Inside Swiss Vault's EIC Accelerator Project on Green Data Storage

A single human genome takes up 100 to 1,000 gigabytes of storage, according to the project's final report, and hospitals that sequence patients need somewhere to keep that data for decades. Swiss Vault Systems, a Basel company founded in 2018, told the European Commission it could build a storage system that a hospital could run in an ordinary office: one tenth of the power, a quarter of the volume and a fifth of the weight of conventional servers, according to the CORDIS fact sheet of its project, BasePort. The EU put €1,744,233.75 into it.

The project ended in February 2023 with three working prototypes. What followed is a different story from the one in the proposal: the company's public record since then is about its storage software, VaultFS, sold through American hardware partners, while its own hardware is still being tested in pilots.

Where Swiss Vault Stands Now

Swiss Vault Systems GmbH is an active company in the Basel-Stadt commercial register. Its latest entry, published on 21 September 2026, moved its address to Herrengrabenweg 21 in Basel, according to Zefix, the federal company index, and Moneyhouse. Since April 2023 all 200 of its shares have belonged to Swiss Vault AG, a Basel holding company registered in January 2019, which took them over in exchange for its own shares, according to the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce entries shown on Zefix. John Douglas Fortune, the company's CTO, ceased to be a shareholder of the GmbH at that point; Bhupinder Bhullar remains managing director with sole signing power and has chaired the AG's board since December 2024.

The company is commercially active, mostly in the United States. In July 2025 the storage maker JetStor, which says it has served over 4,000 customers in 30 years, added VaultFS to its product range and said the software already runs its JetStor Infinite platform and its JetBridge service, according to JetStor's announcement and StorageNewsletter. In February 2026 Swiss Vault ran a webinar with Western Digital on pairing WD's high-capacity SMR hard drives with its software, according to the company's website. Headquarters are given differently across sources: the register says Basel, the website lists Allschwil and Princeton, StorageNewsletter's 2023 report says Princeton, and VCBacked says Calgary.

The Technology: Fewer Disks, Less Power

Conventional storage servers sit in racks that need cooling, reinforced floors and a data centre, and are usually replaced every three to five years. The BasePort report on CORDIS says such systems draw about 1,500 watts per unit. Swiss Vault's answer has two parts. The hardware uses low-power compute nodes; at an IEEE pitch competition in 2024, Bhullar said traditional processors use about 200 watts while Swiss Vault's hardware runs on five, and the company showed an edge node the size of a deck of cards, according to the IEEE Computer Society, which named Swiss Vault USA the winner of that contest.

The software, VaultFS, spreads data across many drives with erasure coding, so that a failed disk does not lose data and the system needs fewer spare copies. In one deployment, Bhullar said, 10 PB of archive data ran on 12 PB of raw storage, an overhead of 20%, against 200% for legacy systems such as ZFS; JetStor gave early benchmark figures of up to 60% less storage overhead and more than 50% less power, according to JetStor and StorageNewsletter. These are vendor figures. No independent benchmark of either the hardware or the software has been published.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Swiss Vault first won a €50,000 EU grant for a four-month Phase 1 feasibility study of BASEPORT, from December 2018 to March 2019, with a total cost of €71,429, according to CORDIS. That study's published summary set out to finish a prototype system called T2400, to obtain safety certifications such as the CE mark, and forecast that BasePort would add €92 million to Swiss Vault's annual revenue and €26 million in profit by the fifth year after commercialisation.

The Phase 2 award came in the March 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot. The European Commission's list of selected companies places Swiss Vault Systems GmbH, grant only, among the projects selected as COVID-19-related in that round, and names no other company for BasePort. The grant was signed on 29 June 2020 and the project ran for 32 months, from 1 July 2020 to 28 February 2023, with an EU contribution of €1,744,233.75 towards a total cost of €2,491,762.50, according to CORDIS.

The final report on CORDIS says the team designed electronics for three performance levels and that "All 3 systems were fabricated to complete working prototypes and performance tested." It reports a working system that cuts energy use by 10X and raises storage density by 5X per unit, and says the high-end system "will be advanced first to commercialization with Contract manufacturing partners". It also says "The working systems are now undergoing rigorous testing" and that a beta system was still to be installed at clients' offices. The report gives no sales, customer or staff figures.

The space claim narrowed over time. The project objective promised a system "20X more space-efficient"; the final report says 5X. A 2023 announcement of Swiss Vault joining the Active Archive Alliance, carried by StorageNewsletter, put it at 14X more data per server volume.

1. Working storage prototypesDeliveredThree prototypes built and tested, per the final report.
2. 10X lower power useCompany figureReported by Swiss Vault; no independent test published.
3. 20X space efficiencyNot achievedThe final report claims 5X.
4. Storage softwareDeliveredVaultFS sold through JetStor since 2025.
5. BasePort hardware on the market for healthcare centresNot announcedHardware still in a genomics pilot in 2025.
6. CE mark and certificationsNot announcedNo certification has been made public.

What Happened After the Grant

Healthcare, the market the grant was meant to open, shows up in one pilot. In August 2025 Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre said it was piloting "next-generation storage infrastructure tailored for genomics research" with Swiss Vault under Genome British Columbia's GeneSolve programme, testing both the Vault File System and server hardware, according to the centre's announcement. No result of that pilot is public. The Solar Impulse Foundation, which gave Swiss Vault's "Low Energy Data Storage System" its Efficient Solution label in July 2020 at prototype stage, lists a VaultFS test at the US data centre of iBridge Cloud Technologies in 2024 and a 2023 implementation at Binghamton University, according to its solutions page; neither could be confirmed in a second source.

Recognition has come mostly for the software. HPCwire gave VaultFS its 2025 Editors' Choice award for best HPC storage product or technology; the Readers' Choice in that category went to VAST Data, according to the HPCwire awards page and Swiss Vault's press release. Earlier, Bhullar won a CHF 50,000 prize at the Swiss Startup DAYs pitching battle in 2018, according to startupticker.

Financial data is thin. Swiss GmbHs do not publish accounts, and this one declared at its founding that it would forgo an audit, according to its register entry. In February 2023 Bhullar told Venturelab that the company had 11 employees and had raised CHF 2.4 million, and that VFS was "ready for commercial sales and partnerships". Two months later Swiss Vault AG raised its share capital from CHF 114,053.28 to CHF 133,334.34 by issuing 3,333,434 preference shares, per Zefix; the price paid for them is not public. CB Insights lists only accelerator and competition backers such as Venture Kick and the Swisscom Startup Challenge, and no later funding round could be found. Swiss Vault is not among the 320 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which fits a grant-only award.

Why It Matters for Europe

Data centres use about 1.5% of the world's electricity, 415 TWh a year, a figure expected to reach 945 TWh by 2030, and the EU now collects energy data from large data centres and is preparing a common rating scheme and minimum performance standards, according to the European Commission. Storage that keeps data on site with less power and longer-lived hardware fits that policy. Swiss Vault also worked with the University of Gothenburg, through an EIC programme, on electronics designed for metal recovery and less e-waste, according to the company's write-up. Its commercial traction so far, however, is with American partners rather than European hospitals.

The Verdict

Swiss Vault and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.