Altaroad Kept Its EIC Accelerator Waste Tracker Mostly in France

Demolition and construction produce more than a third of all waste generated in the EU, according to the European Commission, and much of it leaves building sites by truck without anyone recording exactly what, how much and where to. Altaroad, a Paris start-up founded in 2017 by Cécile Villette, Rihab Jerbi and Bérengère Lebental, sells a system that does the recording: sensors that weigh trucks as they roll over them, cameras that identify vehicles and loads, and software that turns both into waste tracking records.

In the EIC Accelerator pilot's May 2020 Green Deal cut-off the European Commission selected Altaroad, then based in Saint-Mandé, for TRACK4REUSE with blended finance, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names no other beneficiary for the project. CORDIS records an EU grant of €1,888,285 towards a total cost of €2,697,550, from 1 November 2020 to 31 October 2022. The pitch was a European one: Altaroad said it was "ready to take over the European market and its 120 000 large construction sites", aiming to cover 10% of them by 2028.

Where Altaroad Stands in 2026

Altaroad is active. The French company register lists it as an operating simplified joint-stock company with its seat in Paris's 9th arrondissement and Cécile Villette as president, according to the state's company search service. It filed its 2025 accounts in August 2026, with a declaration that they stay confidential, according to BODACC, the official gazette of company notices. Because every set of accounts it has filed carries that declaration, its revenue, losses and equity are not public.

In March 2026 Impact France picked Altaroad as one of the 120 companies of its Impact 40/120 index, chosen from more than 1,200 candidates, the company reported; it appears among the 80 "Impact 120" companies on the published list, not among the 40 tipped to become unicorns.

The bigger change came a year earlier. On 12 May 2025 Altaroad and Trace, a consultancy that has tracked waste for large public and industrial clients since 2012, announced that they would combine their businesses, effective from 6 May 2025, according to their joint press release. Villette became president of the new group and Trace founder Michel Peccenini its vice-president. The release does not name the group, give its size or say how the deal was structured. Altaroad's share capital rose twice in 2025, to €37,097.80 in May and €44,707.50 in August, according to BODACC; whether those share issues are linked to the Trace deal is not stated.

The Technology: Weighing Trucks on the Move

Altaroad began as a smart-road project. In 2018 it described sensors that would sit inside the road surface and track vehicle types, trajectories and weight, drawing on 30 years of infrastructure monitoring research at IFSTTAR and six years of nanotechnology research at École polytechnique and CNRS, and it won a Grand Prix of the national i-Lab competition that year, L'argus reported. An École polytechnique profile lists the intellectual property behind it: a force-measuring acquisition device filed in March 2014, a second patent filed in May 2019, and a technology transfer contract with SATT Paris-Saclay in 2019.

On building sites the product became a tracking system. Connected weighing sensors capture each truck's weight while it is moving, smart cameras identify the vehicle and its load, according to VINCI's Leonard programme, and the platform digitises the waste tracking slips (BSD) that French sites must keep. It is integrated with Trackdéchets, the government's digital waste tracking service, according to France Angels; on the T10 tram works in Hauts-de-Seine, 95% of the excavated soil was recovered, the same profile says. Trackdéchets itself covers hazardous waste, asbestos and similar streams and is a state digital service incubated at the ecology ministry.

Today the product range is split into DigiTrack, the tracking interface, with automatic transmission of regulatory records and real-time carbon accounting including scope 3 in its top tier, according to the product page, and newer camera products. Recomat uses AI to recognise the materials inside skips. Villette presented it in March 2026 alongside the case for recovering critical materials from construction waste; the company publishes no accuracy figures for it.

What TRACK4REUSE Promised, and What the Record Shows

TRACK4REUSE had three work streams: educating the market with small and large pilot projects, making the platform scale for a European roll-out, and ramping up manufacturing of the sensors. The final periodic report, covering November 2021 to October 2022, says Altaroad grew "from a couple of sites to hundreds of them" during the EIC programme, cut the platform's energy use by 90%, upgraded it "to manage thousands of sites", launched carbon footprint calculation, secured small-batch production and reduced costs. Those are the company's own statements; no independent count of sites has been published.

The European part is thinner. The report lists communication campaigns in Spain, Germany, Austria, Norway, Poland and Switzerland, trade fairs such as Bauma and Intertraffic, and one "first deployment abroad", a site in Switzerland. The clients on Altaroad's website include Vinci, Eiffage, Eurovia, Razel-Bec, SADE, Séché and the Société du Grand Paris, as well as French departments such as Oise and Loire-Atlantique; the list is dominated by French contractors and public bodies. The 2024 École polytechnique profile adds the Canal Seine-Nord Europe, the Lyon-Turin rail link and the recycling body Ecominero as clients that selected Altaroad; none of those three has announced it.

1. Pilot projects and market educationDelivered"Hundreds" of sites by 2022 per the CORDIS report; major French contractors among named clients.
2. Platform scaled for thousands of sitesDeliveredReported in CORDIS; DigiTrack sold with multi-site management today.
3. Sensor manufacturing ramp-upPartlySmall-batch production secured, per CORDIS; no volume figures.
4. European roll-outPartlyOne site in Switzerland; no deployment in an EU country outside France announced.
5. 10% of Europe's 120,000 large sites by 2028Not achievedNo site count published and no European client base announced, two years before the target date.
6. Certified weighing systemNot achievedNamed as a use of the 2021 funding round; no certification has been announced.

The project ended on schedule, and its periodic report is published. It delivered a working product with French customers, which is what most of the grant paid for. What it did not deliver is the European market it was sold on.

The Money Behind It

Altaroad was backed by Paris Business Angels in 2019. In March 2021, five months into the EIC project, Global Venturing reported that it had raised more than €10 million from the European Innovation Council and PRO BTP Innovation, the investment subsidiary of the PRO BTP group; the article did not say how much of it was grant and how much equity. France Angels reported PRO BTP's entry in May 2021, saying the money would complement the EIC grant and pay for development, certification of the weighing system and the roll-out of its TopTrack technology. Villette called the round "une étape majeure" (a major step) in the company's life.

The EIC Fund did invest. Altaroad SAS appears in the official list of EIC Fund invested companies, which has its own portfolio entry without an amount or date, and the 2025 Trace release names the EIC Fund among Altaroad's investors. When the equity arrived is not clear: Global Venturing's March 2021 report points to 2021, while the 2024 École polytechnique profile places the "investment of PRO BTP and the EIC" next to 2023 in its chronology. The share register shows increases in both years.

The company has grown, though modestly. The École polytechnique profile counts 32 employees in October 2024, and the national statistics office puts Altaroad in the 20 to 49 employee band for 2024, according to the company search service. It joined the French Tech 2030 programme in 2023, VINCI's Leonard CATALYST programme the same year, and has drawn regional Innov'up and PM'up support and France 2030 money, according to the Île-de-France region, which in June 2025 said Altaroad planned to expand in Europe and Africa.

Why Europe Should Care

The Waste Framework Directive set a 2020 target of 70% preparation for re-use, recycling and other material recovery for construction and demolition waste, the European Parliament's legislative observatory notes; more than half the member states had reached it by 2013 to 2015, while Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia and Sweden stayed below 60%. The Commission treats this waste as a priority stream and points to its Circular Economy Action Plan and the Level(s) building framework, according to its waste pages. Recycling rates are only as good as the data behind them, and Altaroad's own CORDIS report says less than 1% of material flows had good traceability. Weighing and photographing every truck is one way to fix that.

The company now frames its work as a sovereignty question too: in March 2026 Villette argued that Europe needs its own algorithms for tracking resources, and that construction waste holds critical materials such as lithium, for which the article puts Europe's self-sufficiency at 1 to 5%.

The Verdict

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