Elmery and the EIC Accelerator: Platinum From Spent Refinery Acid

Refineries leave part of the platinum, iridium, gold and copper they process behind in their liquids, and the project summary on CORDIS says even the best technologies for platinum and palladium recover only 95%. Elmery, a Finnish company founded in 2022 to commercialise a method developed at Aalto University, treats those liquids with pulsed electric current, depositing the target metal on an electrode while leaving the rest in solution. Its pitch is that the last few percent of a refinery's metal can be recovered with electricity alone.

The EIC Accelerator selected Elmery at the May 2026 cut-off in the challenge for the European critical raw materials value chain. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 23 September 2026 with an EU contribution of €2,463,969.38, running from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The project is to move the company from customer-specific test projects to a live service, and to demonstrate the technology at full refinery scale for the first time, for three recovery processes. At the time of writing it has been running for one month, so this article sets out what was promised and what can already be checked.

Pulses instead of reagents

Conventional electrowinning plates metal out of a solution under constant current; Elmery's own comparison describes it as sensitive to impurities. Elmery's technology page says it instead drives the cell with a controlled pulse, adjusting waveform, duty cycle, frequency, amplitude and polarity so that the target metal is favoured and other metals are kept from depositing with it. The underlying method is set out in a US patent, US 11,486,047, granted on 1 November 2022 with a Finnish priority date of 22 June 2017. Its claim describes depositing a cheaper sacrificial metal such as zinc or nickel on an electrode, then cutting the current so that platinum or silver in the solution replaces it, and repeating the cycle. The patent names Lundström, Halli and four other researchers as inventors; Google Patents lists Aalto University as the original assignee and Elmery Oy as the current one, with the assignment recorded on 17 January 2023.

Aalto originated the concept, according to Elmery, and an August 2026 report on Lundström's Faraday Medal in electrochemistry, published via Newswise, says she co-founded Elmery in 2022 as a spin-out to commercialise it. The company's own comparison table claims recovery of more than 99% for targeted metals in targeted processes, with electricity as the only operating input, starting from about 5 kWh per kilogram.

The CORDIS summary puts the commercial case in numbers. It says the most advanced technologies for platinum and palladium reach only 95% efficiency, and those for rhodium and iridium often about 85%. With refineries processing more than €500 billion of critical metals a year, it says, each 1% lost is worth €5 billion. It also says Elmery's technology has recovered 22 metals on the EU's 2023 critical or strategic list, plus 16 other elements. None of these figures comes with a published test report.

One plant the company can point to

The evidence that the method works outside a laboratory rests on a single published case. In October 2025 Elmery described an installation at Argor-Heraeus, the precious metals refiner in Mendrisio, Switzerland, that recovers residual platinum from hydrochloric acid side streams. According to the case study, the work went from 50 mL laboratory batches in Finland to an on-site bench pilot of 100 L batches, and then to a production unit in which the refinery's own operators treat two 1,200 L batches of spent refining solution a day.

The case study says recovery targets are exceeded more than 99% of the time and that the unit uses 4 kWh per kilogram of platinum. It quotes Simone Frigerio, technical director of Argor-Heraeus: "With Elmery's technology, we are able to easily and constantly recover the platinum above the target levels." All of these figures are published by Elmery; no statement on the installation from Argor-Heraeus or its parent Heraeus could be found on their own channels.

Beyond that case, the record is of partnerships and pilots rather than sales. The company's website shows the logos of Argor-Heraeus, Tronox, Aurubis and Tharisa under "Trusted by industrial leaders" without saying what work was done for each. In April 2026 Elmery announced a collaboration with Aalto and Aurubis, which the release calls Europe's largest copper producer, supported by EIT RawMaterials, to scale the method up on anode slimes; no announcement from Aurubis or EIT RawMaterials could be found. A Business Finland blog of March 2025, co-written by chief executive Mika Paalanne, says Elmery chose ABB as a partner for industrialising its process after meeting it at a Slush side event in 2023, partly for remote data collection and control. The CORDIS summary says "tens of companies" have expressed interest. Elmery also lists a WEF "Mining the Unmined" finalist place (May 2025) and a Knorr-Bremse Circular Technology Award shortlisting (May 2026) on its news page.

Grants, not venture rounds

Elmery's public money before the EIC came from Business Finland. A Business Finland release of 5 September 2023 lists it among 17 startups sharing €6.8 million in Deep Tech Accelerator funding, a programme whose first phase is a €400,000 grant and whose second is a €1 million loan; the decisions at that point covered only the grant phase. The money was to speed up international growth for what the release calls a "new cost-effective and environmentally friendly precious metal processing method". No equity round has been announced by the company, and searches of funding databases and news on 4 November 2026 found none.

Elmery's own announcement of 16 June 2026 describes the award as €2.5 million in grant funding and "access to up to €5 million in equity". The EIC's announcement of the round, dated 15 June 2026, lists 38 companies selected from 87 interviewed, about €90 million in grants and €202 million provisioned for possible equity, without naming the companies in its text. CORDIS records only the grant. Elmery does not appear in the EIC Fund portfolio as checked on 4 November 2026, so any equity investment is not public.

The filed accounts show growth in revenue and staff alongside an operating loss in every year. Revenue was €93,000 in 2022, €157,000 in 2023, €183,000 in 2024 and €323,000 in 2025, according to Asiakastieto, whose figures for 2023 to 2025 match those on Profinder. Asiakastieto gives an operating loss of €438,000 for 2025; Profinder gives a net loss of €443,000. The two measures differ, and both are reported here as given.

What the EIC project promises

The project summary on CORDIS sets out three things to check by September 2028: the move from test projects to a live service, full refinery-scale demonstrations of three recovery processes, and pulse "recipes" tuned for each solution and further optimised with machine learning. It also forecasts the recovery of materials worth €800 million by the end of 2032, a company projection, not a result. CORDIS lists no total project cost, and as the project has just begun, no report or deliverable.

1. A working production unitBefore the grantOne installation at Argor-Heraeus, described in Elmery's case study of October 2025.
2. Full refinery-scale demonstration of three processesToo earlyProject started on 1 October 2026; no host refinery named.
3. Recovery above 99%Company claimStated in CORDIS and on the company website; no independent test data published.
4. 22 critical or strategic metals recoveredCompany claimStated in the CORDIS summary; the list of metals and the test conditions are not published.
5. €800 million of recovered materials by 2032ForecastCompany projection in the CORDIS summary.

Why the EU funds it

The award sits in the EIC Accelerator challenge "Boosting the European Critical Raw Materials value chain", per CORDIS. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act, which sets 2030 benchmarks for the EU to cover at least 10% of its annual consumption of strategic raw materials from its own extraction, 40% from its own processing and 25% from recycling, with no more than 65% coming from a single third country. Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 lists both copper and platinum group metals as strategic raw materials. Dealroom maps Elmery's work mainly to the processing and recycling benchmarks rather than extraction. How much metal the method could add to European supply is not shown by any public figure beyond the single Argor-Heraeus case.

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