After the EIC Accelerator, BiotaTec's Biomining Is Still a Pilot

BiotaTec OÜ, a small Estonian company in Tartu, uses bacteria, archaea and fungi to dissolve metals out of material that conventional smelters and acid plants find too poor to process: low-grade ores, mine tailings, phosphogypsum stacks and electronic waste. In the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with the cut-off of 19 May 2020, it won a grant for BiotaMet, a project to scale up its two-step bioleaching process. The European Commission's list of selected companies names BiotaTec as the only beneficiary of the project, with grant-only funding. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,303,468.13 towards a total cost of €3,290,668.75, from 1 October 2020 to 30 September 2023.

The grant bought hardware that works. The company built a line of 1,000-litre reactors in its pilot plant and says it raised leaching yields to 80 to 90% for the most valuable metals, according to its final CORDIS report. What the grant did not produce, on the public record, is the industrial pilot at a partner's site or the commercial licences in Europe, Canada and Jordan that the proposal set out. Six years after selection, BiotaTec's income is still mostly grants, and its filed accounts show €13,287 in cash at the end of 2025.

A Grant-Funded Lab That Is Still Trading

BiotaTec is active. The Estonian e-Business Register lists it as entered in the register, with share capital of €5,100, Sirli Sipp Kulli as the only management board member since 2010 and as sole shareholder, and annual reports filed for every year from 2008 to 2025. The 2025 report was filed only on 14 October 2026, after the register issued a fine warning on 21 September 2026 for the missing report, according to Inforegister, which also shows €12,434.64 of tax arrears under a payment schedule running to June 2027 and no insolvency notices or bailiff proceedings.

The company's news page shows steady activity: it enlarged its pilot testing facilities in September 2025 with 200-litre test columns, an agglomerator and downstream processing equipment "to meet increasing demand from customers", and a researcher showed visitors how microbes extract metals from e-waste at Estonia's Researchers' Night in September 2026. No customer is named anywhere; the company says on its about page that it works for clients worldwide under strict non-disclosure agreements.

The owner also has a public post. Sirli Sipp Kulli has headed the Geological Survey of Estonia, a state agency under the Ministry of Climate, since January 2020, and began a second term in January 2025, according to the Ministry of Climate, which describes her as founder and board member of BiotaTec. The Geological Survey's own announcement of February 2020 called her BiotaTec's former chief executive, while e-Estonia still called her CEO in December 2023. The register lists no other manager.

How Microbes Mine Metal

Most metals are won by pyrometallurgy, which smelts ore at high temperature, or hydrometallurgy, which dissolves it in strong acids; BiotaTec's CORDIS report calls both polluting and energy-hungry, and uneconomic for low-grade sources. Bioleaching lets microorganisms do the dissolving. It is slow, typically taking weeks or months, as Priit Jõers told Research in Estonia in 2022; BiotaTec says it has cut that to days or hours for some materials.

BiotaTec's variant, BiotaMet, was designed for ores in which metals sit in organic complexes, such as Estonia's graptolite argillite, a black shale. In a first, oxygen-free step, a consortium of heterotrophic bacteria and methane-producing archaea breaks down the organic matter at neutral pH and produces methane; a second step leaches the metals. The CORDIS objective claimed metal yields of 86 to 97%, against 70 to 80% for traditional methods, and 40% less energy. The company filed a patent application for the two-step process in 2016, says its about page, and the earlier MetLeach feasibility study of 2017 describes the same consortium and a proprietary nutrient medium.

The methane step did not work on electronic waste in one test. In LIFE BIOTAWEE, a 2018 to 2022 project coordinated by the Spanish recycler Reydesa Recycling with BiotaTec as partner, the anaerobic step produced no methane from printed circuit boards and was dropped. The final process used aerobic leaching only and recovered 86 to 95% of the copper but just 1 to 4% of the silver in a 50-litre pilot. BiotaTec's later e-waste work centres on gold, which it recovers as nanoparticles, according to e-Estonia.

What BiotaMet Promised and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS fact sheet lists the plan: optimise the technology for four specific raw materials, build large bioreactors at the company's bio-mining centre, validate it in lab-scale and industry-scale pilots, and commercialise it across Europe, Canada and Jordan. The proposal also forecast extra annual revenue of more than €7.3 million for mining customers and more than €5 million for e-waste recyclers.

The final periodic report, covering October 2021 to September 2023, describes step-by-step scale-up through 20-litre, 100-litre and 1,000-litre reactors on phosphogypsum, bauxite residue and graptolite argillite "etc.", leaching efficiencies of "80-90%" and above for the most valuable metals, and methane production from argillite at 1,000 litres. It also says the last parts of the metal-leaching scale-up were still being modified in the 1,000-litre reactor to cope with contamination in industrial settings, and that the technology "is attracting customers around the globe", without naming one. The project ran three years instead of the planned two because of COVID-19, and the EIC approved the final report in May 2024, according to BiotaTec.

1. Large bioreactors at the bio-mining centreDelivered1,000-litre reactors built, per the CORDIS report and company news of six one-cubic-metre reactors.
2. Optimisation for four raw materialsPartlyThree materials named with 80 to 90% leaching; no per-material results published.
3. Methane co-productionPartlyUpscaled to 1,000 litres on argillite, per the company; failed on circuit boards in LIFE BIOTAWEE.
4. 86 to 97% metal yieldsPartlyThe final report states 80 to 90% and above, self-reported.
5. Industry-scale pilotNot achievedPilots ran in the company's own plant; an industrial-scale proof with a partner, set as a 2024 goal, has not been announced.
6. Commercialisation in Europe, Canada and JordanNot achievedNo licence or customer announced; Inforegister shows no export sales in 2023 or 2024.
7. On timeLateThree years instead of two, per the company.

The industrial step is the gap. In December 2023 Jõers and Sipp Kulli told e-Estonia that the internal goal for the following year was to prove the process at industrial scale with a partner, then install mobile units at partner sites and license the technology; the company was seeking investors. Neither the company's news page nor any other source found for this article reports such a partner since.

Living on Grants

BiotaTec was in poor financial shape when it applied. At the end of 2019 it had €122 in cash and equity of minus €219,600 after two years of losses, according to its balance sheets in the e-Business Register. In May 2021 the register issued a warning that the company could be wound up for insufficient net assets, which was later marked as remedied, according to Inforegister. The grant year changed the picture: 2020 closed with a profit of €241,835 on sales of €1,100.

Since then, the company has reported small profits every year, but on income that is mostly not sales. Sales were zero in 2021 and 2022, €561,312 in 2023, €243,485 in 2024 and €337,249 in 2025. Other operating income, which the accounts do not break down, was €910,586 in 2025, and the balance sheet carried €368,826 of targeted financing, the Estonian accounting term for grants received for specific purposes. The 2025 activity report in the register says the company finished a three-year applied research project on e-waste that year.

That project was a second large public grant: €1.94 million from the Estonian Business and Innovation Agency in October 2022 for recovering precious metals from e-waste as nanoparticles, out of a €3.62 million budget, according to BiotaTec and the University of Tartu, whose institute supplies the company's chief scientist and two industrial doctoral students. A third followed in Horizon Europe: BiotaTec is one of the partners of REMHub, a rare earth and magnet innovation hub with €16 million of EU funding, coordinated by Finland's CLIC Innovation from October 2024 to September 2028, with a net EU contribution of €419,125 to BiotaTec. AIMEN, another partner, lists BiotaTec among the consortium.

Private money is absent from the record. In June 2022 BiotaTec said EIC experts had given its equity proposal, with an ask of €6.4 million, a "strong GO" at step 1 of the evaluation, according to its news page. No resulting award appears on CORDIS, which lists only MetLeach, BiotaMet and REMHub, and BiotaTec is not among the 319 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies (all 16 pages checked on 15 October 2026). The register shows Sipp Kulli as the only shareholder, and the 2025 accounts show €208,150 of loans from related parties.

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act sets 2030 benchmarks for strategic raw materials: EU extraction should cover at least 10% of annual consumption, processing 40% and recycling 25%, with no more than 65% from any single third country, and it requires member states and operators to examine recovering critical raw materials from extractive waste. The regulation, (EU) 2024/1252, entered into force on 23 May 2024, according to the European Parliament. BiotaTec's targets fit that agenda closely. Its CORDIS report estimates easily accessible phosphogypsum reserves at 2 billion tonnes and says the process also removes radionuclides and heavy metals, so the cleaned residue could be used as construction material. Lanthanides occur in phosphogypsum at under 1%, which the organisms can extract efficiently, David O'Brock of the rare earth separation company REEtec told e-Estonia; neither claim has been independently tested in public.

The Verdict

Fairness requires one point: an EIC grant funds development, and by that measure BiotaTec built what it said it would build and kept its team together through two more grant projects. Its sales have grown from almost nothing in 2020, and its staff from 3 in the last quarter of 2020 to 9 in the third quarter of 2026, according to tax data on Inforegister. BiotaTec and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article, which is based on public records and published statements linked throughout.