FluIDect's EIC Accelerator Sensor Hunts Bacteria in the Pipe

Checking food or water for bacteria normally means taking a sample, sending it to a laboratory and waiting, sometimes for days. FluIDect, founded in Jena in August 2021, puts the laboratory into the pipe instead. Its sensor uses functionalised polymer microbeads, about ten micrometres across, that are added to the liquid and made to glow; when target bacteria or molecules accumulate on a bead, the emitted wavelength shifts, and that shift can be read optically. The company calls the method the Fluorescent Resonator Signature.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, SpheroScan, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,461,485 from July 2025 to June 2027 to bring a sensor for food production plants to market, with claimed results in under ten minutes and a sensitivity of one colony-forming unit per millilitre. In September 2026 a prototype measured the milk of individual cows in a dairy barn.

Eighteen years of physics behind the bead

The underlying technique is Michael Himmelhaus' work: a surface physicist who had researched it for about 18 years, including biosensor work in Japan between 2005 and 2009, according to SPRIND, the German federal agency for disruptive innovation, which funded a validation project with the team. He was joined by Tobias Schröter, a mechanical engineer and X-ray optics specialist who is now CEO, and Klaus Schindlbeck, who had about 30 years in medical technology. The company dates its first experiment to a garage in Bürgel five years ago, as a September 2026 post on its news page recalls.

At the end of 2023 FluIDect closed a seed round that it and SPRIND describe only as worth several million euros, with bm|t, b.value from Dortmund and the local savings bank investing. In November 2024 it won the German Food Startup Award, and in January 2025 the SpheroScan Explorer won a Prism Award in the sensors category at Photonics West.

SpheroScan: the sensor the EIC paid for

The EIC project is about the in-line device, the SpheroScan Guard. The grant was announced by the company on 24 February 2025 as €2.5 million to bring the Guard to market readiness: a monitoring device for food production, water treatment, biotechnology and medical technology that works around the clock, integrated into existing systems, and reports immediately whether and how badly a liquid is microbially contaminated. CEO Tobias Schröter said the company would "now accelerate our market launch". CORDIS shows no periodic report yet.

The project's own go-to-market plan starts with food producers and farms, then food testing laboratories, then partnerships with equipment integrators. Willingness to pay was verified through discussions and proofs of concept, the project summary says, without giving figures.

What has been demonstrated

Two demonstrations are public, and neither is a published sensitivity measurement. In 2025 the company showed the benchtop Explorer determining the concentration of specific proteins in pharmaceutical culture media in under 20 minutes without sample preparation, at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology in Jena. In September 2026 it connected a SpheroScan Guard prototype to the milk collection system of an automated milking installation and analysed each cow's milk in real time during normal milking, and said the device can also measure protein concentration.

The company is also in a British water consortium: the project "Rapid Cryptosporidium detection to improve water safety and protect public health", led by Severn Trent with five other water companies and funded by the Ofwat Innovation Fund's Water Breakthrough Challenge 5, had its kick-off in May 2026.

1. Benchtop instrumentOn saleSpheroScan Explorer, Prism Award 2025.
2. In-line sensor in real conditionsPrototype testedDairy barn test, September 2026.
3. Bacteria in under 10 minutes at 1 CFU/mlNot publishedStated as a project target; no measurement published.
4. Food producers as paying customersNot reportedNo customer named, no revenue disclosed.

Grants on grants

FluIDect has collected public money from several directions: SPRIND's validation contract, Thuringian programmes, nearly €1 million from a Thuringian research initiative in February 2025 for sensors for rapid antibiotic resistance diagnostics, an HTI project on a modular interface platform for industrial process analytics that started in August 2026, and the Ofwat-funded British consortium, alongside the EIC grant. The private seed round of 2023 remains the only equity disclosed, without an amount, and the company's German accounts were not obtained for this article.

Testing where the food is made

Food safety rules and foodborne illness are the market the EIC backed here, and the argument is one of place rather than chemistry: moving the test from a remote laboratory to the production line, so a dairy or a waterworks can act during processing instead of after it. FluIDect's Jena cluster of photonics and microbiology is the kind of regional specialism EU innovation money tends to reward, and the British water project shows the same sensor being pulled toward utilities.