EIC Accelerator Winner plasmotion Aims a Plasma Jet at Polishing

The last step in making a precision metal part, taking off the burrs and bringing the surface to the finish the drawing asks for, is still largely manual work, according to the EU project that is paying a Saxon start-up to automate it. The EIC Accelerator project of plasmotion GmbH calls this manual polishing and deburring "an omnipresent and critical bottleneck", made worse by a shortage of skilled workers. Its answer is a jet of salt-water electrolyte that, at a few hundred volts, wraps the metal in a thin plasma and removes roughness without touching it.

The European Innovation Council selected the project, 3D JETPEP Finishing, at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 7 October 2025 and an EU contribution of €2,497,326 for November 2025 to October 2027. A year into that period, the process exists and has won two start-up prizes; what is not yet public is a customer using it on a production line.

Polishing without acid or abrasive

plasmotion's website cites more than ten years of expertise in plasma polishing. In the process as the company describes it, the part is immersed in a salt solution and connected to a high voltage; a vapour envelope forms around it, and discharges through that envelope combine with electrochemical reactions to dissolve the peaks of the surface. On its product page, plasmotion gives a working voltage of 200 to 400 volts against about 20 volts for conventional electropolishing, which uses mineral-acid baths at around pH 1. The company says plasma polishing removes about a tenth of the material electropolishing does, keeps edges sharper, and reduces roughness by about a factor of five where electropolishing halves it. These are the company's figures; no independent test of them was found.

By plasmotion's own account, the weakness of the bath process is size: the whole part has to go in, and it is treated all over. plasmotion's step, described in a transfer profile from TU Bergakademie Freiberg's IMKF institute, was to move the working principle from an electrolyte bath to an electrolyte jet, so that large parts and chosen areas can be finished. The JETPEP page describes a robot-guided nozzle in a pilot plant handling parts up to pallet size, with stainless steel and aluminium as the current priorities, and names deburring of milled parts, polishing of tanks and welded structures, and stamping tools that it says can take up to 40 hours of manual polishing.

What the EIC project promised

The CORDIS summary describes a process "up to 15 times faster than laser polishing and using only environmentally friendly saltwater electrolytes", suited to serial production, for semiconductor, medical, aerospace and analytical instrument makers. The business model is machine sales, electrolyte sales and after-sales service. The summary puts the global precision parts market at €178.4 billion in 2024 and projects €894.6 billion by 2037, with Europe expected to lead; those are the applicant's numbers.

The summary also describes the financing the company asked for: about €2.5 million of grant for development and validation, and about €3.23 million of equity for deployment and scaling. CORDIS records the grant only. No EIC Fund investment in plasmotion has been announced in any source found for this article, and North Data, which mirrors register and funding records, lists the EU project entry of €2,497,326 in October 2025 and no equity investment. Whether the equity part of the blended award has been agreed is not public.

1. A working jet processShownJETPEP shown at EMO 2023 and later fairs, per the company news page; pilot plant described on its site.
2. Up to 15 times faster than laser polishingClaimStated in the CORDIS summary; no published comparison.
3. Serial production at customersNot shownThe company names sectors, not customers; no installed line has been announced.
4. Equity to scaleNot publicAbout €3.23M sought per CORDIS; no investment announced.

CORDIS lists no deliverables, reports or publications for the project yet, one year into a two-year grant.

The record so far

The register data show a GmbH entered in October 2022 with €25,000 of share capital and Vincent Stepputat as managing director, which the company's imprint confirms. North Data lists three shareholders whose names sit behind its paywall, new shareholder lists filed on 5 October 2022 and 22 September 2026, a state aid notice of 14 January 2026, and no insolvency notice. Filed accounts with staff, equity or results are not available in the free data.

The outside recognition so far comes from start-up programmes. A June 2024 release by LBBW and Wissensfabrik names plasmotion among the ten winners of the WECONOMY 2023/2024 founders' competition, run with Handelsblatt and UnternehmerTUM, whose prize is a year of mentoring rather than money. In September 2024 plasmotion won the second day of the start-up pitches at the AMB metalworking fair in Stuttgart, as Interempresas reported and the company announced. It also went through the 2023/24 manufacturing stream of the Creative Destruction Lab in Seattle, and in March 2026 it was registered as an exhibitor at the W3+ fair in Wetzlar, listing semiconductor, medical, space and defence work.

Funding beyond the EIC

The company's own site lists support from the German economy ministry's EXIST programme and the European Social Fund, and the futureSAX profile confirms the EXIST research transfer grant. One data aggregator gives an inconsistent picture beyond that: Caplight lists grants, an accelerator entry and a January 2026 debt round with no amount, and a total that is lower than the EIC grant alone. No equity round could be confirmed from a primary source, and the company's news page announces none.

Why it fits the EIC brief

The project's case rests on a shortage of skilled finishing workers, which the CORDIS summary names, and on replacing acid baths with salt-water electrolytes. plasmotion says on its JETPEP page that its electrolytes are fully compliant with REACH, the EU chemicals regulation, and recyclable. CORDIS tags the project at 40% for climate action and lists its keywords as surface finishing, semiconductor, precision parts and aerospace. The summary gives no figure for how much of that finishing work is done in Europe today.

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