Brite Solar Versus Its EIC Accelerator Plan for Agrivoltaic Glass

Greenhouses grow far more food per hectare than open fields, and they burn far more energy doing it. Brite Hellas, a Thessaloniki company that trades as Brite Solar, spent a decade on a coating that lets a solar panel sit on a greenhouse roof without starving the plants underneath of light. On the May 2020 Green Deal cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, the European Commission selected it for blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity, for PanePowerSW, "a unique transparent (80%) solar glass panel". Brite Hellas is the only beneficiary named for the project in that list.

The proposal promised a great deal. It expected Brite to "enter the market in 2021, and sell at least 4 million m2 of solar glass (equivalent to over €160 M of cumulative revenue) by 2026", and projected a return of 7x or more on the EIC's equity at an exit "within 5-6 years", according to the project's CORDIS fact sheet. Six years on, the company is active, has a factory and counts the EIC Fund among its shareholders. Its filed accounts show revenue of €2.74 million across 2021 to 2025.

Where Brite Stands in 2026

The Greek business register lists Brite Hellas as active, with paid-in share capital of €1,758,154.50, a board elected on 17 February 2026 with a term running to January 2031, and approved 2025 accounts registered on 13 October 2026, according to its GEMI publicity record. North Data shows the same register number and address, and the company's EU grants. The 2025 accounts were prepared on a going-concern basis and the company is not in liquidation, according to the notes filed with them. No insolvency is recorded.

The company keeps publishing. Its news page lists items through 2026, including a July 2026 note on a raspberry study and an April 2026 report on an agrivoltaic banana farm in Gran Canaria, where it says 1,754 of its panels are mounted 6 metres above 1,500 banana plants for Grupo FSM, according to the company. That project could not be confirmed in an independent source, and the figures in it are projections.

The Technology: Glass That Turns UV Into Plant Light

Standard solar panels block the sun, which is why they sit on roofs and fields rather than over crops. Brite's panel combines silicon solar cells with a nanostructured coating on the glass. The CORDIS summary describes it as roughly 80% transparent and "uniformly transparent over the visible spectrum", so most crops can grow beneath it. The company's current product page says its patented nanocoating converts ultraviolet light into red light useful for photosynthesis, and that transparency can be set between 30% and 80% depending on the crop, according to Brite Solar. The EIC Scaling Club describes the same mechanism, panels that "convert harmful UV light into photosynthetically active light", in a May 2025 interview with Kanopoulos.

The trade-off is electricity. A panel that lets most light through generates less than an opaque module, a point Balkan Green Energy News made in 2024 when it reported that the company's agrisolar panels "perform less well than conventional modules". In its final EIC report, Brite set its product against conventional silicon and thin-film alternatives such as perovskite, organic and dye-sensitised cells, and claimed that PanePowerSW is "the only transparent PV solution to date" that harvests ultraviolet light for power, according to the CORDIS report. That claim is the company's own and was not independently tested in any source found for this article.

The project produced two patent filings in Brite's name dated 28 September 2021, one for a photovoltaic glass pane and one for an electrochromic glass pane, listed on the CORDIS results page. Whether they were granted is not stated there.

What the EIC Award Promised, and What the Record Shows

PanePowerSW was the last step of a long run through the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument. Brite received €50,000 for a Phase 1 feasibility study in 2017 (CORDIS 774717), then €1,491,783.13 for a Phase 2 project from March 2018 to February 2021 that put its glass on a 1,000 m² pilot greenhouse (CORDIS 804554). That project's final report claimed "the world's first crop production with a negative CO2 footprint per kg of crop produced", a claim no third party has checked.

The EIC Accelerator pilot award followed on the 19 May 2020 Green Deal cut-off. The grant agreement was signed on 5 November 2020, and the project ran from 1 December 2020 to 31 March 2023 with an EU contribution of €917,191.63 towards a total cost of €1,310,273.75, according to CORDIS. The proposal described itself as an application to the "EIC Accelerator Complementary Blended Finance program", meaning EIC equity alongside the grant.

The only periodic report on CORDIS covers December 2021 to March 2023, the end of the project. It says Brite spent the first year finalising and validating the nanocoating materials and had "started construction on the greenhouses" for an operational demonstration. It reports no sales volumes, no production line and no commercial deployment figures.

1. Enter the market in 2021Delivered€620,128 revenue in 2021 (GEMI); BayWa r.e. supply agreement, July 2022.
2. Validated nanocoating materialsDeliveredReported on CORDIS; two patent filings, September 2021.
3. Demonstration greenhouses in operationPartlyConstruction "started" by March 2023, per the final report; no completed results published.
4. 4 million m² of solar glass by 2026Not achievedCompany's own target is 200,000 m² by end of 2025 from its new plant; no sold area published.
5. Over €160M cumulative revenue by 2026Not achieved€2.74M booked from 2021 to 2025.
6. EIC equity exit at 7x within 5 to 6 yearsNot achievedNo exit announced; EIC Fund still listed as an investor.

The Money Since the Award

The EIC Fund's official list of invested companies includes "BRITE HELLAS", Greece, energy sector, with the same one-line description the Commission used in 2020. Brite's own investor page also lists the EIC Fund. So the equity half of the blended award was invested. The amount and date of the EIC Fund's first investment are not public.

The register filings show when fresh money came in. Paid-in capital and share premium rose from €1,293,450 at the end of 2022 to €3,731,586.16 at the end of 2023 and €4,974,517.97 at the end of 2024, according to the accounts filed with GEMI, which also records board certifications of paid-up capital increases in March and April 2024. On 22 February 2024 Brite announced that it had closed an €8.6 million Series A led by New Energy Capital, managed by New Energy Partners, with the EIC Fund, Brace 4 Impact and Deep Capital Group taking part, to build a semi-transparent PV line in Patras. The Recursive reported the €8.6 million round on 23 January 2024, and Balkan Green Energy News gave the same amount and investors. newmoney.gr put it at $9.3 million. The paid-in equity in the accounts is smaller than the headline round; how the rest was structured is not shown in the statements.

The factory followed. Spain's Mondragon Assembly built the line, and Brite commissioned it in Patras in February 2025 with a nameplate capacity of 150 MW, expandable to 300 MW, and targets of about 20 MW by the end of 2025 and 50 MW by 2027, according to PV Tech and TaiyangNews. TaiyangNews and the company's announcement both gave the workforce as 40 specialised engineers, to be doubled within months. Before the plant, the panels were sourced from China and India, according to Balkan Green Energy News and newmoney.gr.

The 2025 accounts are the first full year with the line running. Machinery on the balance sheet stood at €8,878,171.76, inventories appeared for the first time at €279,326.31, and revenue rose to €751,443.39 from €165,512.03 in 2024. Cost of sales, at €2,280,170.60, was three times revenue, and the year closed with a net loss of €1,654,838.32, cash of €85,652.38 and €1,306,366.23 of long-term loans. Equity fell to €7,938,349.08 from €9,593,187.40. Whether the 20 MW target for 2025 was met has not been published; revenue of €751,443 for the year does not point to it.

Customers, Partners and Other EU Projects

Brite has named partners rather than large customers. It signed a supply agreement with BayWa r.e. for Agri-PV projects in July 2022, with no volume or value disclosed. It lists pilot installations in Canada, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the United States, France, Spain, Romania and Singapore; the same ten countries appear in Balkan Green Energy News and newmoney.gr. PV Tech counted eight deployed projects across Europe in February 2025, two of them in Greece. The company joined the EIC Scaling Club in October 2024, a selection also reported by newmoney.gr.

Brite has stayed in EU research. It is a partner in SolarHub, a Greek-Turkish solar excellence hub running from 2023 to 2026, with €200,750 for Brite (CORDIS 101086110), and in GoodByO, a biorefinery project from October 2024 to March 2028, with €368,646.25 (CORDIS 101156486).

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's Solar Energy Strategy of May 2022 set a target of at least 600 GW of solar by 2030, and the Commission has since backed a European Solar PV Industry Alliance and a Solar Charter to support panel manufacturing in Europe, according to the Commission's solar energy page. Agrivoltaics is one way to reach that target without taking farmland out of food production: the Commission's Joint Research Centre calculated that panels on 1% of the EU's utilised agricultural area could add 944 GW, according to the JRC and PV Tech. A Greek line making panels with an in-house coating fits the push for European solar manufacturing; it is also small, with 20 MW targeted for 2025 against a market measured in hundreds of gigawatts.

The Verdict

Brite Hellas and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.