Cramik's EIC Accelerator Binder for 3D-Printed Silicon Carbide

Silicon carbide and boron carbide are ultra-hard ceramics that, in the words of an EU project summary, were previously difficult to process by additive manufacturing. Cramik Additive Solutions, a small materials company in Paterna near Valencia, does not build printers. It sells a polymer binder, CRAMIO B-001, which is mixed with ceramic or metal powder so that the blend can be extruded by a 3D printer or pushed into a mould, and then, the company says, removed with heat alone, without solvents.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, CRAMIO, at its October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant of €1,649,020 for two years from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028, to take production from 15,000 to 75,000 kilograms a year and complete validation at technology readiness levels 8 to 9. The project started five months before this article was written, so what follows is mostly a record of the promise and of what can already be checked.

One binder instead of many

Printing or moulding a ceramic part is a three-step job. Fine powder is mixed into a polymer that lets it flow, the part is shaped, and the polymer is then removed before the powder is sintered into solid ceramic. Cramik's claim is that one formulation covers every powder: its website says the binder was created "to replace multiple binder systems with a single product". Its website calls CRAMIO B-001 a "universal hyper x binder", says it carries up to 80% material by weight, works with more than 25 materials and needs no solvent after shaping. Its technical data sheet of November 2025 describes a pellet of about 3 millimetres, sold in 5 and 10 kilogram bottles, with a standard slurry of 25% binder and 75% ceramic powder mixed at 60 °C.

The same claims appear in the profiles its staff posted for the Ceramic Network 2025 brokerage event in Limoges, which add a melting temperature about 20% lower and position the binder for ultra-high-temperature ceramics, oxide and non-oxide. In a 3Dnatives interview of October 2024, the company listed alumina, silicon oxide, titanium dioxide and silicon carbide among its materials, plus electrode and electrolyte ceramics for lithium batteries, and said it works mainly with melt-based printing (liquid deposition, filament and pellet printing) while evaluating injection moulding and coatings. None of these figures has been published in an independent test.

From Albacete filaments to a Paterna pilot plant

The company began as Laboratorio Print3D Solutions CLM. When BeAble Capital led an €800,000 round in December 2020, it was described as a University of Castilla-La Mancha spin-off making ceramic and metal filaments for desktop-style filament printers, on what it called its own patented technology. The register entries summarised by Empresia show the university's holding company, UCLM Emprende, on the board from January 2017 to March 2022. The University of Castilla-La Mancha holds a patent family on ceramic slurries for filament printing, filed in Spain in May 2016 and granted in the United States in September 2022. Whether CRAMIO itself rests on that family or on a later filing could not be established: a search for patents filed in the names of Cramik or Laboratorio Print3D Solutions returned none.

The founding date is not consistent across sources. The register summary gives 2017, while the company told 3Dnatives it emerged from a university materials department "around 2018". Its registered office moved from Albacete to the Universitat de València science park in August 2021 and to its current address in Paterna in September 2023, per the register summary, and the 2024 interview says the pilot plant is at the Paterna site. The name change to Cramik Additive Solutions is published in the Official Gazette of the Commercial Register (BORME) of 22 August 2024.

Small rounds, and a grant below the ceiling

Outside money arrived in steps. Capital & Riesgo reported in September 2024 that CDTI Innovación committed €720,000 through Innvierte, alongside the BeAble Innvierte KETS Fund. The register shows capital increases over the same years: share capital rose from €61,650 to €75,400 in February 2021, to €84,390 in March 2022, to €102,720 in February 2024 and to €142,150 in January 2025, the last one confirmed in the BORME of 21 January 2025. Share capital is the nominal value of the shares, not the money investors paid, so it shows that rounds closed, not how large they were.

The EIC grant of €1,649,020 is about two thirds of the €2.5 million ceiling for an Accelerator grant. Blended finance also allows an equity investment by the EIC Fund, but no amount has been announced: Cramik does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies as of November 2026, and the EIC's announcement of 17 February 2026 gives only round totals: 61 companies selected from 121 interviews, with €467 million requested. Capital & Riesgo named Cramik among the nine Spanish companies of the round, without a figure for any of them.

What can already be checked

Some of what the website claims has a document behind it. The company publishes an ISO 9001:2015 certificate, number 343312, valid from 19 May 2025 to 18 May 2028, covering the design, formulation, manufacture and sale of materials with ceramic fillers. The data sheet makes the binder a catalogue product rather than a laboratory recipe. The website gives a cumulative production of more than 1.7 tonnes and a facility of more than 500 square metres, which are the company's figures.

Customers are thinner. In the 2024 interview, Cramik named a first agreement with Fiven Norge, a silicon carbide powder maker it described as part of the Kymera group, to combine the two companies' products, with results to be presented at a meeting in Dresden. No later statement by either company on that work was found. The website's application examples (silicon carbide armour plates, injection-moulded inserts, susceptors for melting lunar regolith, filters for aluminium casting and printed battery electrodes) are framed as questions and demonstrations, not as named customer orders. On sales, the Empresia register summary puts annual turnover below €500,000; the latest accounts it lists as filed are for 2024, and no staff figure is public. The website lists eight people in its team.

1. Binder as a commercial productIn catalogueTechnical data sheet of November 2025 and ISO 9001 certificate from May 2025.
2. Processing of SiC and B4CClaimedSilicon carbide demonstrations on the website; no published test results or boron carbide parts.
3. Capacity from 15 to 75 tonnes a yearRunningThe project started on 1 June 2026; CORDIS shows no report yet.
4. TRL 8 to 9 validationRunningThe project summary puts the platform at TRL 6.
5. Circular line for ceramic wasteNot publicDescribed in the CORDIS objective; no plant or partner announced.

A company that is trading, with a new chief executive

Cramik is active. The register shows a steady run of filings into 2026, the latest a change to its stated business purpose recorded on 28 May 2026 and published in the BORME of 4 June 2026, and no insolvency entry appears in the register summary. The leadership changed before the grant began. Alberto Santana, who presented himself as chief executive in the 2024 interview, left the board on 30 September 2025, when his powers of attorney were also revoked and Martín Sáez Cuenca joined the board, per the BORME of 7 October 2025. The company's website now lists Martín Sáez as CEO and Alberto Santana as chief commercial officer. Neither the company nor the register gives a reason for the change.

Where it fits in EU policy

CORDIS places CRAMIO under the 2025 Accelerator challenge on "acceleration of advanced materials development and upscaling along the value chain", and the objective names aerospace, energy, semiconductors and defence as the target markets. The Commission's Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership communication of 27 February 2024 picks energy, mobility, construction and electronics as its first target areas, without naming ceramics. The project's case is that a European source of feedstock for silicon carbide parts serves those markets; no European part maker has yet been named publicly as a buyer of the binder.

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