EPSE: EIC Accelerator Grant for Mine Water, and What Came Next

Global EcoProcess Services Oy, a Finnish company that has traded as EPSE Oy since December 2019, sells a chemical recipe that pulls dissolved metals out of industrial and mining wastewater in a single treatment step. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 9 January 2019 it won a grant for EPSETECH, a project to build portable pilot units so that mines and factories could test the process on their own sites. The EU contributed €1,905,380 to a total cost of €2,805,067.50, and the project ran from 1 April 2019 to 30 September 2021, according to CORDIS. The company appears under its old name, alone and without partner companies, in the European Commission's list of SME Instrument Phase 2 winners for the January and June 2019 cut-offs.

Seven years on, EPSE is active and, on its filed numbers, profitable. Revenue rose from €415,000 in 2023 to €5.96 million in 2024 and was €4.79 million in 2025, with a net profit of €1.28 million in 2025, according to key figures from the filed accounts published by Fonecta Finder and Asiakastieto. What produced the 2024 jump is not shown in the free register data, and the company has not explained it publicly.

Where EPSE Stands Now

The Finnish trade register lists EPSE Oy as a registered limited company with no insolvency, liquidation or other entry against it, according to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office's open data, which also records the change of name on 27 December 2019. The company's own history page dates the name change to 2020. Its main line of business is registered as the manufacture of chemical products. Its news page carried new posts throughout 2026, the latest in September.

Most of the company's recent public activity is in Central Asia. On 28 October 2025, during Finnish President Alexander Stubb's visit to Kazakhstan, EPSE and its US affiliate EPSE Technology Inc. signed a memorandum of understanding with the state-owned Samruk-Kazyna Ondeu LLP for a first "Green Zone" unit, with an option for five more, worth about €200 million in total, according to EastCham Finland. A similar agreement followed in Uzbekistan. UzDaily reported that the Uzbek memorandum was signed with the Ministry of Mining Industry and Geology at a business forum in Tashkent and put the project's initial cost at US$35 million. EastCham names the Ministry of Ecology as a second signatory and says the first Uzbek unit is to be built over 24 months and to start in 2027. Jääskeläinen told Kauppalehti, as quoted by EastCham, that one unit costs about €35 million. The sources disagree on the currency of that figure (dollars against euros). Both deals are memoranda, and no construction of a Green Zone unit had been reported by October 2026.

The Technology: One Step for Dozens of Metals

Mines, plating shops and chemical plants produce wastewater carrying dissolved metals such as nickel, chromium, arsenic and zinc. The usual treatment is lime neutralisation and precipitation, which leaves large volumes of sludge that is itself hazardous and has to be landfilled, a problem the EPSETECH report describes at length. EPSE's method doses a proprietary reagent and adjusts the pH so that the metals settle out together as a multi-metal precipitate, leaving water that can be reused. A Chilean patent granted to the company in August 2022 describes the core step as mixing the waste with a boron compound and raising the pH to between 7 and 11.5 so that metal borates form, with priority from a Finnish application of September 2013, according to the Chilean patent record. IPqwery lists six patent families with Rissanen as inventor, including a US patent granted on 26 February 2019 and a Canadian one granted in February 2021.

The company's own descriptions of its patent coverage vary. The EPSETECH report says protection was extended to 82 countries; a company presentation of October 2024 speaks of five patents "covering nearly a hundred countries", and the company's history page says four. The company claims the process works for about 50 metals and does not depend on temperature. In the 2025 Almalyk pilot it cut lime use by up to 60%, the company reported, as relayed by EastCham. No independent, peer-reviewed comparison with lime treatment or sulphide precipitation could be found.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What It Delivered

EPSETECH was not a research project. Its aim, in the company's words on CORDIS, was "speeding up our sales cycle": large mines would not test a new process in their own plants without on-site trials, and EPSE could only run tests in the laboratory. The plan was to design and build portable pilot equipment in shipping containers, with monitoring software, to pilot it with three customers, and to build a partner network and extend its patents.

The final periodic report, covering April to September 2021, says the first of two portable pilot units had been finalised and further developed, that six pilot tests had been run on 17 types of waste stream, that more than 500 potential clients had been contacted, and that the company had signed 18 licence and project agreements in Finland. The company's history page says the first unit, the Mobile EPSE Proto, was built with the grant in 2019 and an improved second unit in 2020, and that both have been used in Finland and abroad. Its piloting page gives the Mobile EPSE a capacity of 1 cubic metre per hour. Independent evidence that the equipment works in the field came in 2025: a Mobile EPSE unit treated three wastewater streams at the Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Complex in Uzbekistan between 7 April and 2 May 2025, EastCham reported, and in September 2025 EastCham, citing the miner's own news post, wrote that Almalyk "will soon begin using" the technology. The project ended on its scheduled date.

1. Portable container pilot unitsDeliveredTwo Mobile EPSE units, per the company; CORDIS reports the first finalised by September 2021.
2. Pilots with three customersDeliveredSix pilot tests reported on CORDIS; Almalyk field pilot in 2025 reported by EastCham.
3. Monitoring softwareUnverifiedRemote operation and data logging described only by the company.
4. Global partner networkDeliveredJoint venture in Africa (2024), Econet in Kazakhstan, Samruk-Kazyna Ondeu (2025).
5. Full-scale market introductionPartlyRevenue in millions from 2024; no full-scale plant reported as operating.

The Money

EPSE lost money in every period shown in the free data up to 2023: €602,000 in the year to June 2021, €792,000 in the period to December 2022, when the company moved its year end from June to December, and €1.01 million in 2023, on revenue that peaked at €1.04 million. Then 2024 brought revenue of €5.96 million, an operating profit of €4.89 million and a net profit of €4.45 million, according to Fonecta Finder. Asiakastieto gives the same picture: 2025 revenue of €4.8 million, down 19.6%, an operating margin of 34.3% and an equity ratio of 62%. Kauppalehti lists 2025 revenue of €4,793,034.87.

An operating margin above 80% in 2024 points to licence or technology fees rather than equipment sales, but the free data does not show the split and the company has not said where the money came from. The business model in its October 2024 presentation rests on patent licences, joint ventures with regional partners and sales of the EPSE chemical. Average staff numbers are not published in the free register data. No equity round, outside investor or EIC Fund investment could be found; the award was grant only, and EPSE does not appear on the EIC Fund's beneficiaries page.

EPSETECH was not the company's first EU money. From December 2016 to November 2020 it was a partner in IMPaCT, a Horizon 2020 project on small, low-impact mines for critical metals coordinated by the University of Exeter, with a net EU contribution to EPSE of €294,781.25, according to CORDIS. In 2016 the company said it had received funding from the Finnish innovation agency Tekes to develop its business in South Africa, in a release published by Mining.com; the amount was not given.

From Finland to Africa and Central Asia

The early customers named publicly are few. A 2023 profile on the Finnish government-backed Vesi.fi portal lists only "metal surface treatment (pickling) and mining sector customers". Abroad, South Africa's Valhalla Capital Partners formed a joint venture with EPSE, signed in September 2024 by Valhalla chief executive Lesibana Fosu and Jääskeläinen, to offer the process across Africa together with Prosep and Titan Resources, according to Mining Weekly. No project of that venture has been reported since. In Kazakhstan, the water contractor Econet and EPSE designed an industrial wastewater reuse plant for a Kazakh company in 2024, building on a 2023 pilot, with investment expected to begin in 2025, EastCham reported; whether it was built could not be verified.

The Uzbek relationship goes back to January 2023, when Almalyk sent wastewater samples from its copper smelting and zinc plants to Finland for laboratory tests, and to February 2023, when EPSE proposed a pilot to the miner and Uzbekistan's Agency for Innovative Development, according to Yuz.uz. The pilot came two years later. In 2024 the company set up EPSE Technology Inc. in the United States to handle the Americas and Africa, its website says, and in March 2026 it published a call for new joint venture partners.

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act of 2024 sets targets for recycling and for diversifying the supply of critical raw materials away from single countries. EPSE now pitches its Green Zones as plants that recover critical metals and rare earths from tailings, slag and wastewater, and Jääskeläinen told Business Tampere that the first plant would be built "in cooperation with and supported by" the EU's critical raw materials programme. No such support has been announced by the Commission: no Uzbek project is among the 13 strategic projects outside the EU that it selected in June 2025, according to the EU Delegation to Serbia's summary, and EPSE has not announced strategic project status.

There is also a gap between the EU's interest and where EPSE's business is going. A Finnish company built a European technology with EU money, but its largest announced projects sit in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Africa, and its export arm is a US company. Whether any recovered metals would reach European buyers is not stated in any agreement made public.

The Verdict

EPSE and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.