Tracing Archeon's EIC Accelerator Ventilation Monitor to Today

On 19 March 2020 the European Commission decided to build its first common stockpile of medical equipment, starting with ventilators, because hospitals were running out of them. The next day was a cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, and among the companies selected from it was Archeon, a two-year-old medical device maker in Besançon, eastern France. Its project, AIRMED, promised the first independent, very low-cost monitor for mechanical ventilation, so that simple emergency ventilators without alarms could be used safely on intensive care patients in a pandemic, according to CORDIS.

Six years later Archeon is active and raising money, but for a different device. Its business is EOlife, a box that tells rescuers how much air they are giving a patient in cardiac arrest. In October 2026 it announced a €7.5 million round led by Newfund to sell EOlife in the United States and run clinical studies, according to Startuprise and Quasa. The ventilator monitor the EIC paid for has been tested on patients, but no product, regulatory clearance or monitoring partner has been announced.

What Archeon Sells Today

Archeon is an active company with no insolvency or dissolution notice in the French commercial gazette, where its last filing is the deposit of accounts for the period to 31 December 2024, according to BODACC and the state's company search register, which lists Alban De Luca as president and Pierre-Edouard Saillard as managing director.

Its product line is EOlife and EOlife X. EOlife sits between the bag and the mask or airway tube of a manual resuscitator and measures each breath a rescuer gives during cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The company describes it as a Class II FDA-cleared device in the United States and a Class I device under the EU Medical Device Regulation, and says EOlife X is a training version for manikins, according to its product page and EOlife X page. The US Food and Drug Administration cleared EOlife on 18 March 2023 under 510(k) number K221841 as a manual emergency resuscitator accessory, for adult cardiac arrest. Archeon's about page says EOlife is sold in more than 15 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and North America; no unit or customer count is public.

The Technology: Measuring the Air a Patient Gets

Ventilators in intensive care measure volume, pressure and rate and sound alarms when a tube disconnects. The low-cost emergency ventilators that governments bought in 2020 often do not. AIRMED's idea was to add a separate monitor: a gas flow sensor attached to a small electronic unit that analyses the patient's lung profile with algorithms and gives caregivers feedback in real time, so that a simple ventilator could be used safely in a crisis, as the CORDIS results summary of January 2024 describes it. The project built on the measurement technology of EOlife, which Archeon had developed for manual ventilation during resuscitation.

The difference from established equipment is price and independence: the monitor does not depend on which ventilator is used. During the project the design changed. The final CORDIS report says the device was "reoriented" to plug into existing patient monitoring systems, at the request of potential customers, and the registration of Archeon's clinical study on ClinicalTrials.gov gives the reason: a separate monitor "will only add one more product" and "create confusion for the user", so the aim became a ventilation module compatible with existing cardiac monitors.

What AIRMED Promised, and What the Record Shows

Archeon was selected in the EIC Accelerator pilot cut-off of March 2020 with a grant-only award, and is listed as the only company of its project in the Commission's list of selected companies. That round funded 36 companies working against the pandemic with about €166 million, out of more than 1,400 coronavirus-related applications, and the Commission's own summary named ventilation quality feedback among the examples, according to the Commission's announcement of 8 June 2020 and ERRIN. The grant agreement was signed on 3 July 2020, and the project ran from 1 September 2020 to 31 August 2023 with an EU contribution of €1,000,000 towards a total cost of €1,657,575.25, according to CORDIS.

The final report says Archeon "finalize[d] the development of the product", which was "tested and validated with intensive care units and emergency teams during summer 2023", and that technical tests and clinical trials showed its measurements to be "at least as much accurate as ICU ventilators". It says the project created 15 jobs and that "key strategic partnerships" were in place for global sales and integration into patient monitoring systems "by the beginning of 2026". The report also describes the AI that would adjust ventilation automatically in the future tense: "will integrate".

The clinical evidence that is public is one pilot study. Archeon registered a single-centre study at the CHU de Besançon to test a "prototype of sensor" measuring ventilator parameters in intubated patients; it started on 26 September 2023, after the EIC project had ended, enrolled 59 patients and was completed on 6 June 2024, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. No results are posted on the registry, and no publication of them was found. No integration partner has been named by Archeon, and the products on its website in October 2026 are EOlife and EOlife X only.

1. Monitor developed and testedDeliveredPrototype tested with ICU and emergency teams in 2023, per the CORDIS report.
2. Clinical validationPartly59-patient pilot completed in June 2024; results not posted or published.
3. AI that adjusts ventilation automaticallyNot achievedDescribed in the future tense at project end; nothing announced since.
4. Market authorisation for the monitorNot achievedThe only FDA clearance found is for EOlife in cardiac arrest, K221841.
5. Integration into patient monitors by early 2026Not achievedNo partner or integrated product announced by October 2026.
6. 15 jobsDeliveredReported by CORDIS; the company had 17 staff in March 2022.

On schedule, AIRMED did what a three-year development grant can do: a working prototype and a first clinical test. What it was meant to lead to, a cheap monitor in hospital stockpiles, has not appeared.

What Archeon Has Achieved Since the Award

The growth came from EOlife. The company was founded in January 2018 by two engineers, Alban De Luca and Pierre-Edouard Saillard, and in March 2022 it closed a €5.5 million Series A led by Karot Capital and Majycc eSanté Invest, supported by the European Regional Development Fund and Bpifrance, when it had 17 staff, according to its press release and macommune.info. The release names a second product in development, PulmonAIR, meant to be "the first fully automated emergency ventilator"; no launch of it has been found. Archeon's own site describes the 2022 round as "$6 million".

When EOlife reached the market is reported differently. The 2022 release says it has been sold since early 2020, while macommune.info reported in April 2021 that it obtained its CE marking in September 2020, the month AIRMED started, and listed users including the emergency department of Hôpital Lariboisière, the CHU de Besançon and two fire services.

In October 2026 Archeon announced a new round of €7.5 million, which English-language reports give as $9 million, led by Newfund's HEKA fund with Eiffel Investment Group and UI Investissement's OSER BFC fund, alongside existing investors Majycc and Karot Capital, according to Startuprise and Vestbee. Vestbee, like the 2022 release, calls it a Series A, puts the staff at 25 and revenue at $1.5 million in 2025, and mentions further financing in 2024 that no other source opened for this article details. The money is for studies with more than 1,500 cardiac arrest patients at Amsterdam UMC, Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue in Oregon and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

The clinical record for EOlife is still thin. A study of cardiac arrests in the Doubs department found that, despite a protocol requiring it, the device was used in 48 of 166 cases in 2024; favourable neurological outcome at day 30 was 10.4% with it against 3.4% without, a difference the authors call exploratory because the confidence interval includes no effect, according to the abstract on Europe PMC and Quasa. Archeon's website presents the same study as EOlife being "associated with a tripled neurologically intact survival".

The Money

Archeon files its accounts with a confidentiality declaration, so revenue and balance sheet totals are not public, according to BODACC. The ratios published from those filings by the French economy ministry's open data show net losses of €110,916 for the year to June 2022 and €56,073 for the year to June 2023, then €1,482,089 for the period to 31 December 2024, when the year end moved to December. The same dataset's financial autonomy ratio fell from 44.3% to 13.8% between June 2023 and December 2024. The state company directory repeats the 2024 loss and places the company in the 10 to 19 employee band for 2024, below the 25 staff Vestbee reports.

Why Europe Should Care

AIRMED was a direct answer to an EU emergency. On the day before the cut-off, the Commission created the first rescEU stockpile of medical equipment, naming "intensive care medical equipment such as ventilators" first and paying 90% of it. rescEU now runs 22 stockpiles in 16 member states, partly with the EU's health emergency authority HERA, according to the Commission's civil protection page. A cheap, European-made monitor that lets basic ventilators be used safely would fit those stockpiles. Archeon stresses that EOlife is designed and made in France, on its innovation page.

The Verdict

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