INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, a spin-off company of the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) (partner of the Graphene Flagship) and ICREA announced that it has been selected for an EIC Accelerator award of up to 17.5 million Euros. The company, a CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, at the intersection between Medtech, DeepTech and Digital Health, aims to develop medical solutions based on graphene technology for application in patients with neural-related disorders.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator supports small and medium-sized enterprises, in particular start-ups and spinoff companies, to develop and scale-up game-changing innovations. This last call attracted over 1000 applications from across Europe, in all industry sectors. From this pool, 241 were invited to an online interview with the EIC jury members, and 78 of them were chosen for awards, including INBRAIN Neuroelectronics.

The EIC Accelerator will provide INBRAIN substantial financial support with grant funding (non-dilutive) of €2.5 million for innovation development costs, as well as a direct equity investment of up to €15 million, managed by the EIC Fund, to drive the world’s first graphene intelligent brain network platform towards commercialization.

In addition, as an EIC-selected company, INBRAIN will receive coaching, mentoring, access to investors and corporates, and other business acceleration services as part of the EIC community.

“After the support of the European Graphene Flagship programme that helped maturing our innovative graphene technology, the backing from the EIC call demonstrates the potential of this technology in revolutionizing neurotechnology and scaling to levels where European and worldwide patients could benefit for a variety of neural related disorders”, said Carolina Aguilar, CEO of INBRAIN Neuroelectronics.

“We are excited to use this grant to further advance our research and development in unlocking the full potential of the unique graphene properties as ideal material for neural interfaces that require both recording and delivering safe and effective stimulation” said Jurriaan Bakker, CTO and Jose A Garrido, CSO of INBRAIN Neuroelectronics.

As the EIC noted in a statement, “the companies were selected in a highly competitive process. The 78 selected companies will receive close to €470 million of funding in a combination of grants or grant and equity investments.”

INBRAIN received earlier this year additional funding under the scheme of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge for the development of breakthrough minimally invasive neuroelectronic therapies in cooperation with a strong consortium including Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), IMEC, FraunhoferIZM, ETH Zurich, Nanoflex and Leiden University Medical Center.