AQUA4D's EIC Accelerator Pivot Irrigation Water Tech, 7 Years On

Planet Horizons Technologies SA is a company in Sierre, in the Swiss canton of Valais, that almost nobody knows by its legal name. It sells everything under the brand AQUA4D: a pipe-mounted unit that exposes irrigation or building water to electromagnetic signals and, the company says, changes how the water dissolves minerals and moves through soil, without adding chemicals. The company's own website signs as "AQUA4D® by ©Planet Horizons Technologies SA", and the European Commission's list of winners of the 3 April 2019 cut-off names the company Planet Horizons Technologies SA, with the project acronym AQUA4D and the website aqua4d.com. This article uses AQUA4D for the brand and the business, and Planet Horizons Technologies for the legal entity.

In that cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the EU funded 78 projects out of 1,765 proposals, according to the Commission's call results. AQUA4D was a single-company project: the EC list gives it one row, with no partner companies. The grant, €1,427,511.75 of a €2,039,302.50 budget according to CORDIS, was to adapt the system to the very high water flows of centre-pivot irrigation, the rotating sprinkler booms used on cereal, oilseed and pulse farms.

Where AQUA4D Stands in 2026

The company is active. Its entry in the Swiss commercial register, read through Zefix, shows it as existing, with its latest change published on 6 August 2026, and Moneyhouse lists it as active with share capital of CHF 3.0 million. No insolvency or liquidation entry appears in either. PricewaterhouseCoopers is its auditor.

Commercial news continues, mostly in the Americas. In May 2026 Copeval, a Chilean farm supplier, announced an alliance to sell AQUA4D to Chilean growers, according to Portal Frutícola and the company's own release, which claims "more than 100 active projects across Latin America". In February 2026 the company announced that Texas A&M University would run a two-year independent study of the technology on turfgrass irrigated with salty water, from March 2026 to October 2027, led by turfgrass professor Ben Wherley, according to AQUA4D's news site. That study is announced only by the company; no Texas A&M publication on it could be found.

New Owners, New Leaders

The business looks different from the one the EIC funded. In June 2022 the French investment company Abaque Finance put CHF 4 million into AQUA4D, according to allnews, which reported the amount, and Moneycab, which named co-founders Eric Valette and Walter K. Thut and quoted Valette, then chief executive, saying the money would take the company to a new level through recruitment, research and market expansion. Both reports said a new product line for large-scale pivot irrigation would follow in 2023.

The Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, read through Zefix, records what came next. In February 2024 Jean-Michel Balmelle, who had joined the board in 2022, became chairman, Valette lost his roles as chairman and managing director, and Jacques Muller was registered as director. Valette left the board in September 2024 and Thut in December 2024. In September 2024 the share capital rose from CHF 798,875 to CHF 3,028,875; the register entry says CHF 1,564,631 of it came from converting seven claims against the company into shares. A CHF 430,000 conversion of claims had already taken place in June 2022.

In a December 2025 interview on the company's news site, Balmelle described himself as president of Planet Horizons Technologies and of the Abaque Group, which also owns NGL, a cleaning-chemicals maker in the canton of Vaud, and spoke of "acquiring AQUA4D" and of the time "once AQUA4D became part of NGL". Who holds which share of the company, and when control changed hands, is not public: Swiss registers do not show shareholders of a société anonyme. Le Temps has reported separately that the Abaque holding bought NGL Cleaning Technology, based in the canton of Vaud, in 2010, with Balmelle as its managing director and co-owner.

The public face of the business has also shifted towards Latin America. Felipe Villarino, a Chilean entrepreneur, built AQUA4D's Latin American business through his company IST, which held exclusive distribution rights for the region, and raised US$1 million from Abaque Finance, according to a May 2023 profile in Diario Financiero. The same profile put IST's revenue at US$800,000 in 2021 and US$400,000 in 2022. In 2026 Portal Frutícola and AQUA4D's release both call Villarino "CEO of AQUA4D"; the Swiss register lists no role for him at Planet Horizons Technologies, and neither source says which of the group's companies he heads.

The Technology: Changing Water Without Changing Its Chemistry

Farms that irrigate with hard or salty water fight two problems: salts build up in the root zone and damage crops, and minerals and biofilm clog pipes and drippers. The standard answers are chemical (acid injection, gypsum) or energy-hungry (reverse osmosis, which also leaves a brine to dispose of). AQUA4D's unit sits on the pipe, draws little power and, the company says, uses "finely tuned resonance fields" to change how dissolved minerals behave, so that salts leach below the roots, water spreads better in soil and scale does not form. The CORDIS objective promised large-crop farmers "up to 25% water savings, up to 30% in fertilizer savings" and "up to 20% increased crop production".

Physical water treatment of this kind is contested. Australia's Centre for Appropriate Technology concluded in a review of magnetic water treatment that "objective, controlled studies carried out by reputable institutions" had found such products "to not perform as advertised", although its review dealt with household water rather than irrigation. A 2009 University of Southern Queensland student research project on magnetically treated water noted that "a large number of peer reviewed journal articles have reported contradictory claims about the treatment".

AQUA4D does have peer-reviewed support of its own. A Tunisian study using an Aqua-4D device, published in the Journal of the Saudi Society of Agricultural Sciences in 2018 by Mohamed Hachicha and colleagues, reported higher potato yields and lower soil salinity, sodium and chloride with treated saline water. A 2020 paper in Soil and Tillage Research by Malak Moussa, Vincent Hallaire, Didier Michot and Mohamed Hachicha, from Tunisia's INRGREF and France's INRAE, (HAL record, DOI) studied pots of soil irrigated with electromagnetically treated water; the company's summary of the paper reports porosity rising from 8.8 to 11.4% to 11.9 to 14.8%. Both were small trials in pots or test plots, not field studies on pivot-irrigated cereals, which is what the EIC paid for. The Texas A&M trial, if it reports, would add an independent field test on turf.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The award followed a Phase 1 feasibility study, AQUA4D (826885), which received €50,000 for September to December 2018. Its summary forecast 9,000 high-flow units sold between 2020 and 2024 and a "cumulative gross profit of 40.50 M€ by 2024". The Phase 1 report set a different target: 3,075 units in the first five years of sales, for turnover of €85,403,225, with the pivot system on the market "by July 2021". CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company.

Phase 2 was signed on 23 July 2019 and ran from 1 September 2019 to 30 November 2021, 27 months, against the 24 months planned in the Phase 1 report. Its work plan covered adaptation to high flow rates, pilot manufacturing, field validation, an assembly line for serial production, certification and a commercial plan. The final report says the first AQUA4D-Pivot prototypes were installed in three countries with "optimistic results confirming some positive impact on soil moisture improvement, cleaning pipes and increasing yields". It says the serial assembly line had been "fully designed" and would be built "as soon as the certification process is completed", and it announced a commercial product, the AQUA4D H-A Max, for flows of 215 to 720 cubic metres an hour. The intellectual property was recorded on Bernstein, a blockchain timestamping service, rather than patented, according to the report. No deliverables or publications are listed on the project's results page.

1. Adapt the system to pivot flow ratesDeliveredA pivot unit, now listed on the company website as the H-A Pro 100 for up to 432 m³/h.
2. Validate in real farm conditionsPartlyEight prototypes installed; results described only as "optimistic", with no published yield or water data.
3. Serial assembly lineUnverifiedDesigned by November 2021; no announcement that it was built.
4. CertificationUnverifiedPending at project end; the website says units are assembled to IECEE and ISO 9001 "specifications", not that they are certified.
5. Pivot system on the market by July 2021LateStill announced for 2023 in the June 2022 funding reports; now offered on the website.
6. 3,075 units and €85.4M turnover in five yearsNot achievedNo sales figures published; the website counts "1000+" installations across all product lines.

The record is mixed. The engineering goal, a unit that handles pivot-scale flows, was met, and the product is on sale. But the project's final report, the last public account of the pivot work, describes results in cautious words, and nothing since has shown pivot sales at the scale forecast. The company's 2025 and 2026 news covers vegetables, ornamentals, orchards, golf courses, sports fields and geothermal heating systems, not cereal farms under pivots. The three customer quotes on its pivot page, from Windmill Nursery, Gemperle Farms in California and Paulman Farms in Nebraska, give no pivot-specific figures.

The Money

No accounts of Planet Horizons Technologies are published in Zefix, and Moneyhouse keeps turnover and staff behind a paywall. What the register does show is capital. The CHF 4 million from Abaque in 2022 was followed in 2024 by the largest capital increase in the company's history, CHF 2,230,000, of which CHF 1,564,631, or 70%, came from converting claims into shares rather than from new cash. Whose claims they were is not stated in the register. No EIC equity was involved: the award was grant only, and the company does not appear among the 315 organisations on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies.

Why Europe Should Care

On 4 June 2025 the Commission adopted its Water Resilience Strategy, which aims to "improve water efficiency in the EU by at least 10% until 2030" and notes that European companies hold 40% of the world's water technology patents; law firm Squire Patton Boggs names agriculture first among the water-intensive industries it will affect. A cheap, low-energy way to irrigate with saline water would fit that agenda well. The difficulty is evidence: a contested technology needs independent field data before it can count towards public water-efficiency goals, and seven years after the grant, that data for large crops is still missing.

The Verdict

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