Leitspalt: EIC Accelerator Bet on Load-Bearing Battery Cooling

In an electric car battery, cooling the cells, holding them in place and carrying the load are jobs for different parts; an Aachen start-up wants one part to do all three. Leitspalt, which appears in the EIC Accelerator's October 2025 cut-off under its earlier name, ivilion GmbH, proposes a single extruded component that cools, holds and carries the cells. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,495,150 for its project, NEXTPACK, which runs from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028.

Five months into the grant, the record is that of an early-stage company: a technology described by its founders and by the project summary, regional support programmes, a pitch slot at Falling Walls Venture 2026, and no named customer.

One company, two names

The EIC's October 2025 selection lists the company as ivilion GmbH with the website leitspalt.com. North Rhine-Westphalia's press release of 25 February 2026 already names it leitspalt GmbH of Aachen, and CORDIS lists the NEXTPACK coordinator as Leitspalt GmbH at Hüttenstraße 3, the address its legal notice gives. The battery-tech.net profile still describes "Ivilion GmbH" of Aachen, founded in 2024, with the same cooling technology. The date of the name change could not be confirmed: the commercial register entry and filed accounts could not be retrieved for this review, so staff numbers, equity and results are not reported here.

How the cooling structure works

Jannik Bühring, the managing director, set out the design in a CHEManager article he wrote in May 2026. Two half-shells interlock around the cells and leave a narrow gap between them, and coolant flows through that gap. He says the structure covers up to 80% of the cell surface, can be extruded from metal or plastic, fits any cell format and chemistry, and forms a sandwich with deep-drawn sheet covers that can be built into the vehicle body. The idea, he writes, grew out of research on multifunctional space structures at RWTH Aachen's Institute for Structural Mechanics and Lightweight Design, where he did his doctorate on metamaterials.

Bühring measures the design against conventional cooling solutions and against immersion cooling, in which the cells sit in a fluid. He claims about four times the cooling performance of conventional solutions and cooling comparable to or better than immersion, without its drawbacks. The CORDIS summary repeats the fourfold figure. No test report, peer-reviewed paper or third-party measurement backing it was found.

The numbers depend on who is quoting

The company's figures are not consistent across its own channels. CORDIS gives 20% lower cost at pack level excluding cells, and the CHEManager piece says up to 20%, about €7 per kilowatt hour or €500 per vehicle. The battery-tech.net profile gives a manufacturing cost reduction of about 5%. On charging, the company website says charging rates above 3C and charging times under ten minutes, CHEManager says 10% to 80% in five to ten minutes, and Falling Walls says around ten minutes. On range, battery-tech.net and Falling Walls say about 7%, while CORDIS lists a 7% gain in energy density. All of these are the company's targets, not measured results.

What has happened since the award

CHEManager describes the company as in its prototype and industrialisation phase, with first industrial projects that it does not name. The battery-tech.net profile mentions pilot collaborations with automotive manufacturers and Tier-1 suppliers, also unnamed, and says the cooling patents are licensed from RWTH Aachen. The company's public support so far is regional and European: the state press release lists its autoBat project, a battery system with a load-bearing cooling system and a model-based design environment, among 20 projects in the fifth round of Grüne Gründungen.NRW, which shared about €10.7 million in total; no per-project amount is published. The HIGH-TECH.NRW accelerator lists Leitspalt in its fourth batch. The Jülich project agency published an item on Grüne Gründungen.NRW funding notices on 11 September 2026 that describes autoBat among the projects.

The company website says it won the Munich regional round of the Startup World Cup in 2026; a web search found no organiser announcement confirming it. No venture round or private investor was found in web searches, and the company does not appear on the EIC Fund's beneficiaries page. The selection was for blended finance, but CORDIS records only the grant, and no EIC equity investment has been announced.

What NEXTPACK is meant to deliver

NEXTPACK was funded under the EIC challenge for breakthrough innovations for future mobility. According to CORDIS, the grant pays for validating the design in pilot-scale manufacturing and integrating it into next-generation electric vehicle platforms. CORDIS shows no total project cost and, five months in, no periodic report or deliverable.

1. Multifunctional cooling structurePrototype stagePrototypes and first industrial projects, per CHEManager; no partner named.
2. Four times the cooling performanceClaimStated in CORDIS and by the founder; no test data published.
3. 20% lower pack cost excluding cellsClaimAnother profile gives about 5%.
4. Pilot-scale manufacturing and EV platform integrationToo earlyProject runs to May 2028; nothing reported in CORDIS yet.

Why the EU funds battery pack design

NEXTPACK sits in the EIC's future mobility challenge, and the EU is tightening the rules for the battery packs such a design would go into. Under the Batteries Regulation, electric vehicle batteries placed on the EU market from 18 February 2027 need a digital battery passport, as Conformance and Switzerland Global Enterprise both note. Leitspalt's Falling Walls profile promises full cell recyclability, and CORDIS lists improved recyclability among the project's aims; no recycling trial has been published.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.