Billon's EIC Accelerator Blockchain for Contracts, 7 Years On

Billon Digital Services, a Warsaw software company registered in April 2018, won an EU grant of €1,946,402.50 in the January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 for B4TDM, a project to let banks, insurers and utilities sign, deliver and archive customer contracts on a blockchain instead of on paper, according to CORDIS. The project cost €2,780,575 and ran from 1 May 2019 to 31 July 2021. The European Commission's list of SME Instrument Phase 2 winners names the company as the project's only beneficiary, in Warsaw.

The company did what it said it would do. Its final report states that "all the functionalities defined in the project" were completed, and the Polish utility Tauron moved from a pilot to a commercial launch of the system in February 2022, according to Forsal. The business around it has not grown. Billon Group Limited, the London company that owns Billon Digital Services through a Polish holding, reported turnover of £513,467 and a loss of £2,127,604 for 2024, and negative net assets of £1,358,491, according to its filings at Companies House.

Where Billon Digital Services Stands Now

Billon Digital Services is an active company. The Polish court register shows annual accounts filed for every year from 2018 to 2025, the latest on 13 July 2026, a move to a new Warsaw address in August 2025, and no insolvency or liquidation entry. Its president is Robert Kałuża, the co-founder who became chief executive of the whole group in March 2024, according to a group announcement and the register extract. The subsidiary's own revenue, result and headcount could not be retrieved: the Polish financial statements repository blocked automated access, and no free database shows the figures.

The public signs of the business are thinning. The newest post on the group's website dates from August 2024, when it published carbon offset certificates for a client called TerGo. At the UK parent, chairman Wojciech Kostrzewa left the board in February 2025, Kałuża and the founder Andrzej Horoszczak resigned as directors on 19 January 2026, two more directors left in March 2026, and the 2025 accounts, due by 30 September 2026, are listed as overdue, according to Companies House. Why the founders left the UK board is not public.

The Technology: Whole Documents on the Ledger

Banks, insurers and utilities in the EU must hand certain documents to customers on a "durable medium", a copy that cannot be altered afterwards. For many of them that still means paper. Billon's answer, set out in the B4TDM final report, is a private, permissioned distributed ledger on which a company publishes a document, delivers it to a customer with a confirmation of receipt, has it signed remotely and keeps it, with identity checks of the customer built in.

The difference from most blockchain notarisation tools is what goes on the chain. Most store only a hash, a digital fingerprint of a file held elsewhere. Billon splits the complete document and distributes it across the ledger's nodes, readable only with the recipient's key, as both Forsal and Comparic describe it. The ledger grew out of the group's earlier digital cash system, which runs under e-money licences in the UK and Poland. The EU's results summary repeats the company's own performance tests, in which the system added "millions of documents per day", three times more than Ethereum, with about 70% less power. No independent test of these figures was found.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The project set out to add active delivery, digital signatures and digital identity management to Billon's document ledger and take it to market, in a segment the company sized at €1.6 billion a year, according to CORDIS. The final report, covering May 2020 to July 2021, says development was complete, the product was commercially available, and three product lines had come out of it: digital student credentials, a platform for certifying high-value documents, and digital contracts with verified identity and e-signature. It ended on its planned date.

Outside sources confirm the main deployments. Tauron, Poland's second-largest electricity distributor, tested the system with about 100 customers by the end of April 2020, according to Comparic and Ledger Insights, and launched it commercially in 2022, followed by delivery of public documents in January 2023, according to Billon. Kielce University of Technology signed a contract in February 2021 and sent its first 29 graduates blockchain copies of their diplomas on 30 August 2021, according to Billon and Comparic. How many documents Tauron now sends this way, and what it pays, is not public.

1. Active delivery, e-signature and identity functionsDeliveredReported complete in the final report, July 2021.
2. Validation with pilot clientsDeliveredTauron pilot with about 100 customers, 2020.
3. Commercial productDeliveredTauron launch in 2022; Kielce diplomas in 2021.
4. Large share of a €1.6B marketNot achievedGroup turnover £513,467 in 2024.
5. Performance claimsUnverifiedCompany tests only.

What Came After the Grant

The group raised money while the project ran. It closed a $6 million Series A in March 2020 and £2 million in August 2020 through the UK government's Future Fund, half from private investors in convertible loan notes and half matched by the British Business Bank, according to bank.pl and the company. The UK parent's July 2026 confirmation statement lists 2,528,559 shares, of which the Future Fund's nominee holds 231,224, the Polish mint Mennica Polska 71,069 and the US banking software firm FIS 21,416. Billon Digital Services' share capital was raised from PLN 5,000 to PLN 5 million between June 2021 and December 2022, according to the court register. The company is not listed in the EIC Fund portfolio; its award was grant only.

The ledger also took Billon into EU infrastructure work. In November 2022 the European Commission picked it as one of three providers for the final phase of the pre-commercial procurement for the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), with use cases on tokenised intellectual property and digital product passports for plastic waste and batteries, according to Ledger Insights; the IOTA Foundation, another finalist, reported the phase completed in August 2024. The group had won a separate Horizon 2020 grant of €1,960,000 in 2017 for its digital cash system, through Billon sp. z o.o., according to CORDIS. No other EU project of Billon Digital Services was found on CORDIS.

The revenue never caught up with the costs. Group turnover peaked at £733,517 in 2023 and fell to £513,467 in 2024, while losses stayed above £2 million in each of the four years from 2021 to 2024, according to the consolidated accounts filed in 2024 and 2025. These accounts were unaudited under the small-company exemption. In its 2024 going-concern note the board listed cost cuts including cheaper premises and "workforce optimization to approximately 30 FTE positions", new investors, a planned sale of its UK e-money subsidiary Billon Financial, work towards status as a MiCA stablecoin issuer, and talks with creditors to push the £2,400,073 due within a year beyond 24 months. It also disclosed that a planned acquisition of its subsidiary Billon Solutions by Mobilum sp. z o.o. had not received regulatory approval. No second source on the Mobilum deal was found.

Why Europe Should Care

Billon's work sits inside two EU policies: the Commission's blockchain strategy, which aims for European-built ledgers that meet EU rules on data protection and electronic identity, and EBSI, the public ledger network the member states are building for cross-border documents and credentials. A European, regulation-compliant ledger that holds whole documents and has run at a large utility is the kind of supplier those policies want. Whether a company of Billon's size can stay independent long enough to sell it is now the open question.

The Verdict

Billon has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.