Spectronite Ties EIC Accelerator Money to Microwave Backhaul

Between a mobile mast and the core network there is usually either a fibre or a microwave link, and where fibre is too slow or too expensive to lay, the microwave radio decides how much traffic the mast can carry. Spectronite, a company registered in Biot on the Côte d'Azur in February 2020, builds a radio that combines up to 32 radio channels digitally instead of through the analogue combiners that conventional equipment uses. With its EIC Accelerator project, SABRE, it wants to add a layer of artificial intelligence that predicts, detects and resolves radio interference without an engineer in the loop.

The project was submitted to the EIC Accelerator cut-off of 1 October 2025 for blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,999 under a grant agreement signed on 28 May 2026, for a project running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. Le Journal des Entreprises reported the same €2.5 million together with an equity investment whose size it did not give. Spectronite holds a €2.5 million EIC Accelerator grant five months into its project period, so this article is about what the company promised and what can already be checked.

One radio instead of a rack of them

A conventional microwave backhaul radio carries one or two channels. To get more capacity onto one antenna, operators combine several radios through branching units, which the company says absorb between 75% and 90% of the transmit power before it reaches the antenna. Spectronite's answer, as it describes it in August 2026, is to process up to 32 channels in the digital domain and convert them to a radio signal in a single stage, so that no power is lost in combiners. It gives 5 Gb/s of throughput per radio, 98% use of the spectrum channels, a maximum power draw of 100 watts and a weight of 8 kg, in bands from 6 to 23 GHz.

The waveform has a public research partner. In March 2022 CEA-Leti announced that it had adapted its patented spectrally efficient waveform to Spectronite's X-Series modem, with initial tests showing a 20% data-rate increase over a conventional backhaul waveform, and that an X-Series product was targeted for the fourth quarter of 2022. A CEA article of June 2022 repeated the gain of about 20% and the end-of-2022 integration target, and described Spectronite as a start-up founded in 2020, which matches the register.

The figures have moved since. The 2022 release spoke of an X-Series reaching up to 10 Gb/s; the company's 2026 material gives 5 Gb/s per radio and a waveform with 10% more spectral efficiency than the best legacy radios. The two waveform figures are measured against different baselines, so they do not contradict each other outright, but the capacity figure is half of what was announced four years earlier, and no explanation of the change appears in the company's published material.

A test at O2 Telefónica, and no named customer

The strongest outside evidence is from O2 Telefónica in Germany. On 4 November 2025 Spectronite announced that the X-Series had completed a Golden Sample test with the operator, quoting Andreas Jungmaier, the operator's head of transport network engineering and design, as finding frequency aggregation "exciting". TechAfrica News reported the same test in an interview recorded at AfricaCom 2025. The operator's own news post of 2 April 2026 says the collaboration came through its innovation hub Wayra, that it will start with tests and pilot projects and scale up only where the benefit is greatest, and that Spectronite complements its suppliers Ericsson and Nokia. It gives no sites, no results and no purchase.

Beyond O2 the record is thinner. In the TechAfrica interview of November 2025 Fournier said initial installations were under way in Nigeria and that deployments were planned for early 2026; no operator was named. At MWC Barcelona in March 2026 the company showed what it called the first X-Series units, more than three years after the product date given in 2022, and wrote that volume production was targeted for summer 2026 with a selected group of operators. Its testimonial for the show organiser speaks of interest from tier one, two and three operators, without names.

No announcement of volume production or of a commercial order appears on the company's news page as of 4 November 2026. Its post of 31 August 2026 says extended field trials and preparation for commercial deployment are under way. In its post of 26 October 2026, written after 18 meetings in Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria, the company says operators there are "eager to test" and that "now we have to prove it on their networks".

What SABRE promises

The CORDIS summary describes SABRE as the first AI-controlled transmission platform for wireless networks, built on a beyond-5G air interface that it says has been validated by tier-one mobile operators. The platform is to give operators real-time, autonomous control over spectrum use and interference, and the project names Europe, Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia as markets, with underserved areas as a stated aim. CORDIS lists no total project cost and, five months in, no results or deliverables, so none of the AI functions can yet be checked against a public document.

1. Air interface validated by tier-one operatorsOne testGolden Sample test at O2 Telefónica, per the company; O2 describes tests and pilots, not a rollout.
2. Autonomous AI control of spectrum and interferenceToo earlyNo results or deliverables on CORDIS; no published test of the AI layer.
3. Volume production from summer 2026Not announcedTarget set in the company's April 2026 post; no start announced by 4 November 2026.
4. Deployments in underserved marketsNot shownNigerian installations mentioned in November 2025 without an operator name; the company wrote in October 2026 that West African operators are eager to test.

A small company with a large grant

The register shows a company of modest size. The French government's company search, drawing on INSEE and the national register, puts its staff in the band of 3 to 5 employees for 2024 and records a net loss of €198,950 for that year. Spectronite filed its accounts for 2022 and 2024 with a confidentiality declaration, as the BODACC filing notices show, so its revenue is not public. No insolvency or other collective proceeding appears among its BODACC notices.

The capital has been raised several times. BODACC notices record the share capital at €11,416.20 in January 2023, €12,217.60 by March 2023, €14,375.20 in October 2025 and €14,638.00 in December 2025. The notices do not name subscribers or say what was paid per share, and Spectronite has announced no venture round. Le Journal des Entreprises reported an equity investment alongside the grant; no Spectronite holding could be found in public material on the EIC Fund's portfolio, which the Commission discloses only with the company's consent. Spectronite's own news page publishes no funding figure, the EIC grant included, so how much money it has raised in total is not public.

Why the EU cares about microwave radios

The CORDIS record tags SABRE at 100% for the digital agenda and for artificial intelligence, and at 40% for climate action. The sharper policy link is supply security. In January 2026 the European Commission proposed a revised Cybersecurity Act under which components from high-risk suppliers would be phased out of mobile networks within at most 36 months of a list being published, as The Register reported on 21 January 2026. By September 2026 member states wanted to drop the fixed deadline in favour of case-by-case assessment, according to Techzine, and the text is not final. Spectronite's chief executive argued in a January 2026 opinion piece that Europe should replace such equipment with technology designed at home, naming his own company as an example.

The French government programme for strategic start-ups has picked the company twice. Spectronite was in the first promotion of French Tech 2030, the programme for start-ups working on technologies considered critical for sovereignty, and was named again in the 2025 promotion of 80 companies, as Blog du Modérateur reported on 7 November 2025 and the company announced in December 2025. O2, for its part, named Ericsson and Nokia as the suppliers Spectronite would complement rather than replace.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below, checked on 4 November 2026.