Where AEInnova's EIC Accelerator Heat-Powered Sensors Stand Today

Every pump, kiln and steam pipe in a refinery gives off heat that nobody uses. AEInnova, a spin-off of the microelectronics department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), builds sensors that live on that heat. A thermoelectric generator at the base of each device turns the temperature difference between a hot surface and the air into a few milliwatts, enough to measure vibration and temperature and send the readings by long-range radio, with no battery to replace and no cable to lay. In the October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, the European Commission selected the company's project INDUEYE 2.0 for blended finance, a grant plus equity, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names Alternative Energy Innovations SL of Terrassa as the only beneficiary of the project.

The grant was modest: €507,636.50 towards a €725,195 project that ran from 1 May 2020 to 31 January 2022, according to CORDIS. Its goal was a sensor certified for explosive atmospheres (ATEX), demonstrated at ILBOC, a lubricant base oil plant owned by Repsol and SK Lubricants. Almost seven years after selection, the sensors are on sale and the company is still raising money. The refinery demonstration has never been reported.

What AEInnova Is Doing Now

AEInnova is active. The Spanish commercial register shows a capital increase registered on 13 April 2026 that lifted the share capital to €27,097.93, a new board member in September 2025 and a new chair in March 2025, according to North Data, which reads the official gazette BORME. The business directory infonif lists the company as active and records the same April 2026 increase of €3,101.10. No insolvency filing appears in either source.

Its website offers four heat-powered device families: the InduEye VibroSense 1 and 3 vibration and temperature monitors for pumps, motors and compressors, a steam-trap leak detector, the Furthermon multi-channel thermocouple monitor for furnaces, and a cloud platform called DAEVIS. The newest item on its news page dates from 2024, when it was named best deep-tech start-up at the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit and won the European Commission's Innovation Radar Award in the sustainability category, both confirmed by the UAB in November 2024.

Two details on the public record do not match. The website names Raúl Aragonés as chief executive, but David Comellas spoke as CEO in a NacióDigital interview in October 2022, and the register shows Aragonés leaving the board chair in March 2025 and Comellas losing his signing power in March 2026. Who runs the company day to day in 2026 could not be verified. The homepage also contains hidden links, placed off-screen, to online betting sites, and CORDIS flags the project website with a security warning.

The Technology: Sensors That Run on Waste Heat

A thermoelectric generator uses the Seebeck effect: a temperature difference across a semiconductor junction produces a voltage. AEInnova's founders, led by Aragonés, started in 2015 with heat recovery units that chained ordinary Peltier cells in series and later reached 9 watts per 100°C of temperature difference, according to Ecoticias. Because the power was too small to pay back on energy alone, the president said in 2019 that "the cost of these devices is still higher than the energy savings achieved", according to the Catalan industrial doctorates programme. The company turned the harvested power to sensors instead.

The established alternatives are wired sensors, which the CORDIS objective puts at €50 per metre of cable, and battery-powered wireless sensors, whose batteries cost about €300 to replace every 6 to 24 months and contain lithium, which keeps them out of explosive zones. INDUEYE 2.0 promised a device with neither. The product page says the devices need a surface of 50°C to 150°C, transmit by LoRaWAN up to 2 km or NB-IoT, and are available in ATEX/IECEx versions, according to AEInnova. It gives no certificate number or zone, and no third-party record of the certification was found.

INDUEYE 2.0: What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 20 April 2020 and the project closed on schedule after 21 months. Its final periodic report lists design work rather than field results: a thermoelectric module was selected (TGM 287-1.0-2.5), the metal housing and external antennas were removed, the heat sink and heat collectors were sized, manufacturing and industrialisation processes were defined, and a certification plan, a quality plan and an ISO 27000 plan were written. On the demonstration, it reports only "negotiations for the installation of the pilot in an oil refinery". It also set targets: 24 direct jobs in 2021, a 51% sales margin on the device in 2025 and "33 big customers" by 2025.

1. All-in-one heat-powered sensor ready for manufactureDeliveredRedesign completed per the CORDIS report; InduEye VibroSense devices on sale on the company website.
2. ATEX certification for explosive zonesClaimedOnly a certification plan at project end; the website now says ATEX/IECEx versions are available, with no certificate shown.
3. Final demonstration at ILBOC (Repsol and SK Lubricants)Not achievedStill "negotiations" at project close; no installation announced by AEInnova, Repsol or ILBOC since.
4. 33 large customers by 2025Not achievedNo customer count published; the company reported 21 pilots in 2023 and one named distributor-customer, CBC Group.
5. 24 direct jobs in 2021Not shownNo staff figure published by the company or in free register data.

Credit is due for the product: the sensor was redesigned within the grant period and reached the market. The one test that made INDUEYE 2.0 distinctive, a device installed in an explosive zone of a working refinery, is the part that has no public evidence.

What AEInnova Has Achieved Since the Award

The most concrete commercial result is in Japan. In October 2022 AEInnova installed ten vibration sensors at a chemical plant of CBC Group, a Japanese conglomerate that became its distributor in Japan, after adapting the device to local specifications and running pilots at 15 industrial sites in Spain, according to NacióDigital. The same report said the company had a distribution agreement for the Persian Gulf. In December 2023 AEInnova said it had completed 21 pilots in the EU and Japan and had projects in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Brazil, according to Capital Riesgo. A Chinese trade programme to introduce its technology to Chinese industry was reported in May 2025 by China.com, which also names SEAT car plants and cement factories as users; no contract value is public for any of these.

The EU kept funding the team's research. AEInnova receives €418,500 as a partner in OxyBatt, an EIC Transition project led by the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) that runs from May 2024 to April 2027 to build a battery that works between 200°C and 400°C for industrial sensors, according to CORDIS. It is also an unfunded partner in 3DCOMPASS, a fellowship on solid-state lithium batteries starting in July 2026, and received €293,993.75 in the earlier HARVESTORE project. The company's own project page gets some of these figures wrong: it lists OxyBatt at €636,611 and gives INDUEYE 2.0 the grant number of an earlier project, 697982.

The Money

The equity part of the blended award did arrive. The EIC Fund lists AEInnova in its portfolio of invested companies, with a company page that gives no amount or date. In October 2022 the company said it was raising €5 million, with €1 million already committed by the European Innovation Council, according to NacióDigital. What it announced in December 2023 was smaller: a €3 million round closed in three phases during 2023, led by existing investors with the EIC Fund co-investing, according to Capital Riesgo and the UAB. Both put the total raised since founding, private money and public grants combined, at €8 million. Whether the EIC Fund stake is the €1 million mentioned in 2022 could not be verified.

The register confirms that money keeps coming in: share capital rose in February 2023, December 2023 and April 2026. Revenue, profit, equity and staff are not visible in free sources. Infonif masks the figures, including a partly hidden staff number, and no staff count could be verified.

Why It Matters for Europe

Two EU laws touch AEInnova's market. The recast Energy Efficiency Directive (EU) 2023/1791 sets an 11.7% cut in final energy consumption by 2030 and makes energy management systems compulsory for the largest industrial users, who need measurement data to comply. The Batteries Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 tightens collection and recycling of batteries across their life cycle, which raises the cost of the billions of small cells that wireless sensors would otherwise need. A European supplier of sensors that need neither batteries nor cables fits both, and OxyBatt's battery free of cobalt and lithium points the same way.

The Verdict

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