Pulsedeon: EIC Accelerator Money to Laser-Coat Lithium Anodes

Battery makers coat electrodes with slurries, sputtering or vapour deposition. Pulsedeon, a company with nine employees in Tampere and Ii in northern Finland, wants them to use lasers instead. Its process fires picosecond laser pulses at a target material, turns it into a plasma and lets it settle as a film nanometres to micrometres thick on a battery component. In the EIC Accelerator pilot round of March 2020 the European Commission selected the company, grant only, for a project it called Coldab, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names Pulsedeon as the only beneficiary of the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,301,250 towards a total cost of €3,470,500.

Six years later Pulsedeon is still trading and still developing the technology, now aimed at solid-state batteries. But the commercial side of the plan has not materialised. Revenue in the filed accounts fell from €476,000 in 2022 to €72,000 in 2025, according to Asiakastieto and Finder, and in June 2026 the chief executive said the latest money would speed up the company's "path to commercial agreements", though no commercial agreement had been announced.

Where Pulsedeon Stands Now

The Finnish register shows Pulsedeon Oy as a registered limited company with no insolvency, liquidation or restructuring entry, according to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office's open data. Jari Liimatainen has been managing director since November 2022 and a board member since July 2021; Seppo Siljama has chaired the board since July 2021, and a new board member, Joonas Kettunen, joined in August 2026, according to Asiakastieto's extract of the trade register.

Two announcements in mid-2026 show the company is active. On 25 June 2026 it said it had raised €700,000 from Finnish and international family offices, private investors and existing shareholders, none of them named, to expand production and send material samples to customers in Europe, the United States and Asia. The target markets it named were wearables, drones and "dual-use" applications, not the electric cars the EIC project was written around. On 3 July 2026 it said it had supplied deposition systems to Tampere University and the University of Turku, and moved a Coldab S50 tool from its Ii site to the Tampere campus. No other source reports the round, and its terms are not public.

The Picodeon Inheritance

The Coldab name is older than the company. Coldab was the trade name of Picodeon Ltd Oy, a laser coating firm in Ii that in 2013 raised €5 million from Enso Ventures and said it held 18 granted patents and nearly 100 applications, according to Laser Focus World. In October 2013 Liimatainen, then Picodeon's chief executive, presented a ColdAb Series 4 tool that the company called the first production equipment for pulsed laser deposition, according to Compound Semiconductor; the Laser Focus World article two months earlier named Marko Mylläri as chief executive.

The two companies are not the same legal entity, although OLED-Info describes Pulsedeon as "previously known as Picodeon". The register shows Picodeon Ltd Oy left the employer and VAT registers on 6 March 2018 and was removed from the trade register on 22 December 2020, according to PRH open data. Pulsedeon Oy, with its own business ID, was registered on 29 March 2018. Whether Pulsedeon bought Picodeon's patents or equipment is not stated in any source found for this article.

The Technology: Laser Plasma Instead of Slurry

The Coldab proposal on CORDIS argued that existing deposition methods have "low production rate" and that the process could make batteries that are safer and denser. The Commission's representation in Finland described it as a way to put protective layers on battery components, compatible with liquid-electrolyte cells as well as solid-state and lithium-sulphur designs, and quoted Liimatainen saying the method was "more cost-effective than currently used methods", according to its June 2021 article.

The application has narrowed since. The company now describes a platform that combines laser deposition with cold spray deposition, thermomechanical processing and cell stacking to make lithium metal and lithium alloy anodes 1 to 10 micrometres thick, in a dry process without binders, and says it holds 11 patent families, according to its June 2026 announcement. PULSELiON, the EU consortium built around the method, adapts it to make the lithium metal anode, protective layers and sulphide solid electrolyte of next-generation solid-state cells in a single vacuum step, according to CORDIS. The cost claims have not been tested by any independent party in public.

What Coldab Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Coldab followed a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study under the same name, run from June to September 2019, according to CORDIS. The Phase 2 objective was specific: upgrade and validate the Coldab system to automate production of lithium-ion batteries and their components, run validation tests, set up a scalable supply chain, and "conduct pilot tests with 8 battery OEMs" in a commercial setting.

The project's dates differ between EU sources. CORDIS gives 1 October 2020 to 31 December 2023 and a total cost of €3,470,500. The Commission's representation in Finland gives 1 October 2020 to 31 March 2023 and a total budget of €3.28 million. The later CORDIS end date points to an extension of nine months, though no source states the reason.

The final periodic report, for 2022 and 2023, says the proof-of-concept equipment was redesigned into a "Pilot System for Multi-layer USPLD", an in-situ measurement and control system was built, supply chains for targets, deposition systems and post-processing were set up, and the Coldab S50 equipment was upgraded from processing widths of about 100 millimetres to 250 to 300 millimetres. It claims "the first integrated processing system for multilayer Li metal anode, solid state electrolyte components" and energy densities of "up to 1100-1200 Wh/l". On customers it says only that validation programmes "were agreed" with battery producers in the EU, the USA and Asia. No battery maker is named, and no pilot test result is reported.

1. Upgrade Coldab into an automated pilot systemDeliveredPilot system with process control built; width raised to 250 to 300 mm, per the CORDIS report.
2. Scalable supply chainDeliveredSupply chains for targets, deposition and post-processing systems reported as set up.
3. Validation tests of the system and the batteries it makesPartialPretest samples produced; the energy density figure is a company claim with no published test data.
4. Pilot tests with 8 battery OEMsNot achievedValidation programmes "agreed", but no OEM is named and no pilot result has been announced by the company or a partner.
5. Commercial roll-out to battery makersNot achievedIn June 2026 the company was still working towards "commercial agreements".
6. Completion on scheduleLateEnd date of December 2023 in CORDIS against March 2023 in the Commission's earlier project page.

The engineering work was done. The test of the grant, a production process taken up by battery makers, was not met: an eight-company pilot programme is exactly the kind of milestone that a supplier would announce, and nothing has been announced in the almost three years since the project closed.

What Pulsedeon Has Achieved Since the Award

Pulsedeon's main achievement since the award is its place in EU research consortia. CORDIS lists it as a funded partner in four Horizon Europe projects on solid-state batteries: PULSELiON (€1,487,125, 2022 to 2026), built around its laser deposition method; SOLiD (€1,130,000, 2022 to 2027); SOLVE (€906,839.50, 2024 to 2028); and HyList (€972,650, 2025 to 2027). Before the EIC award it had joined the Horizon 2020 lithium-sulphur project LISA (€1,125,962.50, 2019 to 2022). The company names SAFT, Stellantis and Umicore among its consortium partners. Its CEO is also named as an industrial adviser to LEXI4D, a fellowship due to start in 2027, in which Pulsedeon receives no funding.

The consortium work has produced results. The PULSELiON report for March 2024 to August 2025 says Pulsedeon "successfully developed and established pulse laser deposition equipment that allows roll-to-roll deposition of lithium metal anode, protection layers, as well as sulfide/oxide solid electrolytes", and that test cells with laser-deposited lithium and a ceramic barrier ran for about 550 hours against 160 hours without the barrier. The same report still lists the project's 10 Ah pouch cell as a target, not a result.

The Money

The accounts describe a small research company, not a growing supplier. Revenue was €441,000 in 2021, €476,000 in 2022 and €453,000 in 2023, the years of the Coldab project, then fell to €77,000 in 2024 and €72,000 in 2025. The operating loss ranged from €17,000 to €166,000 a year; the free summaries do not show how much grant income was booked outside revenue. The equity ratio was minus 104% in 2025 when capital loans are counted as debt, according to Asiakastieto; the ratio with capital loans counted as equity is behind its paywall. Finder reports the same revenue and results to within €1,000.

EU grants are the largest funding on record. The seven EU projects on CORDIS committed €7,973,827 to Pulsedeon, more than the "EUR 7.5 million in technology investment since 2019" the company cites. The only private round on record is the unnamed €700,000 of June 2026. Staff never exceeded ten.

Why Europe Should Care

Battery manufacturing is one of the EU's oldest industrial priorities. The European Battery Alliance, launched in October 2017, was set up because Europe had "almost no battery cell manufacturing at scale". In December 2025 the Commission announced a €1.8 billion Battery Booster, with €1.5 billion for European cell makers and research and innovation named as one of its five pillars, according to EBA250. European-owned process technology for the next battery generation, solid-state cells with lithium metal anodes, fits that aim.

The Pulsedeon record also shows the limit of that policy. The EU has funded the same small company's laser coating method through seven projects, and the technology is now embedded in Europe's solid-state research, but no European battery maker has publicly adopted it.

The Verdict

Pulsedeon has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.