Holloid's EIC Accelerator Bid to Watch Fermentation Live

Most fermenters are run on proxies. Operators read sensors for the conditions in the tank, and when they want to know what the cells themselves are doing, they draw a sample and wait 24 to 48 hours for a lab result from plating or PCR. Holloid, a 2022 spin-off of Vienna's BOKU University, wants to put a microscope inside the process instead: a holographic camera that images every particle in the liquid and lets software sort living cells from dead ones and production strains from contaminants, while the batch runs.

The European Innovation Council backed that idea at its October 2024 cut-off with a €2,499,999 grant for the project ROLF, short for Revolutionary OnLine Fermentation monitoring. CORDIS shows the project running from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2027. Two thirds of the way through, Holloid has a working device and a product range on its website, but no named customer and no published pilot result.

A four-founder spin-off with no outside investor on record

The Firmenbuch record shows a small company. Holloid GmbH was registered on 14 May 2022 with €35,000 of share capital. Its four shareholders are the two managing directors, Marcus Lebesmühlbacher and Pinar Frank, and Petrus van Oostrum and Erik Reimhult, all registered on the day of founding. The shareholder list has not changed since, so no investor has bought into the company through the register.

Holloid files its accounts on time: four annual accounts, for 2022 to 2025, the latest submitted on 3 June 2026, according to the Firmenbuch document list. The accounts are paid documents and were not obtained for this article, so revenue, losses and headcount are not public here.

The company grew out of BOKU's Institute of Colloid and Biointerface Science, as the university's announcement of the grant puts it, and it is based on BOKU's Muthgasse campus. It went through the INiTS SCALEup incubator, Vienna's university startup programme.

A camera that records holograms instead of pictures

A conventional microscope focuses on one plane. A digital holographic microscope records the interference pattern of light passing through the whole sample, and software then refocuses that pattern numerically into a three-dimensional image. Holloid's technology page describes the chain: an in-line hologram on the camera sensor, numerical back-propagation to recover phase and intensity, proprietary contrast algorithms, and automatic detection, characterisation and tracking of every object above 500 nanometres in the sample volume.

From each hologram the system derives object counts, size distributions, shape, colour, internal structure and membrane integrity, and from successive frames it measures motility, diffusion and sedimentation. Because the method works on scattered light, it needs no staining or sample preparation. Machine learning sorts the objects into classes: microorganisms by type and state, and particles.

The commercial device is called the Hollometer, a compact automated 3D microscope installed at the process. Holloid offers two versions, a water monitor that screens process and utility water for microbial load and particles, and a bioprocess monitor that reads cell density, morphology and viability from a bioreactor through an automatic dilution module. A browser-based portal collects the results from every device and raises alerts on contamination or deviations.

The prototype came from an FFG project

Before the EIC grant, the Austrian research agency FFG funded the step from lab method to prototype. The FFG project, "Exact bacterial and cell population growth using holographic cytometry", ran from 1 July 2024 to 28 February 2026 under the 2024 Basisprogramm, with Holloid as coordinator and BOKU's colloid and biointerface institute as partner. Its goal was a prototype that monitors bacterial growth and detects and counts bacteria online, chosen because bacteria are small and varied, and the hardest microorganisms to count.

Holographic counting of bacteria is an active research field beyond Holloid. A group at Ulm published work in 2025 on digital holographic microscopy for bacteria segmentation and counting in microfluidic cartridges, describing how chamber height and suspension density limit the signal. Holloid's bet is on the step from the lab cartridge to a device bolted onto an industrial process.

ROLF: from device to pilot plants

Holloid won at the most competitive EIC Accelerator round to date. The EIC's announcement of 17 February 2025 reported 71 companies selected from 1,211 proposals, of which 431 reached the jury interviews; ten of the 71 chose grant-only funding, Holloid among them. Trending Topics reported that Holloid and Easelink were the only two Austrian winners.

The CORDIS project page narrows the target market to food made with precision fermentation and microalgae cultures, where processes rarely scale beyond the lab because operators cannot see which cells are growing. ROLF is to add early detection of contaminants, remote maintenance and secure data handling, and to offer the platform as software as a service with low-cost sensors. The commission signed the grant on 3 June 2025; CORDIS gives no total project cost.

The first periodic report, for July 2025 to June 2026, lists several hardware iterations with better sample handling, a cloud architecture with data pipelines and user interfaces, a data management plan, progress on the recognition models, and data collection for pilot installations. It reports no quantitative result and lists no publication.

1. In-line holographic monitorBuiltThe Hollometer is offered in water and bioprocess versions on the company website.
2. AI recognition of microorganisms and their statesIn developmentThe periodic report describes advancing models without accuracy figures.
3. Pilot installationsIn preparationPilot data collection under way in June 2026; no pilot site named.
4. Remote maintenance and secure dataIn developmentRemote maintenance concept and data management plan reported.
5. Scalable SaaS offerToo earlyA customer portal exists; no subscription customer is public.

Why Brussels cares about seeing inside a fermenter

Precision fermentation uses microorganisms to make food ingredients such as proteins, and the ROLF report ties the project to the EU's Farm to Fork Strategy and the European Green Deal: less water, energy and chemicals, and less food lost to contamination. A batch lost to contamination wastes water, energy and feedstock; a contaminant caught in minutes instead of days can save it. Holloid's water monitor points at a second, larger market: utilities, bottlers and plants that sample their water by hand today.

The question for 2027 is whether the device leaves the pilot stage. Holloid has a product, a portal and an EIC grant that runs until June 2027, but its shareholder register still shows only its founders, and no customer has said in public that the Hollometer runs on its line.