Aquarray After the EIC Accelerator: Droplet Chips in Liquidation

A biopsy yields a few thousand tumour cells at best, too few to test more than a handful of drugs in the standard plastic plates that laboratories use for screening. Aquarray, a spin-off of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), sold glass slides patterned with thousands of water-attracting spots on a water-repelling background, so that liquid split by itself into separate droplets of a few nanolitres, each a tiny culture dish. In the European Innovation Council's 5 June 2019 round of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the company won a grant to turn the slides into an automated screening system for patient cells, with an EU contribution of €1,749,825 towards a total cost of €2,499,750, according to CORDIS.

The project ran from February 2020 to December 2023. Aquarray launched a microplate-format version of its slides and won ISO 9001 certification, but the screening system did not reach the market. In February 2025 the company went into liquidation, according to its entry in the commercial register as shown by North Data.

Where Aquarray Stands Now

Aquarray GmbH is being wound up. North Data's copy of the register lists a liquidation entry dated 17 February 2025 and shows the company as "i. L." (in liquidation). No insolvency proceedings appear in the register. The entry does not say why the shareholders dissolved the company, and the name of the liquidator is not shown in the free sources. Two other register portals, Firmenwissen and Online-Handelsregister, still label the company active, but their latest entries date from 2022 and do not include North Data's October 2022 management change or the 2025 liquidation.

The company's public presence ended at the same time. The Internet Archive's last normal capture of aquarray.com dates from November 2024, when it still advertised slides and plates for sale; from December 2024 the address redirected to a software upgrade page, and the domain now redirects to a domain broker's sale listing. No announcement of the closure, a sale of the technology or a successor company could be found.

Aquarray is not among the roughly 315 companies on the EIC Fund's list of investments, which was checked page by page. Its 2019 award was a grant only, so no EIC equity was involved.

The Technology: Droplets Instead of Wells

Drug screening normally runs in microtitre plates, plastic trays of wells filled by pipetting robots that cost "several 10,000 euros", in KIT's words. KIT's droplet microarray replaces the wells with a flat glass slide. A light-driven coating process creates hydrophilic spots separated by superhydrophobic borders, so that a liquid spread over the slide breaks up into uniform droplets of 3 to 250 nanolitres, compared with about 40 microlitres in a conventional plate, according to a 2017 KIT press release. The approach was developed by the chemist Pavel Levkin and tested on cells with the cell biologist Anna Popova and the lab head Konstantin Demir, according to a 2017 profile of the founding team on Bionity.

Aquarray offered slides with between 80 and 6,048 spots and working volumes from 5,000 nanolitres down to 10, according to its archived product page; its distributor MoBiTec gives the same spot range but a minimum of 20 nanolitres. Because the slide is flat and open, the droplets can also be read by MALDI mass spectrometry, an application Levkin presented in a 2021 Bruker webinar with spots of 0.5 millimetres holding 40 nanolitres and as few as 10 cells per spot. The trade-off is handling: the company's final CORDIS report concedes that the slide format "is a disadvantage" for customers who need automation, because it does not fit standard laboratory equipment.

The science came with years of EU money before the company existed. The European Research Council funded Levkin's DROPCELLARRAY project at KIT with €1,499,820 from 2014 to 2019, and a €150,000 Proof of Concept grant, CellScreenChip, under which KIT also filed the Aquarray trademark in 2015. The CORDIS results summary of DROPCELLARRAY says the arrays were "available at the spinoff company Aquarray GmbH".

What the EIC Award Promised, and What the Record Shows

The Commission's list of the June 2019 winners names Aquarray GmbH of Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen as the only beneficiary of the Droplet Microarray project. The grant agreement was signed on 30 January 2020 and the project started on 1 February 2020. Its objective on CORDIS promised to "mass produce" a DMA Cartridge and a Cell Screening System that would integrate the cartridge with a nanolitre dispenser, an incubator and a reader, sold directly and through dispenser makers such as Dispendix and Labcyte. It added: "We are expected to generate €167M revenues by 2025 capturing 9.37% of the market."

The final periodic report, for 2023, credits the project with brand building, ISO 9001 certification, a more accurate and scalable production process, quality control that takes at least 50% less time, and a DMA-Cartridge in the standard microplate format that was "currently being launched on the market". On the system, it says that "establishing the automated Integrated Screening System (ISS) as a product is a task that has a time horizon well beyond the funding period and will be continued with Aquarray's own resources". It also notes that "the acceptance of new technologies is slow and requires staying power".

1. DMA Cartridge in microplate formatDeliveredDMA-Plate launched March 2023, per Aquarray and the CORDIS report.
2. Integrated cell screening systemNot deliveredPrototype tested with Fraunhofer IPA in 2022; never sold, left beyond the project.
3. Dispenser partnershipsDelivered"I-Dot Mini AQ Edition" dispenser offered on the company website.
4. Scalable productionDeliveredISO 9001 in August 2023; less scrap and faster quality control, per CORDIS.
5. €167M revenue by 2025MissedIn liquidation from February 2025; no revenue figure was ever published.

The project ran almost four years, from February 2020 to 31 December 2023, across four reporting periods. Whether that was the original duration or an extension is not stated on CORDIS. On the evidence, the award is partly delivered: the consumables and production improvements exist, while the screening system at the centre of the proposal and the revenue it was meant to bring do not.

The Years After the Grant

The grant arrived without outside investors. When the award was announced in April 2020, Aquarray said its own share had been raised from the founders and its new chief executive, Wolfgang Sipos, who began his career at Roche Diagnostics, with a large part coming from the business angel and co-founder Gunter Festel, according to Bionity. The register shows the share capital doubling to €50,000 in May 2020, and North Data counts 11 active shareholders. The consultancy Steinbeis 2i handled the project's administration from summer 2020.

Management then turned over quickly. Angelika Weinländer-Mölders became chief executive on 1 January 2022 and Holger Saal chief technical officer. In February 2022 the company said it had been financed in its first two years by Horizon 2020 and that it was looking for investors, according to an Aquarray press release. By August 2022 she had left and Tim Friedrichson, formerly a translation manager at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, was in charge, the company announced. North Data records management changes in the register in May 2020, May 2022 and October 2022.

In 2023 the company issued a run of announcements: the DMA-Plate launch in March, a call in May for "investors and cooperation partners" to develop the personalised medicine application, ISO 9001 certification in August, a development and distribution partnership with HB Technologies in October that it said added to existing cooperations with Bruker and Shimadzu, and worldwide distribution through MoBiTec in November. In that last release Aquarray said the DMA was used by more than 20 pilot customers, "including five of the ten leading pharmaceutical companies worldwide". The customers were not named and the claim could not be checked independently.

What Cannot Be Checked

Why Europe Should Care

The project sat on two EU priorities. Europe's Beating Cancer Plan (COM(2021) 44) backs personalised medicine, and testing drugs on a patient's own tumour cells is one route to it. Directive 2010/63/EU commits the EU to replacing animal experiments where possible, an aim the company's proposal cited for screening on human primary cells. The droplet microarray was a European invention with more than €3.4 million of EU research money behind it across three grants. Aquarray's end shows how hard it is to turn a laboratory consumable into a business when the instrument that would make it routine is never finished and no investor steps in after the grant.

The Verdict

This article is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout. Aquarray's liquidator and the EIC have not been asked for comment.