Photosynthetic Puts EIC Accelerator Funds Into Micro 3D Printing

Most 3D printers build an object by stacking flat layers, and the ones that reach sub-micron detail use two-photon lithography, which Photosynthetic says is a thousand times slower than its own method. Photosynthetic, an Amsterdam company founded in 2018 by Alexander Kostenko, then a researcher in the Computational Imaging group at the Dutch national mathematics and computer science institute CWI, says it forms the structure inside a volume of resin at once. Its project summary on CORDIS describes the method, volumetric micro-lithography, as based on single-photon polymerisation and "1000 times faster than Two-Photon Lithography".

The company appears in the EIC Accelerator's 12 March 2025 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant agreement for €2,499,999 running from 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2027. The money is for hardware upgrades, better materials and scaling production. A year into the project, the company has a minimum viable printer, ORIGIN2.5, with what a 2026 profile calls an operational deployment in the Netherlands, a granted US patent, and no announced sale.

Printing a volume instead of a line

A CWI article of June 2020 contrasts the approach with current technologies that stack 2D structures. Photosynthetic's pitch, in the words of a CWI note of January 2024, is to combine "the speed of stereolithography with the high resolution of two-photon lithography".

The patent shows how. WO2021116501, filed by Photosynthetic BV with Kostenko as inventor and a priority date of 13 December 2019, describes a maskless method that projects a sequence of light patterns focused at different depths into a photosensitive medium, using one wavelength to start polymerisation and another to inhibit it, so the structure forms in the volume rather than layer by layer. The US member of the family, US12558849, was granted on 24 February 2026 and is assigned to the company. A 2020 CWI article describes the same idea as polymerisation "controlled in three dimensions by millions of light beams".

The speed claim is the company's own. No independent benchmark of the thousandfold figure, or of the printer's actual resolution and build rate, could be found in public; the company website publishes no specifications, and a TechTour profile of June 2026 gives only "sub-micron precision" over centimetre-scale areas.

A sales date that moved

Photosynthetic was one of five winners of the Formnext Start-up Challenge in 2022, reported by 3Dnatives and 3D Printing Industry. In an interview with 3D Printing Industry in November 2022, Kostenko set out the plan.

Since then the company was a finalist in the Hello Tomorrow Global Challenge, reported by CWI and Amsterdam Science Park in January 2024, and took second place and $5,000 at the SPIE Startup Challenge at Photonics West on 28 January 2025, per Novus Light and the SPIE release on Business Wire. In April 2026 it exhibited at RAPID + TCT in Boston, per the exhibitor directory.

The TechTour profile of June 2026 describes ORIGIN2.5 as the company's first product, a minimum viable printer for laboratories, universities and medical centres, at TRL 6, with three patent applications and an operational deployment in the Netherlands. It names UMC Utrecht and the Eindhoven University of Technology's MicroFabLab and NanolabNL environment as early customers and ecosystem partners, with pilot facilities in Amsterdam and Eindhoven, and says the company now plans to turn its strongest leads into paid pilots or first system placements. That is two years behind the 2022 roadmap, and no price, order or sale of a printer has been announced on the company's website or in the trade press searched for this article.

What the EIC project promised

The project summary on CORDIS says Photosynthetic will "complete, test, and commercialise" its technology, starting with micro-porous membranes for cell analysis, microneedle array patches for drug and vaccine delivery, and bio-scaffolds for tissue engineering, with cosmetics and mass immunisation named as later markets. It lists no total project cost. The EIC's announcement of 30 June 2025 reports 40 companies selected in that round for almost €230 million, 87% of them for blended finance; the page itself does not name the companies.

The equity half of the blended award has not surfaced. The summary says the company was seeking €6 million in equity, €3 million from the EIC and €3 million from other venture investors. No investment by the EIC Fund and no venture round has been announced by the company, the EIC or the trade press found in searches for this article, and TechTour wrote in June 2026 that Photosynthetic was still looking for partners, early users and investors.

1. Working printerTRL 6ORIGIN2.5 deployed with Dutch research users, per TechTour, June 2026.
2. Protected methodGrantedUS12558849 granted 24 February 2026, per Google Patents.
3. 1,000 times faster than two-photon printingClaimNo independent benchmark found.
4. Commercial salesNot announcedNo order or price published; project runs to October 2027.
5. €6M equity alongside the grantNot announcedNo EIC Fund or venture investment found.

Thin public accounts

The public funding found before the EIC consists of an NWO Take-Off grant for a feasibility study in 2019 and a €300,000 convertible loan from Innovation Fund North Holland in 2020, both reported by CWI. The KvK figures republished by Liza show equity of €91,882 at the end of 2024 and minus €309,742 at the end of 2025, with total assets of €753,435 in 2025. No second public source for these figures could be found, and the figures shown include no revenue.

Why it matters for Europe

The project summary ties the technology to public health as well as industry: microneedle array patches for vaccine delivery and mass immunisation are among the uses it names, next to membranes for cell analysis and scaffolds for tissue engineering. The company's stated customers so far are research institutions, UMC Utrecht and Eindhoven's nanofabrication facilities, per TechTour, and its membership of the PhotonHub Scaling Club, reported in the same profile, places it in a European photonics scale-up programme. Whether a Dutch printer becomes a production tool for European medical device and lab-on-chip makers depends on numbers the company has not yet published: speed, resolution, price and yield.

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