Spectro Inlets: What the EIC Accelerator Bought in Biogas Monitoring

A mass spectrometer can tell you almost exactly which molecules are in a sample, as long as the sample is a gas in a vacuum. Getting it to read a liquid, such as the fermenting slurry inside a biogas reactor, has been the awkward part. Spectro Inlets, a spin-out from the Technical University of Denmark, built a microchip that does exactly that, and in 2021 the European Innovation Council paid most of the cost of taking it into industry.

The grant was €1,519,875 under the Green Deal challenge. The plan was to take the company's liquid-gas analyser from prototype to certified product, starting with biogas plants, where real-time chemistry could raise output and cut emissions. The demonstration delivered. The commercial company that was meant to follow has shrunk instead.

What Spectro Inlets Sells Today

Today's Spectro Inlets is a laboratory instrument maker. Its website leads with two products for electrochemistry: EC-MS Professional, which tracks the gases produced by electrochemical reactions in real time, and EC-MS Premium, aimed at battery research. The customers are research groups working on batteries, electrolysers and catalysts. In May 2024 the company installed an EC-MS Premium system at MIT, according to its own news.

The industrial product the EIC funded is harder to find. When checked in September 2026, the company's in-line mass spectrometry page listed only the two laboratory systems, with no price, customer or installation for the biogas analyser. The company still publishes material on its biogas pilot, but no second plant, no distributor and no certification have been announced.

The Technology: A Chip Between Liquid and Vacuum

A quadrupole mass spectrometer, the workhorse of gas analysis, operates in a vacuum. Liquids evaporate, bubble and foul anything they touch, so measuring the gases dissolved in them has traditionally meant taking a sample to a lab, or accepting slow, selective membrane probes. Spectro Inlets' microchip, as DTU describes it, uses "a microperforated membrane" that touches the liquid directly and "a micro-capillary" that drops the pressure to the vacuum the spectrometer needs. The result is a continuous, non-selective reading of dissolved gases in seconds.

That same inlet serves both markets. In a battery lab it catches the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide a cell gives off as it degrades. In a biogas reactor it watches hydrogen, methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide, early signals that the microbial process is about to foam, acidify or stall.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

UBISpec's objective on CORDIS was ambitious: optimise, demonstrate and certify the analyser, from technology readiness level 6 prototypes to level 9 and "full commercialisation in the biogas sector". It promised production yields up 5 to 15%, greenhouse gas savings of 2.3 million tonnes of CO₂ a year across Europe, and 60 new jobs within five years.

The project report documents a demonstration at Sønderjysk Biogas in southern Denmark. The fully automated sensor ran with "an uptime of more than 90%", connected to the plant's SCADA control system, measured six compounds within 10% accuracy, and was linked to "up towards 15% biomethane increase". It also says that CE marking and other certifications were still to come.

1. Automated field demonstrationDeliveredMonths of operation at Sønderjysk Biogas with over 90% uptime and SCADA integration, per the CORDIS report.
2. 5 to 15% higher yieldPartial"Up towards 15%" at one plant, reported by the company; no independent measurement published.
3. Certified product (TRL 9)Not seenCertification listed as future work at project close; no CE-marked analyser announced since.
4. Full commercialisation in biogasNo evidenceNo second plant, customer or sale of the in-line analyser has been made public.
5. 60 new jobs in five yearsMissed so farEmployees fell from 13 in 2022 to 6 in 2025, according to the filed accounts.

What Has Happened Since

For two years after the award, the company grew. Gross profit in the Danish filings, which is revenue minus direct costs and the best available measure of sales, rose from DKK 2.52 million in 2022 to DKK 8.25 million in 2024, and the annual loss narrowed from DKK 5.33 million to DKK 1.56 million. Then 2025 reversed most of it.

The Money

The accounts reported by Proff, with the 2025 figures confirmed by Lasso, show a loss of DKK 2.70 million in 2025, gross profit down to DKK 2.57 million, and equity down to DKK 2.98 million, roughly €0.4 million. Over 2022 to 2025 the company lost DKK 13.2 million, about €1.8 million. Total assets have fallen from DKK 18.46 million to DKK 8.08 million since 2022.

Why Europe Should Care

The strategic fit is hard to fault. Under REPowerEU the EU wants biomethane production to reach 35 billion cubic metres a year by 2030, and most of that will come from anaerobic digesters of the kind Spectro Inlets monitored. A sensor that lets operators push their reactors harder without tipping them into failure is a direct lever on that target, and the pilot reported "up towards 15%" more biomethane.

Public money has backed the technology three times: Denmark's EUDP energy programme through the Spectro Biogas project, and the EU through Horizon 2020 and the EIC. The question is no longer whether the chip works, but whether a six-person company is the vehicle that will get it into hundreds of plants.

The Verdict

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