BTRY, an EIC Accelerator Winner, Plans a Thin-Film Battery Plant

BTRY sets out from three weaknesses of the conventional lithium-ion battery: it recharges slowly, its liquid electrolyte can burn, and it copes badly with heat. The 2023 spin-off of Empa and ETH Zurich in Dübendorf builds its cells from layers a few micrometres thick, deposited in a vacuum and stacked, with a solid electrolyte instead of a flammable liquid. The company says the result is a battery from 0.1 mm thick that charges and discharges in about a minute and works at up to 150 °C, according to its website and the Hannover Messe release that announced its HERMES Startup Award in April 2026.

The European Innovation Council named BTRY among 38 companies in the Accelerator round it announced on 15 June 2026, describing the project as "industrialising an energy-dense solid-state battery that can be charged in one minute". CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,260,125 for the project, also called BTRY, from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The project has not started yet, so this article sets out what it promised and what can already be checked.

Semiconductor tools for a battery

BTRY's founders came out of Empa's Thin Films and Photovoltaics laboratory. A single thin-film cell is only a few micrometres thick, and the company's approach, as chemeurope reported at its pre-seed round in January 2024, is to stack many thin cells into one battery and make them with high-precision vacuum coating and no toxic solvents. The Gebert Rüf Stiftung, which backed the company with CHF 150,000, describes the same approach: stacked thin cells for fast charging and a solvent-free vacuum process that cuts energy use.

The first named product is the BTRY 1S4P, which the company announced on 12 March 2025 as a battery for smart cards: under 0.1 mm thick, 4 by 5 centimetres, up to 50 mAh, rated from -40 to +150 °C and for more than 1,000 cycles. These are the company's figures. No independent test of the cells has been published that this review could find.

For scale, a solid-state microbattery already in licensed production, Ilika's Stereax M300, is listed on Ilika's product page at 1.1 mm thick and 300 µAh, made under licence by Cirtec Medical for medical implants and industrial sensors. The two products target different devices, so the comparison shows the format BTRY is aiming for, not which battery is better.

Three rounds before the grant

BTRY's money so far has come in three steps. High-Tech Gründerfonds led a CHF 900,000 pre-seed round with Zürcher Kantonalbank in January 2024, per chemeurope. Gebert Rüf Stiftung approved its InnoBooster grant on 3 July 2024. In November 2025 the company closed a seed round that Empa and Tech.eu put at $5.7 million, led by Redstone VC; the CORDIS project summary gives the same round as €4.9 million. Empa said at the time that the company had 14 employees.

The Swiss commercial register matches that sequence. It records share capital of CHF 100,000 at founding, CHF 134,578 after a capital increase resolved on 28 December 2023 that created pre-seed preference shares, and CHF 178,677.68 after one resolved on 27 October 2025 that created seed preference shares. The same entries show Yaroslav Romanyuk leaving the board in January 2024, Pascal Stürchler joining it in November 2025, and an auditor appointed from January 2025. The register shows no insolvency, name change or deletion.

What the EIC project promises

The CORDIS summary sets out the goal plainly: reach technology readiness level 8 and build "Europe's first thin-film solid-state battery factory" on a solvent-free, roll-to-roll process that uses equipment from the semiconductor industry, for devices in the Internet of Things, medical technology and consumer electronics. The company's EIC announcement adds a capacity of millions of batteries a year, without naming a site, a date or an investment figure. The summary also says BTRY has validated its process on four production platforms and holds commercial agreements with electronics companies, which it does not name.

1. Technology readiness level 8Project not startedThe CORDIS project runs from October 2026; no report exists yet.
2. Thin-film battery factoryNo site namedThe company gives a capacity of millions of cells a year, but no location or timetable.
3. Roll-to-roll productionFunded, not shownThe seed round was raised for the move to roll-to-roll, per Empa; no line has been shown in public.
4. Customers and offtakeUnnamedPaid pilots per the Gebert Rüf Stiftung, smart-card makers testing per the company; none named.

Pilots, awards and an unnamed customer base

The commercial record is thin in public. The Gebert Rüf Stiftung's portfolio entry says BTRY demonstrated industrial fabrication, delivered first cells to customers and ran paid pilot engagements. The company said in March 2025 that smart-card manufacturers were testing the 1S4P and that prototypes in other formats were under evaluation in medical technology and wearables. When it won the >>venture>> Startup Challenge in June 2025, it said it was scaling from lab-scale cells to small series production. None of these sources names a customer.

The one named partner is InsightSilica, a semiconductor metrology company in Sunnyvale, California. A release of 24 September 2026, carried by IoT For All and listed on BTRY's news page, says the two will adapt and validate BTRY's batteries for semiconductor manufacturing environments. It discloses no value, duration or volume.

The same Hannover Messe release quotes Hanselka saying BTRY is already negotiating with licensees, and Design Engineering also reported the award. A licensing route would sit alongside the factory the EIC project describes; neither BTRY nor the EIC has said how the two fit together.

Where it fits in European battery policy

The European Parliament's research service wrote in a January 2025 briefing that China accounts for more than 80% of the manufacturing capacity for battery cells, with the United States and the EU at around 5% each. The briefing deals with batteries for the transport and energy sectors. BTRY's announced smart-card cell holds up to 50 mAh and its target devices are labels, sensors, wearables and cards, so those capacity shares describe a different market from the one BTRY sells into. The project's own case is narrower: a European factory for a battery format made with semiconductor-style tools, which it describes as the first of its kind in Europe.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.