EIC Accelerator Check: Inorevia and Its DNA Library Prep Robot

Inorevia, a 2016 spin-off of Institut Curie in Paris, set out to shrink and automate the most tedious step in DNA sequencing: library preparation, the chain of enzyme reactions and bead clean-ups that turns a raw DNA or RNA sample into something a sequencer can read. In the European Commission's April 2019 round of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, it won a grant-only award for MAGELIA, a €2,793,000 project of which the EU paid €1,955,100, according to CORDIS. Inorevia appears on the Commission's list of companies selected at the 3 April 2019 cut-off, which names no other company for the project, and CORDIS lists no partner.

Seven years on, the instrument exists and is sold under the name Magelia. But the company that built it has been under court protection since June 2025. On 19 June 2025 the economic activities court of Nanterre opened safeguard proceedings (procédure de sauvegarde), a French procedure for companies in difficulty that are not yet insolvent, according to the official gazette BODACC. On 29 May 2026 the same court adopted a safeguard plan with a duration of 84 months, a second BODACC notice shows. No press coverage of either step could be found.

Where Inorevia Stands Now

Inorevia is still trading. The national company directory lists it as active, with its head office at 34 rue de la Croix de Fer in Saint-Germain-en-Laye since 7 May 2025, after earlier offices at the ESPCI incubator and on rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris and in Bagneux, according to the Annuaire des Entreprises and the North Data record of the same register. The register names Julien Autebert as president and Amel Bendali as managing director, and its entry was last updated on 25 September 2026. The company's product page, carrying a 2026 copyright and the new address, still markets Magelia.

Under the safeguard plan, a court-appointed commissioner, Selarl El Baze Charpentier, oversees its execution, according to the May 2026 BODACC notice. The plan's terms, such as how much of the company's debt is rescheduled and over what instalments, are not public. Safeguard is not insolvency: Inorevia still trades, but under court supervision for up to seven years.

The Technology: Library Prep in Sub-Microlitre Volumes

Before a sample can be sequenced, its DNA or RNA has to be fragmented, tagged with adapters, amplified and cleaned up several times with magnetic beads. In small and mid-sized labs, which the project report puts at 80% of the market, this is done by hand across several instruments, an error-prone process that needs a lot of starting material, according to the CORDIS periodic report.

Inorevia's approach comes from microfluidics research at Institut Curie's UMR168 laboratory. A "magnetic clamp" holds metal microbeads coated with DNA, RNA or proteins inside a flowing liquid, so that reactions run in nanolitre to sub-microlitre volumes, according to the Institut Curie start-up page (archived copy). The 2019 proposal promised sample volumes "100-1 000 times smaller" than standard workflows, according to CORDIS. The company now describes Magelia as an open benchtop platform that runs overnight without supervision, and claims PCR-free whole-genome libraries from 5 ng of DNA and RNA-seq libraries from 1 ng of total RNA. Those figures are the company's own; no independent peer-reviewed study of Magelia could be found.

What the EIC Grant Promised, and What the Record Shows

MAGELIA ran from 1 August 2019 to 30 September 2021. The proposal described a TRL6 prototype and set out to reach TRL8 and start commercialisation by 2021. Beyond the product, it set business targets: "over 400 customers and 15% of the European market within five years, with a turnover of 30 M€", from a team of eight people, according to CORDIS.

The final report, covering August 2020 to September 2021, says the company "developed and industrialized a fully-automated Lab Automation platform", that the instrument "is now commercialized" and that it had been shown at a trade show in Paris and a conference in London, according to the CORDIS report. The project closed on its planned end date. The first third-party sign of use came in June 2024, when New England Biolabs, a US reagent maker, announced a collaboration to automate its NEBNext library preparation kits on Magelia, including PCR-free whole-genome sequencing libraries from samples at and below the kits' recommended input, according to BioSpectrum and GenomeWeb.

The commercial targets are another matter. Inorevia has never published a customer count or named a paying customer. The only revenue figure in the public accounts dataset is €51,500 for 2019, according to the INPI accounts dataset. Inorevia filed its accounts for 2020 and for 2022 to 2024 with a confidentiality declaration, as the BODACC filing notice for the 2024 accounts shows. Nothing public shows turnover near €30 million or 400 customers. Under this series' rule, a promised milestone that neither the company nor a third party has announced counts as not delivered.

1. Finish the Magelia instrument (TRL8)DeliveredFinal report and product page.
2. Start commercialisation by 2021DeliveredReported as commercialised in 2021; NEB partnership in 2024.
3. Validated applicationsPartly shownWGS work confirmed by NEB; other results are company claims.
4. 400 customers within five yearsNot achievedNo customer count or named buyer published.
5. €30M turnover, 15% of the European marketNot achievedRevenue undisclosed since 2019; safeguard in 2025.

The Money

Before the award, Inorevia said it had secured "over 1.3 M€ in grants and a seed round", according to CORDIS. Institut Curie lists it among its winners of the national i-LAB start-up competition in 2017, according to the archived Curie page. The register shows capital increases in February 2018, July 2020, June 2022 and January 2023, taking share capital from €10,000 to €20,406.60, according to North Data and BODACC. The sums raised in these rounds were never announced. CB Insights lists Investessor, WeLikeAngels, Wilco, Paris Biotech Santé and One Green as investors and classes the company at angel stage; no venture capital round could be found. The award was grant only, and Inorevia does not appear on the EIC Fund pages.

Inorevia also won a second EU grant. It is one of four partners in NEXUS, an EIC Transition project led by Italy's National Research Council to build an instrument that isolates and analyses extracellular vesicles from blood for liquid biopsy, with an EU contribution of €598,750 to Inorevia between June 2022 and May 2025, according to CORDIS. One of the other partners, University Medical Center Freiburg, reports that the EU's Innovation Radar recognised it.

The losses tell the rest. While the EIC grant ran, Inorevia's annual net loss stayed between €33,795 and €101,724. In 2022 it rose to €612,933, in 2023 to €1,038,202 and in 2024 to €1,072,042, according to the INPI accounts dataset; the 2024 figure also appears in the national company directory. Over the same period equity fell from 86.5% of the balance sheet at the end of 2022 to 37.1% at the end of 2024, and the dataset's debt ratio rose from 10.0% to 128.7%. Six months after the 2024 year end, the safeguard proceedings opened.

Why Europe Should Care

Genomics is a declared EU priority. Under the 1+ Million Genomes initiative, 25 EU countries plus the UK and Norway have committed to linking genomic and clinical data, and its Genome of Europe project aims to sequence at least 100,000 citizens for a European reference database. Every genome sequenced starts with library preparation. Inorevia's own partner in this field is American: the reagents it automates come from New England Biolabs. A European instrument that lets smaller hospital and research labs sequence scarce samples fits that agenda, but only if it reaches those labs at scale, and the record does not show that it has.

The Verdict

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