Neurinnov Ties EIC Accelerator Money to Restoring Hand Grasp

A complete spinal cord injury in the neck can leave a person unable to move the hands, and the EIC project summary says physiotherapy offers little hope of getting that movement back. Neurinnov, a 2018 spin-off of the French computer science institute Inria and the University of Montpellier, wraps electrodes around two nerves of the upper arm and uses a purpose-built chip to steer current to the bundles of fibres that close or open the hand. In small studies, patients have used it to hold a can and drink through a straw.

The EIC Accelerator selected Neurinnov's project ARCHE at its October 2025 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,999 from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The money is meant to finish industrialising the implant, which CORDIS calls NeuriGrasp, run the pivotal clinical trial and obtain a CE mark in Europe and FDA approval in the United States. When Neurinnov raised its seed round in 2021, it announced that same pivotal study for 2024.

Two electrodes instead of one per muscle

The usual approach to electrical stimulation of paralysed muscles, as the 2020 paper below frames it, places an electrode for each muscle. The Montpellier group's bet is that a nerve contains bundles of fibres that each serve a particular muscle, so a multi-contact cuff around the nerve can reach several muscles if the current is shaped precisely. A paper in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation in May 2020, with David Guiraud listed under Neurinnov, reported tests during surgery on eight subjects: stimulating the radial and median nerves selectively produced isolated finger and thumb movements and key, power or hook grips, though different subjects reached different grips. The authors confirmed that the nerves contain muscle-specific bundles and set the goal of grasp and release with only two cuffs above the elbow. The work is registered as NCT03721861, a study at a Montpellier clinic from 2016 to 2019 that enrolled nine participants.

The current is steered by a dedicated chip. ERCIM News wrote in December 2021 that the technology combines epineural electrodes with a chip called SAFE for multipolar stimulation, is patented and licensed from the University of Montpellier and Inria, and has four further patents filed. In an August 2023 article published by Cadence Design Systems, whose software Neurinnov uses for the chip, the company put industrialisation at about 60% complete. The project summary in CORDIS describes the finished device as fully implantable, fitted in a two-hour operation and learned in two weeks of training, at a price it calls accessible; it gives no figure.

What the studies show

The clinical record is small. ClinicalTrials.gov lists a study sponsored by the Paris hospital group AP-HP with Inria and Neurinnov as collaborators, which implanted two cuff electrodes in two participants in Perpignan between October and December 2020 and kept them in place for one month. A Scientific Reports paper published on 6 October 2022, with three of its nine authors affiliated with Neurinnov, describes two participants whose grasp stayed stable over 28 days and who controlled the movements through voluntary actions to hold a can and drink through a straw. A follow-on study under the same name, AGILIS, sponsored by the Bouffard-Vercelli rehabilitation centre in Perpignan, ran from October 2022 to December 2023 and is recorded as completed with two participants, using cuffs on the median, ulnar and radial nerves. The 2020 study's registry entry has no results posted.

A third study, SENSORS, started in November 2024 and compares non-invasive interfaces, such as voice commands, motion sensors and switches, that a patient could use to tell the neuroprosthesis what to do; it plans 30 participants and was last updated in July 2025. A search of ClinicalTrials.gov for Neurinnov on 4 November 2026 returned only these three studies and no pivotal trial.

The money before the Accelerator

Neurinnov raised €3 million in a seed round led by IRDI Capital Investissement, UI Investissement and Sofilaro, dated 9 December 2021 by Nordic9 and reported by CFNews on 27 December 2021 as a first round to continue clinical studies. Mérieux Partners separately lists a 2021 seed investment through its Pertinence Invest 2 fund, without an amount; the round reports above do not name it. ERCIM News added that the earlier clinical study, completed in 2020, had been funded by EIT Health.

The company has also worked on EU grants as a partner. In AI-HAND, an EIC Pathfinder project led by Inria from August 2023 to July 2027 to develop the implant's electronics and self-adapting electrodes, take it through animal studies and into a first human trial, CORDIS records €882,625 for Neurinnov out of €2,999,834. In DREIMS, an EIC Transition project led by Spain's national hospital for paraplegics on a spinal cord repair implant, Neurinnov supplies the implantable pulse generator and CORDIS records €748,750 for it.

The register shows a company that is active and has no sales yet. The national company directory records Neurinnov as active, with a staff band of 10 to 19 employees in 2024, and for 2025 revenue of zero and a net loss of €439,487. The official commercial gazette BODACC lists 16 notices for the company, the latest the filing of its 2025 accounts published on 16 July 2026, and no insolvency proceeding. BODACC also records a new registration in March 2023 after the registered office moved from another court district (the 2021 accounts had been filed at the Béziers court), and two changes of president since 2023: David Guiraud took over from Serge Renaux in 2023, and Nicolas Serandour from Guiraud in January 2024. Staff figures for other years are not public in the sources reviewed, so whether the company has grown cannot be established.

What ARCHE promised

The EIC's list of companies selected at the 1 October 2025 cut-off includes Neurinnov with ARCHE for blended finance, meaning a grant plus an equity investment. The cut-off drew 923 full applications, and the EIC announced 61 selected companies on 17 February 2026. CORDIS lists no total project cost. A web search on 4 November 2026 found no announced EIC Fund investment in Neurinnov, and the company does not appear on the EIC Fund's portfolio page.

The project's market case rests on figures it states itself: about 20 million people worldwide live with a spinal cord injury, some 40% of them at the cervical level, and nearly half of those injuries are complete. The project says European rehabilitation centres it is in contact with would take part in the pivotal trial and become the first customers, and it names stroke as a possible later use. None of these centres is named in CORDIS. The company's profile with MTEC Southern California describes the EIC grant the same way, as money for clinical, regulatory and industrial work ahead of an upcoming pivotal trial.

1. Selective grasp in patientsShown in small studiesTwo participants over 28 days, Scientific Reports, 2022.
2. Finish industrialisationIn progressAbout 60% in August 2023, per the company; no later figure published.
3. Pivotal clinical trialNot registeredAnnounced for 2024; no entry on ClinicalTrials.gov as of 4 November 2026.
4. CE mark and FDA approvalPendingNo notified body review or FDA filing announced in the sources reviewed.

A European supply chain for a niche implant

The European dimension in the record is the supply chain of the implant itself. Neurinnov designs its own stimulation chip, and the AI-HAND consortium joins it with Inria, the University of Freiburg, the German company CorTec and rehabilitation centres in France and Luxembourg, per CORDIS. A CE mark for an implant like this falls under the EU Medical Device Regulation, which the DREIMS project names as the standard its own implant is being built to. The ARCHE period runs to May 2028, so the delivery of the pivotal trial cannot yet be judged; what can be checked is whether that trial appears in a registry in the coming months.

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