Avantama: An EIC Accelerator Story of Quantum Dots Put Up for Sale

Avantama AG, a materials company in Stäfa on Lake Zurich, set out in 2019 to put a new kind of quantum dot into the world's television screens. The European Commission selected its project, Perovskite-QDD, in the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, according to the Commission's list of winners, and paid an EU contribution of €1,832,175.63 towards a €2,617,393.75 project, according to CORDIS. The aim was to move perovskite quantum dots from laboratory batches to industrial production and to become "a key supplier of optical film manufacturers in the TV screen production value chain".

The production part happened, on the company's own account. The commercial part did not. Avantama forecast a first product launch for 2019 and a first LCD display with its film for 2021; no display maker has announced a product using its material. In November 2024 the company hired a patent broker to sell its perovskite quantum dot portfolio of more than 220 patent assets together with its know-how and manufacturing assets, according to the sale announcement by Ocean Tomo Transactions and a report by Perovskite-Info. Whether a buyer was found is not public.

Where Avantama Stands Now

The company still exists. The federal commercial register Zefix lists Avantama AG as existing, with no liquidation or insolvency entry; its last published change, in September 2024, moved its registered address from Laubisrütistrasse 50 to number 52 in Stäfa. OnlineInfo.ch, which mirrors the register, shows the same two board members and a total capital of CHF 211,464. Swiss limited companies of this kind do not publish their accounts, so revenue, losses and headcount cannot be checked in the register.

What the company said it would keep is its other line of business. The 2024 sale announcement says Avantama's "remaining operations" would continue to serve demand for its avamox materials, metal oxide nanoparticle inks used in organic and perovskite solar cells, short-wave infrared sensors and quantum dot light-emitting displays. Its web shop still sells such formulations, for example a tin oxide ink at CHF 490 per 100 millilitres, and its website still advertises the perovskite film. Since January 2025 Avantama has been a partner in PERSEUS, a Horizon Europe project on printed perovskite solar cells led by Finland's VTT that runs to the end of 2027; CORDIS lists Avantama as a partner with no EU contribution.

Database figures on the company disagree and could not be confirmed. Tracxn gives 6 employees as of August 2026 and names the EIC Fund among its investors, although the 2019 award was a grant only and the company does not appear in the EIC Fund portfolio. CB Insights lists a grant from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation at the end of 2021, with no amount. No private funding round with named investors and amounts could be found.

The Technology: Brighter Green From a Perovskite Crystal

Most LCD televisions marketed as QLED shine a blue backlight through a film of quantum dots, nanocrystals that convert part of the blue light into pure red and green. The purer those colours, the wider the range a screen can show. The established dots are made of cadmium selenide, which the EU restricts under its hazardous substances rules, or indium phosphide. Avantama's application said indium dots reach quantum yields of about 80% and emit broad colour peaks of more than 40 nanometres.

Perovskite quantum dots are metal halide crystals, such as caesium lead bromide, according to Perovskite-Info. They emit very narrow, bright colour peaks but have long been unstable in heat, humidity and strong light. Avantama's case was that it had solved that problem. Its product page pairs a green perovskite film with a red phosphor or red indium dots and claims "up to 93% of Rec.2020 color gamut", "40% higher peak brightness" and "25% less power consumption" than displays with cadmium or indium films. Its application to the EIC claimed up to 50% more colours and up to 30% less energy than Samsung's quantum dot LCD televisions. None of these figures has been published by an independent laboratory or a display maker.

What Perovskite-QDD Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 24 May 2019, with the project running from 1 May 2019 to 31 December 2020. Avantama was the only participant; the Commission's list names no partner company for the project. The application said the company had 15 full-time employees and was already selling quantum dots at research scale, plus other nanomaterials for printed OLED and solar cells.

The final periodic report is short and positive. It says Avantama moved its synthesis to production scale, where quantum yield, emission wavelength and yield "proved to be better on production scale than on R&D scale"; that films passed 1,000 hours of reliability testing; that "pilots with optical film manufacturer and display maker were conducted successfully"; that new equipment was bought and qualified, "making Avantama ready for mass-scale production"; and that new patents were filed. It puts the cost of the solution at about €10 per square metre. It names no customer and no pilot partner.

1. Industrial-scale quantum dot productionDeliveredEquipment installed and qualified, per the CORDIS report; the 2024 sale notice cites "multi-ton scale" capacity in Switzerland.
2. Pilots with film and display makersReported, unnamedOEM qualification of the green film reported in October 2020 by Perovskite-Info and Display Daily; no partner named.
3. Patents filedDeliveredMore than 220 patent assets offered for sale in 2024.
4. Key supplier to the TV value chainNot achievedNo television or monitor using Avantama film has been announced; the business was put up for sale in 2024.

The project finished on time and delivered the engineering work it was funded for, as far as the company's own report shows. The goal that justified the grant, supplying the television industry, was not met.

The Launch That Kept Moving

Avantama's market dates slipped year by year. At Display Week in June 2018 it showed "a large jar of glowing green perovskite QDs" and said it planned to launch products the next year, Display Daily reported. In October 2020 it had passed an OEM qualification and expected "the first commercial LCD display to adopt this solution to hit the market in 2021", according to Perovskite-Info. In January 2022 the analysts at DSCC still said perovskite films "could enter the market in 2022", citing Avantama's qualification, as Perovskite-Info reported.

A Chinese rival got to a shop first. In early 2021 TCL sold 500 of its 75-inch 75M10 televisions in China fitted with perovskite films from Zhijing Nanotech, which OLED-Info called likely "the world's first commercial adoption of pQD films in the display industry"; Perovskite-Info reported the same figures.

Avantama kept developing. In January 2024 it reported printing its quantum dot ink with the Swiss start-up Scrona's electrohydrodynamic inkjet process, aimed at microLED displays, according to Perovskite-Info. Ten months later came the sale. Chief executive Samuel Halim described the technology as "market-ready" after reliability was confirmed with display supply chain partners and production was set up in-house and at "a leading Asian film manufacturer", and said the aim was to place it with a company "with market and customer access", according to Perovskite-Info. The buyer would decide whether production stays in Switzerland.

The EIC grant was not Avantama's only EU money. From November 2019 to April 2023 it was a partner in DROP-IT, a €3.46 million FET Open research project on lead-free perovskites printed by inkjet, led by the University of Valencia, with a net EU contribution of €436,250.

The Money

Avantama's accounts are not public, so its revenue and losses since the grant cannot be checked. The commercial register shows only nominal capital. Share capital rose from CHF 143,679 to CHF 204,249 in four steps between December 2017 and December 2021, the last two after the EIC grant; participation certificates, a form of non-voting capital, rose from CHF 855 in 2016 to CHF 7,215 in September 2024, according to the register entries on Zefix. The price paid for the new shares is not published, so the amounts raised are unknown. No capital increase has been registered since December 2021.

Why Europe Should Care

A European source of display materials that avoids cadmium fits two EU aims: the hazardous substances rules and the Commission's February 2024 communication on advanced materials for industrial leadership, which calls such materials building blocks of the EU's resilience and strategic autonomy. Display manufacturing itself is concentrated in Asia, which is where Avantama said its qualification and film partners were.

Regulation moved more slowly than the company's plan assumed. In 2017 the Commission decided that cadmium quantum dots in displays would be banned from October 2019, Laser Focus World reported. Renewal applications kept the exemption alive, and a 2024 amendment extended it to 21 November 2025 and added a new cadmium exemption for dots placed directly on LED chips until 31 December 2027, according to 1cc Consulting. The cadmium restriction that Perovskite-QDD's application presented as a settled advantage was, in practice, postponed by six years.

The Verdict

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