Tanaza, the EIC Accelerator and the Promise of Open Wi-Fi Software

Every Wi-Fi access point runs an operating system, and almost always it is the one its maker installed. Buy Cisco, Aruba or Ubiquiti hardware and you also buy into that vendor's software, management cloud and licence fees. Tanaza, a Milan company founded by Sebastiano Bertani in 2010, set out to break that link. Its pitch to the European Commission in 2019 was an Android for Wi-Fi: one operating system that could be installed on almost any access point, managed from one cloud dashboard.

The Commission bought the idea. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 3 April 2019, part of the Horizon 2020 pilot that became the EIC Accelerator, Tanaza was selected for TanazaOS, according to the Commission's list of winners, which names Tanaza alone for the project. The grant agreement, signed on 17 July 2019, gave it an EU contribution of €1,624,350 towards a €2,320,500 project, according to CORDIS. The proposal forecast "revenues for over €10M in the first two years, and over €70M in the fourth year after the project ends".

Where Tanaza Stands Now

Tanaza is still a registered company and its website still sells its software, but it is far smaller than it was when the EU funded it. The company register summary on Companyreports lists Tanaza S.p.A. as active, with 2024 revenue of €410,840, a net loss of €428,394, staff costs of €293,815 and three to five employees. TopAziende, which publishes the same filed accounts up to 2023, gives four employees. In August 2019, a month after the grant was signed, Bertani told Il Sole 24 Ore that the company had 18 people, about €1 million in annual revenue and around 1,000 customers, and that it planned to hire about ten more engineers.

The product is still on sale. The Tanaza website, last updated in April 2026 according to its own page data, offers Basic and Pro subscriptions, a free tier, TanazaOS firmware and an app marketplace, and its management cloud at app.tanaza.com was online when this article was checked. But the public news flow has nearly stopped. Tanaza's press page ends with an Edgecore partnership in February 2023, and the latest post on its blog is the launch of NARA, an AI support assistant, on 22 July 2024. Beyond the website's own page data, no news, filing or hiring from the last 12 months could be found, so whether Tanaza is still operating cannot be confirmed.

The Technology: Separating Wi-Fi Software From Hardware

Enterprise Wi-Fi is sold mostly as a bundle. The access point, its firmware and the cloud or controller that manages it come from the same vendor, and switching vendor usually means replacing the hardware. The TanazaOS objective on CORDIS names Cisco, Aruba and Ruckus/ARRIS as vendors that "aim at establishing lock-in barriers with high switching costs".

Tanaza's answer has two parts. TanazaOS is a Linux-based firmware that replaces the manufacturer's software on supported access points, including white-box devices and some off-the-shelf models; a free tool, the TanazaOS Installer, detects compatible devices and flashes the system in a few clicks. Once flashed or pre-installed by a partner manufacturer, the devices are configured and monitored from Tanaza's multi-tenant cloud, which is aimed at managed service providers and internet service providers running many small networks. The US network engineer Lee Badman, writing in April 2020, described the pitch as "Meraki without the Meraki costs", with licences then starting under $50 per access point, and noted that Tanaza manages access points only, not switches or security appliances.

The approach is protected in part by patents. Google Patents lists two US patents assigned to Tanaza S.R.L., the company's earlier legal form: US8891404B2, granted in 2014, for managing network devices of different vendors, and US10534600B2, granted in January 2020, for uniform remote management of network devices. When the company converted to an S.p.A. could not be verified from free sources.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 November 2021. Its published report on CORDIS covers the period to the end of the project, yet its summary describes what TanazaOS "achieved" in "the first 12 months": the patent-protected installer, pre-installation deals with "multiple hardware manufacturers", and dedicated cloud versions for Linksys/Belkin. It also says talks to integrate TanazaOS with Facebook's Express Wi-Fi were "in an advanced stage", that Tanaza had become a founding member of the Telecom Infra Project's Open Wi-Fi group, and that the company was evaluating expanding TanazaOS "from Wi-Fi access points only to the whole networking industry". The results page lists only two communication reports as deliverables. No final technical or commercial results are published.

Outside sources confirm most of the technical and partnership claims. Tanaza announced an expanded partnership with Linksys in May 2020, building on the Linksys Cloud Manager launched in August 2018. Meta's developer blog lists Tanaza among the 20 start-ups in the first Facebook Accelerator: Connectivity cohort in November 2020, and Tanaza said on completing it in February 2021 that it had integrated its platform with Express Wi-Fi. A year later Meta announced it would wind down Express Wi-Fi, as Light Reading reported on 1 February 2022 and TechCabal confirmed. In January 2024 Tanaza announced support for all TIP OpenWiFi access points, with a quote from TIP's OpenWiFi co-chair, and said its technology ran on "over 60,000 active access points"; that figure has no independent confirmation.

1. Linux OS for third-party access pointsDeliveredTanazaOS and its installer are on sale; CORDIS and the company website both describe them.
2. Pre-installation by hardware makersDeliveredLinksys, Edgecore, Intelbras and others ship or support Tanaza-managed devices.
3. Express Wi-Fi integrationOvertakenIntegrated by February 2021; Meta wound the platform down in 2022.
4. Expansion to the whole networking marketNo evidenceThe website still covers Wi-Fi access points only.
5. Over €10M revenue in two years after the projectMissed€3.75M for the whole company in 2022 and 2023.

On the engineering side, Tanaza did what it said it would: the operating system exists, it is installed by partners, and it runs on hardware from several manufacturers. On the commercial side, the forecast was wrong by a wide margin.

The Money

The filed accounts show a brief climb and a steep fall. Revenue rose from €726,472 in 2020 to €1,160,431 in 2021 and €2,245,152 in 2022, the year Tanaza made its only profit in the period, €463,691, according to TopAziende. Revenue then fell to €1,509,401 in 2023, with a small loss of €13,238, and to €410,840 in 2024, with a loss of €428,394, according to Companyreports. The value of production was higher than revenue in each year from 2020 to 2023, €3,164,113 in 2022 for example; what makes up the difference is not broken down in the free summaries.

Private funding is hard to pin down. Seedtable and CB Insights both list a 2014 seed round, the year Tanaza went through the Seedcamp accelerator. The start-up database Seedtable lists $2.48 million raised in two seed rounds, including $1.8 million dated 19 July 2019, two days after the EU grant agreement was signed, while CB Insights shows $50,000 over three rounds. Neither figure is confirmed by a company announcement, and no investment round has been announced since the EIC award. In 2019 Bertani told Il Sole 24 Ore that the company might seek outside investors within six to twelve months; no such round has been made public. Tanaza is not among the 301 companies in the EIC Fund portfolio, which fits a grant-only award.

Why Europe Should Care

Public Wi-Fi is EU policy as well as a market. Through WiFi4EU the Commission gave 7,237 municipalities vouchers worth €15,000 each, a budget of €108 million, which paid for more than 90,000 hotspots in public spaces. A European management layer that runs on interchangeable hardware fits the EU's interest in open, interoperable networks that do not depend on a few suppliers, the same logic behind the Telecom Infra Project's open Wi-Fi group that Tanaza helped found. The CORDIS report also argues that TanazaOS "extends the life of the hardware" and gives users back the right to repair.

Being open made Tanaza useful to hardware makers such as Linksys and Edgecore. Its Express Wi-Fi integration was overtaken when Meta wound that programme down in 2022.

The Verdict

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