Acosense: The EIC Accelerator Acoustic Sensor That Ran Out of Cash

Pulp mills, paper machines and chemical plants pump liquids that are hard to measure: hot, opaque, viscous or corrosive. Acosense AB, a Gothenburg company registered in 2009, built an instrument that clamps onto the outside of a pipe, sends sound through the fluid and reads its properties from how the signal changes. In the European Commission's list of winners of the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the pilot that became the EIC Accelerator, it is the only beneficiary named for the ACOSENSE project. The EU contributed €1,371,302.63 to a project costing €1,959,003.75, according to CORDIS.

The project ran from October 2019 to March 2022. In February 2023 the board decided to file for bankruptcy at the Gothenburg District Court, saying it had not been possible to reverse the company's negative results and cash flow, according to Aktiespararna. Trading in the shares was halted on 23 February 2023 and the company was delisted from Spotlight Stock Market after the close on 27 February, according to the exchange's trading halt notice and delisting notice.

A Closed Bankruptcy and a Lost Domain

Acosense no longer exists as an operating company. The Swedish company register, as shown by Ratsit, records the status "Konkurs avslutad 2024-10-04", a bankruptcy concluded on 4 October 2024, with no board, chief executive or employer registration left. North Data marks the company as terminated. The credit agency Syna still shows the earlier status "Försatt i konkurs" (declared bankrupt), without a closing date. Who bought the instruments, patents or software from the bankruptcy estate, if anyone, could not be found in any public source.

The company's web address, acosense.com, which the EC winner list and the company's own reports gave as its site, now forwards to a Swedish-language casino review page, an HTTP check in October 2026 showed. The domain has evidently passed to an unrelated owner.

The Technology: Listening to a Pipe

Acosense called its method active acoustic spectroscopy. An actuator on the outside of a pipe sends an acoustic signal through the fluid; the way the fluid damps and alters the sound is linked to properties such as dry solids content, density, viscosity and particle size. Because nothing touches the fluid, the instrument can be fitted without stopping production and serviced while the line runs, according to a 2012 Pulp & Paper News report on the Skapa innovation award the company won that year. The signal processing relied on statistics and machine learning, developed in part with the Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centre from 2013.

The established alternatives are probes inserted into the process stream and samples taken to a laboratory. Inserted sensors foul or wear in hot, abrasive pulp liquors, and laboratory samples arrive late. Acosense's pitch was continuous, real-time readings in places where, as its Phase 1 project summary put it, analysis had been "considered difficult or impossible". The ACOSENSE objective claimed 10 international patents and seven years of development behind the technology, which it rated at technology readiness level 7.

Whether the measurements matched or beat inserted instruments in independent tests could not be verified: no peer-reviewed comparison or third-party evaluation is public. The company's own customer list, cited by Swedish business press, included BillerudKorsnäs, SCA and Stora Enso, with about 30 installations; that claim comes from Affärsvärlden and could not be checked against a second source.

What the EIC Project Promised

The ACOSENSE grant agreement was signed on 6 September 2019, three months after the cut-off. The project's aim was to "launch into the market" the platform for the pulp and paper and chemical industries in Europe and Latin and South America, generating "cumulative net profits of €32 million during 2022-2026" and creating 19 jobs, according to CORDIS. Acosense told shareholders the project was worth €2 million with €1.4 million of grant, and would spread knowledge of its products and develop its offer through installations at several mills, with machine learning in the software and business development, in its 2019 year-end report.

The final periodic report, covering October 2020 to March 2022, lists technical work rather than sales. Acosense added applications for heavy oil, quality indicators at a board machine and detection of mixed pulp. It removed a plastic backing around the actuator to make a high-temperature version and to help the variant for explosive atmospheres, made stiffening rings on the pipe standard in all new installations to cut noise from nearby pumps, studied frequency tracking to improve density estimates, and simplified installation so that partners could fit the instrument. The report says Covid-19 had "big effects on the progress", mainly because staff could not visit customer sites. It closes with a forward-looking goal of 10 new full-time staff within three years and 500 units, not with results achieved. The only deliverable on the CORDIS results page is a revamped website, the address that now points to a casino page.

1. Certification for explosive environmentsDeliveredEx approval for zones 1 and 2 by DNV GL Presafe, autumn 2019, per the 2019 year-end report.
2. New applications beyond pulpDeliveredFirst petrochemical installation with Borealis, 2020; heavy oil and board machine applications in the final report.
3. Market launch in Europe and the AmericasPartlyUK installations and South American sales reported in Q4 2021, per Börsvärlden; net sales stayed around SEK 1M a year.
4. €32M cumulative net profit, 2022 to 2026Not achievedNet loss of SEK 5.6 million in 2021; bankrupt in February 2023.
5. 19 new jobsNot achievedStaff rose from 7 to 10, then all jobs ended in the bankruptcy.

The project was delivered on schedule in the narrow sense: CORDIS shows it closed on its planned end date of 31 March 2022, and the hardware advanced. The commercial goals the grant was meant to unlock did not follow.

The Money: Grants Bigger Than Sales

Acosense's sales were small throughout. Net sales were SEK 1,247,000 in 2019 and SEK 1,063,000 in 2020, while grant income from the Swedish Energy Agency, Vinnova, the Västra Götaland region and Horizon 2020 was SEK 2,668,000 in 2019, according to the 2019 and 2020 year-end reports. Total income in the 2020 annual accounts was SEK 11.34 million, according to hitta.se (Dun & Bradstreet data) and Ratsit, which puts grant and other income at roughly ten times sales that year. According to the 2020 year-end report, the company drew SEK 5.6 million from the H2020 project in the autumn of 2020 alone.

The two register services disagree on total income for 2021: hitta.se gives SEK 9,875,000 and Ratsit SEK 6.8 million. Both give the same net loss of SEK 5,618,000 and 10 employees. Net sales for the full year 2021 could not be confirmed from a primary source; the fourth quarter brought SEK 0.4 million, according to Börsvärlden.

Shareholders covered the gap. The company raised SEK 13.5 million before costs in a rights issue in mid-2019, 72% of the SEK 18.7 million sought, according to the offer announcement and the 2019 year-end report, and about SEK 8.0 million in a directed issue in December 2020, plus about SEK 1.7 million from warrants, according to the 2020 report. Its 2017 listing had drawn SEK 60.8 million of subscriptions for a SEK 12 million offer, according to Aktiespararna.

In the third quarter of 2022 Acosense reported its best quarterly sales ever, SEK 0.9 million, including the largest single order in its history, under new chief executive Anders Toftmark. In the same quarter its equity ratio fell to 18% from 71% a year earlier and long-term debt rose to SEK 7.0 million, according to Börsvärlden. In early February 2023 the board said that since mid-2022 it had looked for mergers, acquisitions and new money from shareholders without success, and proposed voluntary liquidation, according to Realtid. Two weeks later it filed for bankruptcy instead. "The company should have acted four years ago," board chair Lars Alervall told Aktiespararna, adding that a turnaround would have required buying a business that generated cash.

Why It Mattered to Europe

The European Commission describes pulp and paper as "energy and raw materials intensive" and counts forest-based industries at about 7% of EU manufacturing output, on its forest-based industries page. Better process measurement is one of the cheaper ways to save energy, chemicals and wood in such plants, and ACOSENSE was funded under Horizon 2020's industrial leadership pillar on that logic. The company's own numbers in the CORDIS report, such as €221,520 a year in energy savings for a typical digester, are its estimates; no customer published results that confirm them.

The Verdict

This article is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout. The bankruptcy estate and the former management have not been asked for comment.