EIC Accelerator Winner Westra Materials and the Li-ion Binder Race

The binder in a lithium-ion cathode is a small share of the electrode and a large share of its problems. The standard material, PVDF, is a fluoropolymer, it has to be dissolved in the solvent NMP, and it does not conduct electricity, so cell makers add carbon black or nanotubes to carry current through the coating. Westra Materials, a Norrköping company that began life in 2020 as n-ink AB, says its conductive polymer can do the binding and the conducting at once, without fluorine and without NMP.

The EIC Accelerator selected the company's project, ODIN, at its 1 October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 under an agreement signed on 29 May 2026, running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The company's website and the LEAD incubator in Linköping describe the full package as €6.5 million, with the rest as equity from the EIC Fund. Five months into the project, the record contains a material, a product line of solar inks and a list of claims; it does not yet contain test results from a battery or capacitor maker.

An ink company first

The chemistry comes out of Linköping University's organic electronics group. In April 2021 its researchers published BBL:PEI in Nature Communications, an ethanol-based n-type conducting polymer that could be sprayed onto a surface. The university's release framed it as the missing partner to PEDOT:PSS, the widely used p-type conducting polymer, and quoted Simone Fabiano: "The lack of a suitable n-type polymer has been like walking on one leg."

The company that commercialises it was registered on 12 August 2020 as n-ink AB and now trades as Westra Materials AB, per the tic.io register summary, which also shows it as active, with Daniel Westling as external CEO and chair. By early 2025 its products on sale were solar inks. pv magazine reported in February 2025 that n-ink sold three BBL:PEI formulations for the charge-extracting layers of organic and perovskite solar cells, with conductivity from 0.01 to 3,000 S/cm, that it had raised €2 million of equity in total, and that it was working on capacitor inks and a PFAS-free option for lithium-ion battery research.

The company was also a partner in SUNREY, a Horizon Europe project on lead-reduced perovskite solar cells that ran from 1 November 2022 to 31 January 2026 with a total EU contribution of €4,249,978. CORDIS lists Westra Materials AB with a net EU contribution of €301,675.

What the project promises

The ODIN summary on CORDIS sets out two products from one material family. In batteries, the polymer would replace PVDF and the carbon additives, giving direct charge transfer and a simpler electrode process for NMC and LFP cathodes. In polymer capacitors, it would replace PEDOT:PSS, which the summary says degrades above about 125°C and is costly; the company says its polymer is stable up to 225°C and aims to meet the AEC-Q200 automotive standard at 150°C.

The other numbers are the company's own: a one-step, one-hour polycondensation process, costs about ten times lower than PEDOT:PSS, conductivity up to 3,000 S/cm and electrochemical durability up to 4.5 volts. The summary calls this "a true 2-in-1 breakthrough". None of these figures has been published in an independent test of a full cell or a qualified capacitor; the CORDIS page lists no results or reports so far.

The LEAD incubator, reporting the company's place on Ny Teknik's 2025 list of 33 young Swedish technology companies, describes the aim as replacing PVDF, "currently the dominant binder for lithium-ion batteries". A company job advertisement published on Jobbsafari on 9 February 2026 claims more than 30 customers worldwide and 15 patents. Neither the customers nor the patent numbers are named there, and no customer for the battery binder has been announced on the company website.

The money

The EIC's list of selected companies, published with its 17 February 2026 announcement of 61 companies chosen from 121 interviewed, lists Westra Materials AB, ODIN, blended finance, Sweden. The grant part is in CORDIS. The equity part is not in any EIC document found for this article: Nordic9 reported on 18 February 2026 a €2.5 million grant and a €4 million investment by the EIC Fund, and LEAD reported €6.5 million on 23 February 2026, quoting Westling: "The support will enable us to accelerate our industrial scale-up." Whether the equity investment has closed is not public.

Before the award, Nordic9's database records a SEK 42 million round in September 2025 with Voima Ventures and Lotus Singapore Group joining Navigare and Almi Invest. No announcement by the company or by those investors could be found to confirm the amount, so it is not charted here.

1. Conductive, PFAS-free polymer existsExistsBBL:PEI published in 2021; solar ink formulations on sale, per pv magazine.
2. Binder replacing PVDF and carbon additives in NMC and LFP cathodesNot yet shownNo public cell cycling data or named cell-maker partner.
3. Capacitor polymer at AEC-Q200 (150°C)Claim225°C stability claimed in the CORDIS summary; no qualification reported.
4. Industrial-scale productionToo earlyProject runs to May 2028; CORDIS lists no results.

Why the EU is paying for binders

The ODIN summary frames the project as an answer to two pressures: Europe's dependence on supply chains it describes as China-controlled, and the PFAS restriction it expects, which would hit fluoropolymer binders such as PVDF. CORDIS files the award under the EIC Accelerator challenge on advanced materials development and upscaling along the value chain. A locally made, fluorine-free binder would serve both the battery and the chemicals agendas, and Westra is not alone in the October 2025 list: the same list includes Altris, another Swedish company, for sodium-ion cathode material.

The company's own news is about outreach rather than orders. Its website posted "Hello from Japan!" in August 2026, alongside a note that its battery team is growing, and in October 2026 thanked visitors at an upcell Alliance event. These are signs of a company at work, not of contracts.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.