Counting Growponics' EIC Accelerator Results on Algae Fertiliser

Nitrogen fertiliser is made almost entirely from natural gas, and organic growers have few liquid alternatives that work in hydroponic greenhouses. Go Green FoodTech Ltd, an Israeli company from Kiryat Bialik that trades as Growponics, proposed to make that nitrogen on the farm itself, with cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that pull it from the air using sunlight. The European Commission's list of selected companies names it as "GROWPONICS GREEN HOUSE TECHNOLOGIESLTD", a grant-only winner of the March 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with no partner company. CORDIS records the grant under the company's legal name: €2,450,875 towards a €3,501,250 project that ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2023.

The record shows a working pilot and a commercial launch that has kept slipping. The company built a 3,000-litre bioreactor and fed a pilot greenhouse with its fertiliser. It told readers of its website that first revenues would come in 2025. In April 2026 its founder said the first commercial beta sites were still being prepared.

Where the Company Stands Now

Go Green FoodTech is active. The Israeli Corporations Authority's open register lists it as an active private company, incorporated on 4 August 2011, care of Lior Hessel, with its last annual report filed for 2026; OpenCorporates shows the same number, name and status. The fertiliser work now runs under the Algaenite brand. A separate company, Algaenite Microalgae Technologies Ltd, was incorporated on 30 May 2021 at the same Kiryat Bialik address and is also active, according to the same register and OpenCorporates. Which of the two entities owns the technology and the EU-funded equipment is not public. Neither register shows accounts, revenue or staff numbers.

The Growponics website still presents the greenhouse business and describes Algaenite as a Growponics company with a "patented bio-fertilizer made from nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria". The Algaenite website says the technology is funded by the EIC and the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, and lists a team of nine, including Anders Thomsen as head of an Algaenite unit in Denmark.

The latest public account of the business is an interview Hessel gave to the consultancy GreyB, published on 2 April 2026. "We are preparing three commercial beta sites in Connecticut, Denmark, and Spain," he said, and "in parallel, we are raising our seed round to complete that proof of concept". No investor or amount of a closed round could be verified. The company is not among the 326 organisations on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which fits a grant-only award.

The Technology: Ammonia From Air and Sunlight

Almost all nitrogen fertiliser comes from the Haber-Bosch process. The project's CORDIS objective puts its use at 3 to 5% of the world's natural gas supply and about 10 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of nitrogen fertiliser. Organic fertilisers avoid that, but, the company argued, are "expensive, unstable and fail to support robust, commercial growth in hydroponic greenhouses or in advanced irrigation farms".

Growponics' answer is a photobioreactor that grows nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria. Some cells in each filament fix nitrogen into ammonia while others photosynthesise to supply the energy, which Hessel told GreyB was "a Haber-Bosch factory with a solar farm attached". According to the project's final report, the harvested biomass goes into an anaerobic digester, and the nitrogen-rich effluent becomes a liquid organic fertiliser, which the company calls BLF, that can be fed through drip and hydroponic irrigation. Hessel says natural strains, not engineered ones, are used, and that because the strains make their own ammonia and need no sugar feed, contaminating microbes struggle to compete. Those claims come from the company and have not been tested in any published independent study that could be found.

The yield comparison is the company's own; no trial data has been published. A page on the website of H2O Farm, a Connecticut partner, quotes the company as claiming yields 25% to 40% higher than with traditional organic fertilisers, again without data.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The EIC award followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study, also called Cyanobacteria, which ran from December 2018 to May 2019 according to CORDIS. The Phase 2 grant was signed on 27 July 2020 and paid 70% of the project's cost.

The objective on CORDIS describes a system to produce nitrogen fertiliser "at the actual site of the farm or greenhouse", sold through Growponics' builder-operator model, so that clients could sell their produce as certified organic. The periodic report, covering August 2021 to July 2023, sets the goal as a "robust, automation ready, commercial scale bioreactor system" to be commercialised first as a pilot beta site and then as a full commercial product. It says the team moved from flasks to 240-litre columns and then to continuous cultivation at 3,000 litres, built a manifold that links the columns into one unit, and wrote its own software to automate inoculation, harvest and cleaning. It also says the company was "in advanced contact" with companies in Europe, the US and Israel to install pilots "during the second term of this project". The report names no installed customer pilot.

The Results in Brief article on CORDIS adds that the 3,000-litre facility produced enough fertiliser to feed a hydroponic unit of about 800 square metres, and that a monitoring system with sensors, cameras and AI analysis, called AlgaeNite, was developed. It says three hydroponic pilots were under way, at Growponics and at farms in Connecticut and Florida, with initial results expected by the end of 2024, and that a commercial site and R&D campus was planned in Shaar Efraim, Israel. CORDIS dates the article 5 April 2023, but its text refers to the project's completion "last year", so its actual publication date is unclear. No results from those pilots and no work on the Shaar Efraim site have been made public.

1. Scale cultivation to a commercial-size bioreactorDeliveredContinuous 3,000-litre cultivation reported on CORDIS.
2. Automated process and control softwareDeliveredIn-house software and the AlgaeNite monitoring system, per CORDIS; not independently shown.
3. Liquid organic fertiliser used in a greenhouseIn-house onlyFed the company's own 800 m² pilot unit; no published yield data.
4. Pilot beta sites at customers during the projectNot achievedStill being prepared in April 2026.
5. Commercial sales, first revenues in 2025Not achievedNo sale or revenue announced; the company is still pre-commercial.

On the engineering, the project did what it set out to do and on time: the system grew more than tenfold in volume and was running when the grant ended in July 2023. On commercialisation, which the report placed inside the project period, it did not.

What Has Happened Since

The company's account of its next step has changed several times. The CORDIS Results in Brief said Growponics had "pivoted" to standalone bioreactors for growing plant protein, with inoculum supplied in capsules "similar to Nespresso capsules". The Algaenite news page instead announces fertiliser production services at commercial beta sites in Connecticut, Florida and Denmark "to do a POC with leading clients", with "First revenues 2025", and names three partners: H2O Farm, an indoor lettuce grower in Connecticut; 4Roots in Florida; and Legro A/S, a Danish herb and lettuce grower. In the April 2026 GreyB interview, Hessel named the beta sites as Connecticut, Denmark and Spain, and said protein was a later opportunity: "agriculture is the priority". None of the partners has announced an installation, and no revenue figure is public.

Why Europe Should Care

Fertiliser became a supply-security issue for the EU after Russia invaded Ukraine. On 9 November 2022 the Commission published a communication on the availability and affordability of fertilisers, noting that the gas price peak had driven a 149% rise in fertiliser prices in September 2022 against a year earlier, according to 3tres3. The Commission's own summary says that replacing mineral fertilisers with organic ones "whenever possible" would reduce the EU's dependence on gas and cut farming's carbon footprint. A nitrogen fertiliser made on the farm from air and sunlight fits that policy directly. Its relevance to Europe depends on sites in Europe, and the Danish and Spanish beta sites named by the company are not yet running.

The Verdict

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