Delmic's Cryo-ET Tools: What the EIC Accelerator Paid For

Cryo-electron tomography can show proteins at work inside a frozen cell, but only if someone first carves that cell into a slice thin enough for an electron beam to pass through. In 2019 Delmic B.V., a microscopy company in Delft, told the European Commission that this step took a PhD-level operator 4 to 8 hours and 22 steps, and that more than 80% of the samples ended up unusable. Its answer was the Cryo-SECOM Workflow: a light microscope built into the ion-beam instrument that cuts the slices, linked to automated sample handling, in effect a "cryo-ET sample prep robot", according to the CORDIS fact sheet.

In the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the Commission selected the project, according to its list of winners, which names DELMIC BV as the only company in it. The grant was €2,143,750 towards a total cost of €3,062,500. The project ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 May 2023. It produced products that Delmic sells today. The workstation at its centre is still not one of them.

One Group, Two EIC Awards

Delmic is a group, and the two EIC awards linked to its cryo work went to two different companies in it. The 2019 grant covered here went to the parent, Delmic B.V. Its subsidiary DELMIC Cryo B.V. (KvK 70674582), set up in January 2018, is a separate legal entity: the subsidiary is directly consolidated by Delmic B.V., according to the Global LEI register, as are Fast Imaging B.V. and CL Solutions B.V., and North Data lists the same three companies with Delmic B.V. as their parent. The parent's registered purpose is to support those subsidiaries "in the development and sale of technical products in the field of microscopy".

In June 2021 DELMIC Cryo B.V. won an equity-only EIC Accelerator award for "MIMAS Workflow", described with exactly the same words as the 2019 project title: "unlocking the potential of cryo-electron tomography by simplification of the sample preparation workflow". That award and what became of it are covered in a separate article on Delmic Cryo. The final report of the 2019 project explains the link: it refers to the "Cryo-SECOM (MIMAS) chamber" and to "the MIMAS system", so the system the EU paid Delmic B.V. to develop in 2019 is the one the EIC backed again, with equity, in its subsidiary two years later.

The Technology: Aiming the Ion Beam

To make a cryo-ET sample, frozen cells on a small grid are thinned with a focused ion beam (FIB) inside a scanning electron microscope until only a slice, or lamella, thin enough for an electron beam to pass through is left. The protein of interest is usually tagged with a fluorescent marker, so researchers check its position in a separate cryo light microscope and move the frozen grid between instruments. Each transfer risks ice contamination, and a cut made in the wrong place loses the target.

Delmic's approach puts the light microscope inside the FIB chamber so that the target can be found, cut and checked without moving the sample. The project's final report claims that its microscope localises targets along the beam axis to about 50 nm and measures lamella thickness to ±5 nm with an interferometric mode, "making the SEM obsolete", and that a batch of samples can be milled automatically without the expensive robotic autoloaders of competing systems. These are the company's own figures; no independent test of them was found.

Delmic is not alone in the market. A 2023 paper in Nature Methods by a Chinese group that built its own confocal version names Thermo Fisher Scientific's integrated light microscope and Delmic's METEOR as the commercially available integrated systems, and notes that both mainly use widefield imaging, which lacks depth information. The 2019 report itself counts the Cryo-SECOM Workflow as "one of the three products" covering most of the preparation steps in one workstation.

What the Grant Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study from December 2018 to March 2019. The Phase 2 objective promised an integrated workflow that would cut sample preparation time by 87%, raise yield 8-fold and reduce the cost per sample by 90%. In August 2019 Delmic also announced a Eurostars consortium, CETFlow, with the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund, the University of Twente, Demcon kryoz and CryoVac on contamination-free sample transfer, and credited the EU grant 879673 in the same post.

The final report describes three stages: a retrofit Cryo-SECOM prototype that met the requirements of technology readiness level 7 and produced usable lamellae; a standalone prototype with a dedicated FIB chamber, contamination-free transfer hardware and a cryogenic cooler; and, in the last stage, a fully integrated module that was validated by external partners "in a real laboratory conditions", after which the design was frozen. Along the way three products reached the market.

1. Light microscope integrated in the cryo-FIBDeliveredMETEOR launched in October 2020, first system at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, per Delmic; named as a commercial system in Nature Methods.
2. Contamination-free sample handlingDeliveredIce Shield and Clean Station, licensed from MPI Dortmund in March 2021 and still sold.
3. Integrated, automated Cryo-SECOM workstationPrototypeValidated and design frozen by May 2023; no launch, price or buyer published since.
4. 87% less time, 8x yield, 90% lower costNot shownStill stated as aims in the final report; no measured result published.

The anti-ice tools came from a licence rather than from Delmic's own lab. The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology announced on 10 March 2021 that Delmic had licensed the Ice Shield, Clean Station and Vitri-lock invented by Stefan Raunser's group, sold together as the CERES Ice Defence System. The final report credits the collaboration with its validation partners for adding them to the workflow. Two Delmic staff presented CERES and METEOR together as a workflow at MMC2023, and Delmic's website still lists the Ice Shield and the Clean Station next to METEOR 2.0.

What Happened to the Workstation

The integrated system reappears under its new name. A seminar announcement from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology for 7 October 2025 says Delmic "has partnered with TESCAN to develop the MIMAS workflow", integrating its fluorescence microscopy, including confocal and "tricoincident" imaging, with the Czech maker's SOLARIS X 2 FIB-SEM. The talk was given by Katherine Lau, Delmic's vice president of business development for life sciences. That is a different set-up from the dedicated FIB chamber described in the 2019 report, and the announcement presents MIMAS as a workflow under development, not as a product with a price.

Delmic's own website does not name MIMAS. Its life-science range consists of METEOR 2.0, unveiled on 28 March 2025 with an 8 times larger field of view, a targeting product called METEOR Target, the FAST-EM multibeam microscope and the two anti-ice tools. No customer, order or installation of a complete MIMAS or Cryo-SECOM system has been announced by Delmic or TESCAN.

The Money

In March 2023 Delmic raised €4 million from Value Creation Capital and the EIC Fund to scale service, sales and applications and speed up product development, according to Bits&Chips and the company's own announcement. The split between the two investors was not published. The EIC Fund's list of invested companies includes "Delmic"; its portfolio page gives no amount or date and does not say which group company holds the stake, though the logo it shows is labelled "Delmic CRYO".

The EU money kept coming. On 23 April 2026 Delmic B.V. signed ACCESS, an EIC Transition project that runs from 1 May 2026 to 30 April 2029 with €2,498,320 of EU funding. It aims to determine protein structures with a 30 kV electron microscope and ptychographic reconstruction "at 1/10th the cost" of conventional cryo-EM. Of the EU funding, €88,875 goes to Delmic B.V. as coordinator and €1,454,250 to DELMIC Cryo B.V. as a linked third party; the other partners are EPFL in Lausanne and the University of Antwerp. Delmic B.V. is also an unfunded partner of ZooCELL, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie training network running from 2024 to 2027.

Those figures come from the parent's own balance sheets as summarised by liza.nl; North Data confirms that accounts for 2022 to 2025 were filed, the latest in August 2026, but its figures are behind a paywall, so the numbers could not be checked against a second source. Small Dutch companies file no revenue, and Delmic does not publish group accounts. The falling headcount at the parent may reflect staff sitting in the subsidiaries, whose own figures were not checked here, so it cannot be read as the group shrinking. North Data also lists Dutch state aid of €1,181,921 and €250,816 under the NXTGEN HIGHTECH programme in July 2023.

Where Delmic Stands Now

Delmic is active, and its public face has shifted towards materials science. In a SemiWiki interview published in 2026 ahead of the International Microscopy Congress, Sander den Hoedt said more than 220 research institutes and companies in over 30 countries use Delmic's technology, that more than 100 of its SPARC cathodoluminescence systems are installed, and that the life-science business in cryo-electron tomography and volume electron microscopy runs on "the same automation platform and the same software core". He named SPARC 3.0 as the headline at that congress, held in Liverpool in August 2026; the tool for compound semiconductors was unveiled there, as Laser Focus World also reported.

Why Europe Should Care

Cryo-electron microscopes are made mostly outside Europe: the ACCESS objective on CORDIS puts the cost of a 300 kV system and its infrastructure from "US/Japanese manufacturers" at €10 million or more. The Commission's Choose Europe for Life Sciences strategy of 2 July 2025, summarised by Van Bael & Bellis, aims to make the EU the world's most attractive place for life sciences by 2030 and to close the gap between laboratory and market. A Dutch supplier of add-on tools that make the existing machines more productive, partnering with a Czech FIB maker, is a small European foothold in a supply chain dominated by others.

The Verdict

Delmic has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.