Sensmet's EIC Accelerator Spectrometer for Metals in Liquids

Process samples sent from a lithium or battery-metals plant to the laboratory typically take 4 to 10 hours to come back, by Sensmet's account, which delays the chemical dosing they are meant to guide. Sensmet, an Oulu company, sells an analyser that fires an electric spark inside the liquid itself, flash-heats a microscopic volume to about 10,000 °C and reads the light the atoms emit, giving metal concentrations while the process runs. The method is called micro-discharge optical emission spectroscopy, which the company shortens to µDOES and describes as patented. A patent number could not be confirmed in the searches made for this article.

The EIC Accelerator selected Sensmet's AquaSpec project at its 1 October 2025 cut-off, listed as blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,999 for a grant signed on 29 May 2026 and running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The project reaches beyond the fixed process analyser Sensmet already sells, to what it calls the world's first portable optical emission spectrometer, measuring hard-to-detect elements such as lithium, boron, phosphorus, sulphur and chlorine within seconds at the point of need.

A spark inside the sample

The laboratory reference for metals in solution, and the method both industrial trials below compared against, is inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). Sensmet's analyser instead puts a micro-discharge directly in the liquid, needs no carrier gas or chemical reagents, and, per the company website, measures up to 30 metals at once with part-per-billion sensitivity, around the clock. Light elements such as lithium and sodium are the selling point: an opinion piece by Sensmet's chief sales officer Aappo Roos in pv magazine argues that X-ray fluorescence cannot measure them and is nearly impossible to calibrate for low-concentration impurities, and that lab batch results typically take 4 to 10 hours. The same piece calls the company a 2017 university spin-off.

A paper in Analytical Letters, published online in December 2023, gives the method's sensitivity in deionised water. It lists VTT MIKES, Aalto University and Sensmet Oy as affiliations, and its six authors include Toni Laurila and Aappo Roos, so it is the developers' own measurement rather than an independent test. Per the VTT research portal and the journal record, it reports limits of detection of 0.1 µg/L for lithium, 0.9 µg/L for copper and 4.1 µg/L for nickel, long-term repeatability of 2 to 4.2%, and an application to a black mass sample from lithium-ion battery recycling.

Two industrial trials, both against the lab

In 2022 Keliber, the Finnish lithium subsidiary of Sibanye-Stillwater, ran the analyser in a pilot that made battery-grade lithium hydroxide from spodumene concentrate. Envirotec reported in January 2023 that the pilot ran continuously for 400 hours with lithium recovery above 88%, and that nearly 80 process samples were analysed for sodium and lithium by both µDOES and laboratory ICP-OES, with what the release called "an excellent degree of correlation". Recycling International reported the same 80-sample pilot. Neither report gives a correlation figure.

The second trial came with numbers. At Metso's facilities in Pori, more than 60 samples from a lithium hydroxide process were analysed both ways, and the reported coefficients of determination were 0.98 for lithium and 0.95 for sodium, per Canadian Mining Journal in December 2023 and Operations Engineer in January 2024. Both tie the technology to Metso's Courier HX on-stream analyser with global availability in 2024; Operations Engineer reports that Metso will adopt it in selected Courier HX systems and quotes Veli-Matti Järvinen of Metso's automation product group: "We were impressed by the outcomes of the measurement campaign."

What happened next is harder to trace. A Metso blog from October 2024 says a Courier HX system can include "an optical emission spectroscopy analyzer to measure lighter elements e.g. Li, Na, Mg", but it does not name the supplier, and Metso's Courier HX product page mentions only X-ray fluorescence. No Metso press release naming Sensmet, and no count of systems sold, was found. Sensmet's own website names no customers; trade reports on its 2026 funding say the analysers are deployed in wastewater treatment, battery recycling, lithium production and fertiliser manufacture, without naming sites.

A small company in the accounts

The filed figures describe a business far smaller than its trial partners. Per Finder.fi and Asiakastieto, revenue rose from €123,000 in the year to March 2022 to about €359,000 in the year to March 2024, then fell in each of the next two years to about €301,000. The operating result was negative in every one of the five years, between €302,000 and €683,000. Finder.fi gives net losses of €528,000 for the latest year and €591,000 for the year before.

Staff fell from 10 to 6 in the year to March 2026, per both databases. Asiakastieto, the only one of the two to show it, gives an equity ratio of minus 49% for that year, counting subordinated capital loans as debt. The filed balance sheet itself was not obtained for this article, so the size of the equity gap is not stated here. The Finnish trade register's open data shows the company as registered, with no name change, and no insolvency or liquidation entry was found.

Where the money came from

Innovestor made its initial investment in 2019, per its chief executive Wilhelm Lindholm. In 2021 Sensmet raised €1.5 million in a second round led by the Finnish venture fund Nordic Option, with a follow-on from Innovestor and new private investors, to enter international markets, as reported by H2O Global News and Nordic9. In March 2026 EIT RawMaterials, the EU-funded raw materials innovation community, invested €1.5 million through its Booster programme to scale deployment, per tech.eu, Instrumentation and the company's EU projects page.

The EIC grant followed two months later. The award appears in the winner table as blended finance, which pairs a grant with a possible equity investment from the EIC Fund. Sensmet's own project page describes AquaSpec as a €2.5 million grant, and no EIC Fund investment in Sensmet had been announced in the sources searched on 4 November 2026. The only other EU project found for the company is its participation in the ITEA Spectralligence project from the 2020 AI call; a CORDIS search for "sensmet" returns AquaSpec alone.

What AquaSpec promises

The CORDIS objective sets out the case: European industry faces targets for circularity, pollution reduction and raw material autonomy, yet lab analysis of key elements typically takes 1 to 5 days, longer than the 4 to 10 hours Sensmet's sales chief gave for lithium plants in 2023. AquaSpec is to deliver lab-grade precision on site, for metals and non-metals, for decisions in battery recycling, wastewater treatment, hydrogen production and mining. The company's own description is more industrial: scaling its system into a mass-manufacturable, field-deployable product. Announcing the grant, Laurila said, as quoted by Envirotec, that "this award will primarily be used to advance µDOES".

1. Online µDOES analyser in industrial useTrialledKeliber and Metso trials reported; no named customer site or sales count found.
2. Lab-grade agreement for lithium and sodiumReportedR² of 0.98 and 0.95 against ICP-OES in the Metso trial, per trade press.
3. Portable spectrometerNot yet publicProject started June 2026; no prototype shown.
4. Boron, phosphorus, sulphur and chlorine within secondsNot yet publicPublished results cover metals; no data on these non-metals found.

Five months in, there is nothing to check against these goals, and CORDIS lists no results. What the company has published since June 2026 is organisational: the appointment of Bart Rooijakkers as operations manager in June, of Jyri Hämäläinen as chief product officer in September, and a job opening for a senior software engineer in October, all on its news page.

The raw materials case

Sensmet frames its work around the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act, and the fit is direct. The Commission's summary sets 2030 benchmarks for the EU to extract at least 10%, process at least 40% and recycle at least 25% of its annual consumption of strategic raw materials, and to draw no more than 65% from any single third country. Lithium refining and battery recycling are hydrometallurgical processes run on liquid streams, which is where an online metals analyser sits. That EIT RawMaterials and the EIC both backed the company in the same spring follows from that policy, not from any published sales record.

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