Elementic's EIC Accelerator Carbon Tile Arrives Before Its Brick

Lignin, a side stream of forestry and agriculture, is mostly burned for energy. Elementic, the brand of the Finnish company Fifth Innovation, heats lignin and other forestry side streams into a hard, light carbon material that can be shaped into tiles, panels and bricks. Because the carbon came out of the air through the trees, every kilogram of material locks away about 3 kilograms of CO2, the company says, and a facade of it could offset a house's entire embodied carbon.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,497,596.50 from May 2025 to April 2027 for the step from lab to industrial pilot and market. Eighteen months in, a pilot line runs in Lempäälä and the first product is on show: an interior wall tile sold under the brand MO6, which won a Red Dot design award in 2026. The brick the EIC project is named for has not reached the market, and the company's revenue fell to almost nothing in 2025.

A Valmet research idea and a Silo AI founder

Fifth Innovation was founded in 2017 and paid for its early research by selling lab services, according to a May 2025 profile in forumNordic. The material was developed by co-founder Tuomo Hilli and his research team, originally at the Finnish industrial group Valmet. CEO Ville Hulkko, a co-founder of the AI companies Silo AI and Valossa, joined first as an advisor. The Finnish Trade Register lists Fifth Innovation Oy from October 2017 and Elementic as an auxiliary name since April 2025.

By May 2025 the company had raised €10 million in total: a €2.3 million product development loan from Business Finland, the €2.5 million EIC grant, and the rest from private investors including Jtel Oy, the Hulkko family's investment company, Kaleva reported.

Carbon from lignin, by heat

The process converts lignin into what CORDIS calls a hard, structurally durable mono-material; the periodic report lists pyrolysis among the production steps. The company describes the result as fire-retardant, resistant to moisture and temperature, free of plastics and volatile organic compounds, and sound-absorbing. The CO2 figure is the company's own: the CORDIS summary gives about 3 kilograms per kilogram of material, while the periodic report gives about 5 kilograms, and neither has been verified independently.

The pilot line and the first product

The first periodic report covers May to December 2025. It lists verified production specifications from raw material to post-processing, the installation of a first pilot production line with reactors, mixing and forming units and safety systems, the start of continuous production trials, an updated in-house software system for tracking batches and quality, and two new patent applications. It reports no production volumes or customers.

The commercial launch came through design rather than construction. In May 2026 Elementic set up MO6, an interior design brand whose first collection, MO6 Eternal, consists of wall tiles; the tiles won a Red Dot Award: Product Design 2026, whose jury noted "their ability to bind significant amounts of CO₂", and were shown at the Habitare fair in Helsinki in September 2026. Kaleva had reported in May 2025 that customer deliveries of the tiles would start in spring 2026 and that facade bricks would follow; no date for the bricks has been given.

1. Pilot production lineInstalledEquipment in place and continuous trials started by December 2025.
2. First product on the marketLaunchedMO6 Eternal wall tiles, 2026; no sales figures.
3. Building brick for facadesNot yetDescribed as the next product; no launch date.
4. Certification and market entry (TRL 9)Too earlyThe project runs to April 2027.

A growing loss and a shrinking revenue line

Before the pilot line, the lab services brought in some revenue: €58,700 in 2022, €57,100 in 2023 and €81,100 in 2024, according to Vainu, which draws on the filed accounts. In 2025, the first EIC year, revenue fell to €3,000 while the net loss rose to €1.4 million, from €0.58 million in 2024. Vainu lists an equity ratio of minus 65% for 2025 and four employees.

A negative equity ratio means the balance sheet carries more liabilities than assets. The company's funding so far, according to Kaleva, is the EIC grant, a Business Finland loan and private investors; tile sales from 2026 onward will show whether the material can earn money.

Storing carbon in buildings

Elementic's pitch fits the EU's climate goals for construction: a material from a Finnish forestry side stream, made in Finland, that stores carbon in buildings instead of releasing it when the side stream is burned. The open questions are cost, the verified carbon balance and whether the material passes the certification a load-bearing or facade product needs.