Coramaze Channels EIC Accelerator Money to Tricuspid Valve Repair

A leaking tricuspid valve, between the right atrium and the right ventricle, is a common heart condition that few patients are treated for, according to the case Coramaze Technologies put to the EIC. In its CORDIS project summary, the company says tricuspid regurgitation affects about 3 million people in Europe, that open-heart surgery suits fewer than 1% of them, and that more than 90% remain untreated. Its answer is Tripair, a catheter-delivered implant that places a spacer in the leaking valve instead of clipping or replacing it.

The EIC Accelerator selected Tripair at its 1 October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 5 June 2026, an EU contribution of €2,142,115.50 and a 24-month project running from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2028. Its stated purpose is a pilot clinical trial in 30 European patients to move the device towards CE marking.

A mitral company first

Coramaze did not start in the tricuspid valve. High-Tech Gründerfonds announced on 12 February 2014 that it had co-led a €1 million seed round with SeedCapital Dortmund in an Essen spin-off of the Western German Heart Center, founded by chief executive Laura Figulla and the inventor Till Neumann. The product was mitramaze, a catheter-based device for leaking mitral valves. In September 2015 the same investor announced a €4.5 million Series A led by the Israeli holding company Elron, by then giving the company's base as Munich, and said the money would take mitramaze into a first-in-human study in 2016.

No results of that mitral study were found in searches of trade press and conference coverage for this article, and the company has not said publicly why it moved from the mitral to the tricuspid valve. What carried over is the design idea: the 2015 release describes a flexible spacer with atraumatic anchoring in the left atrium, and Tripair is described as a spacer anchored in the right atrium. The Swiss investor MTIP named Coramaze in April 2017 as one of the first two start-ups in its new CHF 60 million fund. No funding round after that has been announced publicly; third-party databases give totals of about $6.3 to $6.5 million, which cannot be checked against filed figures.

How Tripair differs from a clip

Two tricuspid devices approved in the United States in 2024 work in opposite ways. Abbott's TriClip, approved by the FDA on 1 April 2024 according to TCTMD and Cardiovascular Business, clips the leaflets together, an edge-to-edge repair. Edwards' EVOQUE, which TCTMD reported as the first transcatheter tricuspid replacement approved, on 1 February 2024, replaces the valve.

Coramaze calls its approach "edge-to-spacer". An April 2025 copy of its website describes a flexible inflatable spacer that fills the gaps between the leaflets, deployed under X-ray with standard catheter techniques, with no anaesthesia and no transoesophageal echo, and a device time of less than 20 minutes. The CORDIS summary gives the whole procedure as less than 30 minutes, without general anaesthesia or transoesophageal echo, and adds atraumatic anchoring and full retrievability. In a December 2025 talk at LSI Europe, Jochen Reinöhl said the implant can be retrieved even weeks after implantation and is delivered through the femoral or jugular vein. These are the company's claims; no published study tests them.

Clinical claims without published data

The CORDIS summary refers to "promising results in the completed FIH study", a first-in-human trial. Coulter Partners, announcing Rob ten Hoedt as board chair on 7 May 2025, wrote that Coramaze was moving from global feasibility studies to pivotal trials. Ten Hoedt left Medtronic in August 2024 as executive vice president, per the same release. Paul Sorajja presented the Tripair technology at TCT 2025 on 27 October 2025, per a TCTMD slide listing whose content sits behind a login. At LSI Europe, Reinöhl said a global early feasibility study was under way with 15 more patients planned.

What could not be found is the evidence for any of this: no patient count, safety outcome or reduction in regurgitation from the first-in-human study has been published in the sources reviewed, and a search of ClinicalTrials.gov for "Coramaze" and "Tripair" on 4 November 2026 returned no registered study. The absence of a registration is not evidence that no patients were treated; it means the results cannot be checked there.

What the EIC project promises

The Tripair project started on 1 July 2026, four months before this article, and CORDIS lists no report or result yet. The scorecard below is what can be checked against the plan at this stage.

1. Signed grant agreementSignedCORDIS records signature on 5 June 2026 and a start on 1 July 2026.
2. EU pilot trial in 30 patientsToo earlyNo first European patient under the project announced; no trial registration found.
3. Published first-in-human dataNot publishedThe study is described as completed, with no numbers in public.
4. CE markingNot yetThe device is investigational, per the company and Coulter Partners.

The money around the grant

The award was selected as blended finance, a grant plus a possible EIC Fund equity investment. CORDIS records only the grant, split between the Hilden company and Coramaze Technologies Ltd in Petah Tikva, which takes part as a third party. Coramaze does not appear among the 319 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked on 4 November 2026, so whether an equity part has been signed is not public. At LSI Europe the chief executive said the company was raising a Series B of 16 million, without naming the currency, to reach readiness for a pivotal study by mid-2027. No closing of that round has been announced.

The German commercial register entry could not be retrieved for this article, so staff numbers and filed accounts are not reported here. The company website, coramaze.com, did not complete a secure connection on 4 November 2026; the April 2025 archived copy lists offices in Petah Tikva and Hilden and a management team of Reinöhl, chief technology officer Boaz Harari, research head Ido Sadan and clinical affairs head Michal Shohat. The High-Tech Gründerfonds portfolio page, updated in August 2026, also gives the Hilden headquarters and an R&D hub in Israel.

Where it fits in EU policy

The Commission unveiled the Safe Hearts Plan, its first EU-wide strategy on cardiovascular disease, on 16 December 2025, according to its cardiovascular health page and the World Heart Federation. Its flagships include a cardiovascular research and innovation roadmap and recommendations on personalised treatment. The two devices whose 2024 FDA approvals are cited above come from Abbott and Edwards, both based in the United States; a European-developed alternative that, as the company claims, needs less imaging and no general anaesthesia would fit the plan's aim of treating more patients, if the trial shows it works.

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