EIC Accelerator Winner Level Nine Labs and the Lignin Polyol Race

Lignin, a component of wood and other plant biomass, is today mostly burned, Level Nine Labs says in its January 2026 investor slides. The Berlin company, registered in 2023, designs synthetic catalysts it calls nanozymes: small structures that copy the active site of an enzyme but are built to survive industrial conditions. Its first target is turning lignin into aromatic polyols, a building block for polyurethane foam used in insulation and construction, per the project summary.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, L9-NANOZYME, for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 23 September 2026 with an EU contribution of €2,485,221 for 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The project is to finish optimising the process, test the polyols in real industrial products, and deliver a fully engineered commercial demonstration plant of 3,000 tonnes a year. A month into the grant, the public evidence that the chemistry works at scale is the company's own account of a 50-litre pilot.

An enzyme's active site, rebuilt for a reactor

The problem the project describes is a trade-off. Enzymes are selective but fragile, and conventional industrial catalysts are robust but break lignin into an unruly mixture, which is why, according to the CORDIS objective, existing lignin processes need harsh conditions that make them costly and hard to scale. Level Nine's argument, set out in its slides, is that less than 1% of an enzyme does the catalytic work, so a synthetic copy of only that active site can keep the selectivity without the protein that makes enzymes delicate.

The company's website says the process runs at 60°C and atmospheric pressure and breaks selected bonds to give a low-molecular-weight, uniform product. The slides describe a machine learning platform trained on protein databases, which the company says cut a design iteration from five months to minutes. The aromatic structure of lignin is the selling point: the company told Startbase that its polyol matches fossil alternatives, is flame-retardant without halogenated additives and fits existing polyurethane lines, and the CORDIS objective targets uses where fire safety and strength matter. None of these performance claims has been published as test data.

What the EIC is paying for

The CORDIS record lists three deliverables: process optimisation, validation of the polyols in real industrial applications, and a fully engineered 3,000 tonne a year commercial demonstration plant. "Engineered" is the operative word: the objective describes the plant's design being delivered within the 24 months, not its construction. The EIC announced on 15 June 2026 that 38 companies had been selected, with €90 million in grants and €202 million set aside for possible equity; the attached selection list names "Level Nine Labs UG", although the register shows the company has traded as a GmbH since December 2025. No EIC Fund investment in Level Nine is listed on the EIC Fund portfolio page as checked on 4 November 2026.

1. Optimised lignin-to-polyol processPilotA 50-litre pilot "completed with external partner, ready for 350L", per the company's January 2026 slides; the partner is not named.
2. Polyols validated in industrial productsNot shownThe company says it works with several polyurethane makers it does not name; no test results are public.
3. Engineered 3,000 t/yr demonstration plantToo earlyProject started 1 October 2026; no site or engineering partner announced.
4. Cost-competitive bio-polyolClaimSlides cite a techno-economic study by unnamed experts: competitive at 1,700 to 2,000 per tonne with 50% to 60% profitability.

The record so far

Level Nine closed a €4 million seed round in March 2026, led by Visionaries Tomorrow, reported by Tech.eu on 17 March and by ESG Today a day later, which names Zero Carbon Capital and Rockstart as existing investors and IBB Ventures and better ventures as new ones. Tech.eu and TAM Radar put total funding at €6.5 million. ESG Today says the money is for a planned kilotonne-scale first-of-a-kind plant; TAM Radar reports pilot facilities at the new Berlin headquarters and plans for production of kilograms a day.

The register summary on North Data shows the company converting from a UG, the German mini-company form, into a GmbH on 8 December 2025, share capital rising to €36,485 on 19 December 2025, a move of address on 2 March 2026, and IBB Unternehmensverwaltung recorded as a shareholder on 24 April 2026. It also lists Pro FIT state aid of €170,263 recorded on 29 August 2024, and the company's website credits a Pro FIT project co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. No insolvency entry appears, and North Data shows no filed accounts figures, so revenue and losses are not public.

What the record lacks is independent evidence about the catalyst. A Google Patents search on 4 November 2026 for Level Nine Labs as applicant or Seadna Quigley as inventor returned no published patent; the slides call the process "patent-pending", which a search of published documents cannot confirm or rule out. Web searches for this article found no peer-reviewed paper or third-party test of the polyol, and no named customer or offtake agreement. The slides set the next step as a 5,000-litre demonstration plant with offtakes secured, then a first commercial plant of 30,000 tonnes.

Why Brussels is interested

The Commission's Action Plan for the Chemicals Industry, presented in July 2025, set out to cut the sector's energy and feedstock costs and reduce geopolitical dependencies. The Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking read it as recognising bio-based chemicals as a strategic pathway built on European biomass. The project summary makes the same case for Level Nine: lignin is described as an abundant European bioresource, and polyols as a chemical made almost entirely from fossil feedstocks today. Whether the process reaches the price the slides promise is not shown in any public document yet.

The verdict

Level Nine Labs was not asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.