An EIC Accelerator Detour: Amapex's Wastewater Bacteria

Factories that dye textiles, tan leather or treat metals discharge water loaded with ammonium, fats, solvents and chlorinated compounds, and small plants often cannot afford the treatment that the law requires. Amapex Environement, a Catalan company run by the biologist Joaquim Canadell, bets on bacteria: a selected strain of Bacillus subtilis, fed so that it releases enzymes that break down "very recalcitrant molecules", as Canadell told CORDIS in 2022. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2019 cut-off, the European Commission selected Amapex for RIBATI, a project to turn that product into an automated service, with a grant of €717,854 towards a €1,025,505.71 budget, according to CORDIS.

The project built what it promised to build: a smart dosing unit that multiplies the bacteria on site and doses them into the wastewater. What followed is harder to see. The company still offers the system on its website, but it now also sells biofertilisers and water-retaining polymers for farms, a register summary puts its sales in a €0.5 million band, and none of the commercial targets in the EIC proposal has been publicly reached.

What Amapex Does Today

Amapex is an active company. Empresia lists it as "activa" with accounts filed up to 2024, and Infoempresa also lists it as active, both drawing on the Spanish company register (see also Infoempresa). The legal notice on its website was last updated in July 2026. It names the company as Amapex Environement, S.L., with its registered office on the Olot to Girona road in Castellfollit de la Roca, where the company moved its seat from Barcelona in June 2022, according to the Official Gazette of the Commercial Register (BORME). The brand it uses is spelled "Amapex Environment"; the registered name keeps the French-looking "Environement".

The homepage now presents two lines of business. The first is the RIBATI approach, described on its wastewater page: bacterial strains chosen for each client's pollutants, a bioreactor that the company says multiplies them "x1000", and an integrated dosing system. Clients are invited to send a water sample for a laboratory test before any installation. The second is agriculture: biofertilisers and biostimulants based on Trichoderma and other microbes, and biodegradable superabsorbent polymers that the company says absorb more than 200 times their volume in water and cut irrigation water by 40 to 50%. None of these product claims has been independently tested in any source found for this article.

The website also shows how small the operation is. It says the company works "with clients all over Spain", not in the six countries the EIC proposal targeted. Both of its blog posts about European funding, including one on a "new European project" dated January 2026, still carry placeholder text that says it will be replaced by the final article, as the post itself states. One of the four client testimonials on the homepage is in fact the subtitle of the CORDIS article about RIBATI. The three named people quoted, including the chief executive of a clarifier manufacturer, could not be verified as customers.

The Technology: Bacteria Grown at the Factory Gate

Using microbes to break down pollutants is an established technique. The problem Amapex set out to solve is logistics. Preserved bacteria are "expensive and slow growing", Canadell explained to CORDIS, so a treatment tank either needs a huge, uneconomic dose or a wait of over a month while the bacteria multiply. Amapex screened strains of Bacillus subtilis and Pseudomonas, worked for a year on the nutrients its chosen strain needs, and, with an outside engineering firm, built a smart dosing unit (SDU) that grows, preserves and doses the bacteria according to the load in the water.

The active product combines a registered bacterial strain with 12 trace elements, according to the RIBATI objective. In April 2019 Amapex filed a European patent application for a method that uses a B. subtilis strain producing a laccase enzyme to degrade organochlorine pollutants, naming Joaquim Canadell Casanova among the inventors. The application, EP3722263A1, was published in October 2020 and was deemed withdrawn in September 2021, according to Google Patents. No granted patent from Amapex was found. The 2018 Phase 1 report had said the dosing unit "will be patented together with the entire System", according to CORDIS.

The business case was cost. The EIC proposal priced conventional treatment at €40 to €121.4 per cubic metre, with efficiency as low as 20% in some sectors, and claimed savings of up to 59% from tests with more than 30 potential clients, according to CORDIS. The Phase 1 pilots in Italy, Spain and Mexico found two exceptions: dairy plants, where Lactobacillus attacked Amapex's microbes, and slaughterhouses, where the volumes of water were too large for the slow biological process, the Phase 1 report says. These savings figures come from the company and have not been published as independent results.

What RIBATI Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of companies selected at the 9 October 2019 cut-off names "AMAPEX ENVIRONEMENT SLU" of Barcelona for RIBATI, grant only, with no website and no partner company. The grant agreement was signed on 7 April 2020 and the project ran from 1 May 2020 to 30 April 2022 under the Horizon 2020 SME instrument, as CORDIS shows. It followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study of the same name from December 2017 to May 2018, which CORDIS lists separately. The "SLU" in the EU records stands for a single-shareholder company; the company lost that status in February 2021, during the project, according to BORME.

The final periodic report set out the plan: manufacture five pre-series dosing units, demonstrate the system in five sectors (chemical, textile, food, hydrocarbons and biogas) and at ten companies, and reach about 500,000 cubic metres of treated water a year, €12.3 million of revenue, an EBITDA of €8.3 million and 15 new jobs. It reports a redesigned unit with extra pumps, thermal insulation and a simplified water inlet, automation software, remote monitoring over a standard Internet of Things platform, and a "1ST PRE-SERIES UNIT MANUFACTURED". It says the work packages ran on time despite the pandemic, that some pilot companies closed, and that the pilots "were successful", without naming the sites or giving their number. The unit was being prepared "for CE marking"; the report does not say the marking was obtained. The only public deliverables are a user manual and a data management plan, according to the CORDIS results page.

1. Automated smart dosing unitDeliveredBuilt, automated and connected, per the final report; still offered on the website.
2. Five pre-series unitsPartlyThe report shows the first pre-series unit; the other four are not mentioned.
3. Pilots in 5 sectors and at 10 companiesPartlyPilots described as successful; sites, sectors and results not published.
4. CE marking of the unitNot achievedOnly preparation reported; no marking announced.
5. Launch in Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and GermanyNot achievedThe website names clients across Spain only.
6. Patent protectionNot achievedEP3722263A1 deemed withdrawn in 2021; no other patent found.
7. €12.3M revenue and 15 new jobsNot achievedSales in a €0.5M band per Empresia; no hiring announced.

A grant pays for development, and the development was done: the dosing unit exists and was tested on site, on schedule, in the middle of the pandemic. Everything that was meant to turn it into the subscription business the proposal called "RIBATI PAY PER FLOW" is missing from the public record.

What Amapex Has Done Since the Award

No private funding round, investor, acquisition or customer contract has been announced. Amapex is not among the companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages of the list for this article; its award was a grant without equity.

Its main step since RIBATI is another EU project. Amapex is one of the partners of MEloDIZER, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by the Politecnico di Torino that develops membrane distillation to reuse industrial wastewater, with prototypes to be demonstrated in textile, beverage and chemical plants. The project runs from 1 December 2022 to 31 March 2027, and Amapex's net EU contribution is €311,937.49 of a €7,007,470.74 grant, according to CORDIS. The company names the project on its homepage and says the European funding from RIBATI and MEloDIZER allowed it to invest in research. Its exact role in the consortium is not described in the sources found.

The Money

Spain's free register summaries give only ranges, and they do not agree. Empresia shows sales of "0.5M €" and 2 employees, with accounts for 2020 to 2024 deposited in the Girona register, according to Empresia. Infoempresa says the company has "between 10 and 49 employees" and annual turnover "of less than 2 million euros", according to Infoempresa. The filed balance sheets and income statements are sold, not published, so profit, equity and debt could not be checked. Both summaries describe a company far from the €12.3 million of revenue it projected, and further still from the €41 million of turnover by 2024 and 52 direct jobs that its 2017 Phase 1 proposal forecast, according to CORDIS.

Why Europe Should Care

Industrial wastewater is moving up the EU agenda. The revised Industrial Emissions Directive entered into force on 4 August 2024 and requires permits to contain "binding quantitative resource efficiency requirements for materials, water and energy", according to the European Commission; member states had until 1 July 2026 to transpose it, as Linklaters notes. On 4 June 2025 the Commission adopted its Water Resilience Strategy, which aims to improve water efficiency in the EU by at least 10% by 2030 and to build a "water-smart economy", according to the Commission; a review of the Water Reuse Regulation is planned through 2028, as Squire Patton Boggs reports.

That is the market RIBATI was designed for: small textile, tanning and chemical plants that cannot afford their own treatment plant but face tighter rules. Cheap, biological treatment that lets such factories stay in Europe rather than move abroad was the policy argument of the proposal. Whether Amapex's system can deliver it at scale remains untested in public.

The Verdict

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