efficient production/recycling of critical materials.
• Sensmet project objective: Improve versatility of the µDOES® technology.
• Investment landscape: This €2.5m award builds on €1.5m additional investment from EIT RawMaterials.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) is the European Union’s flagship innovation programme designed to identify, develop, and scale up breakthrough technologies and game-changing innovations. Established under the EU Horizon Europe programme with a budget of over €10 billion (2021–2027), EIC supports researchers and startups that enhance green and digital transition. Sensmet’s technology directly aligns with the objectives of the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, and has received funding from the EIC under grant agreement No. 101298437. Sensmet signed the EIC grant Agreement on 29^th May 2026.

Founded in 2017, Sensmet has developed and commercialized technology for the continuous, real-time multi-metal analysis of aqueous samples. Employing patented Micro-Discharge Optical Emission Spectroscopy (µDOES®), Sensmet products are particularly well suited for strategic materials production and recycling, including battery metals and rare earth elements (REEs). They are also ideal for high-value, ultra-sensitive applications such as monitoring residual palladium after catalytic processes.

Commenting on the award, Sensmet CEO Dr Toni Laurila said: “The EIC Accelerator is one of the most competitive deep-tech SME funding instruments in Europe, so this award represents powerful third-party validation of both our technology and our commercial roadmap. More specifically, this award will primarily be used to advance µDOES, further improving its capability to enable customers to perform high-precision measurements directly at the point of value creation, where real-time chemical intelligence has the highest impact.”

Explaining the scale-up potential of µDOES technology, Dr Laurila said: “There are two clear factors underpinning the enormous potential that this represents. First, continuous multi-metal analysis offers substantial process, financial and environmental benefits in critical processes. Metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel for example, are essential for batteries, renewable energy systems, and advanced manufacturing. 

“Second, the traditional approach to metal measurements in liquid processes has involved sampling for laboratory analysis, which incurs delays and causes inefficiency. Continuous measurements with µDOES completely resolves these issues.”

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