EIC Accelerator Winner Botalys and the Indoor Ginseng Business

Ginseng that sells as a premium supplement usually comes from roots grown in fields for four to six years, or from wild plants dug up in forests. Botalys, a company in Ath in the Belgian province of Hainaut, grows Panax ginseng in sterile rooms under artificial light and harvests it in months. In January 2019 the European Commission selected the company, still registered as Green2Chem, in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 and gave it €2,205,000 to scale the method up, according to CORDIS. Seven years later its HRG80 red ginseng is sold in supplements in Europe, the United States and Asia, and it has partnerships with Air Liquide's ingredients arm Seppic and with Haleon. What it does not yet have is a profit: its filed accounts show losses of €2.58 million to €3.14 million in each year from 2022 to 2025, and its staff fell from 24 to 16.8 full-time equivalents in 2025, according to Companyweb.

One Company, Two Names

The European Commission's list of SME Instrument Phase 2 winners names the beneficiary of Rhizomia as Green2Chem of Ghislenghien, with the website green2chem.com; it is the only company listed for the project. CORDIS lists the same grant under Botalys. Both are one legal entity. The Belgian Official Gazette shows enterprise number 0834.134.177 under the name Green2Chem SA until a publication of 24 April 2019 on its "dénomination", and under Botalys SA from January 2020 onwards, according to the Gazette's company index. North Data dates the name change to 11 April 2019 and shows that the company was registered in 2011 as Green2Chem Consulting SA with €70,000 of capital.

Where Botalys Stands Now

Botalys is active. It filed its accounts for 2025 on 30 June 2026, according to North Data, and Companyweb lists its status as active. It exhibited at the 2026 edition of the SupplySide Connect trade show in New Jersey with HRG80 ginseng, a cold-pressed ginseng juice for drinks and indoor-grown rhodiola, according to the exhibitor listing. In October 2025 Haleon, the consumer health company split off from GSK, announced a partnership to explore supplement concepts for the US market built on Botalys' Korean red ginseng and its "Fjord rhodiola", according to NutraIngredients. Financial terms were not published, and no Haleon product with the ingredients had been announced by October 2026.

The accounts tell a harder story. The company does not publish its turnover. The gross margin it files, a figure that in Belgian abbreviated accounts nets revenue against purchased goods and services, was minus €479,655 in 2022 and €55,321 in 2025. The net loss was €2,622,759 in 2022, €3,140,172 in 2023, €2,575,214 in 2024 and €2,862,216 in 2025, according to Companyweb. Equity rose in 2023 and again in 2025 despite those losses, which matches the capital publications the Official Gazette lists in May 2023 and in September and November 2025. The amounts of the 2025 capital increases and the names of the investors could not be verified from free sources.

The Technology: Wild Conditions, Indoors

Ginseng's active compounds, ginsenosides, build up in the root slowly and vary from field to field, and wild roots are overharvested, the company's final EIC report says. Botalys grows the plants hydroponically in sterile, tightly controlled rooms and imitates seasonal changes and insect attacks to push the plant to produce more of the compounds, the company told RTBF in January 2019. The roots are then steamed into "red" ginseng. The company named the resulting powder HRG80, for hydroponic red ginseng, and launched it at Vitafoods Europe in May 2019, according to NutritionInsight. RTBF reported that the company kept the process secret rather than patenting it.

The technology changed shape on the way. The company's 2017 SME Instrument Phase 1 study, worth €50,000, described "a novel bioreactor" for growing root cultures in vitro, with a doubling time to beat the 20 to 30 days of bubble-column reactors, according to CORDIS. The Phase 2 objective repeated those bioreactor figures, but the final report describes something else: vertical farming of whole plants on a robotic production prototype of 2 tonnes a year. Whether the promised doubling time of 6 to 8 days and the 10 to 12% ginsenoside content were reached is not stated in the published report.

What Rhizomia Promised, and What the Record Shows

Rhizomia ran from 1 March 2019 to 31 May 2021 with a total cost of €3,150,000, according to CORDIS. The objective promised 2x faster biomass growth, 2 to 3 times more ginsenosides than wild ginseng, and a large-scale production facility that would give the company a 30 to 35% share of a world market of about 80,000 tonnes of dry ginseng a year by 2030. The final report, covering the period to the scheduled end date, lists 800 kg of roots produced for market tests "despite numerous problems linked to the scaling-up of the technology", FSSC 22000 food-safety certification for growing and processing medicinal plants in September 2019, production trials of a second plant, red sage (Salvia miltiorrhiza), two patents and five publications. It also names the main commercial obstacle plainly: some supplement brands "are not interested in true quality".

Two of the clinical studies are in the peer-reviewed literature. A pilot trial in 50 tired healthy adults found HRG80 better than placebo and better than standard white ginseng on attention and memory tests, according to the paper in Pharmaceuticals in March 2020; its first author is Mariage, who declared a conflict of interest as co-chief executive of Botalys. An EEG study in elderly subjects followed in the same journal in February 2021, with Mariage as co-author. No independent replication was found.

1. Produce ginseng roots at pilot scaleDelivered800 kg produced, per the final report.
2. Food-safety certificationDeliveredFSSC 22000, September 2019, per the report.
3. Clinical evidence for HRG80DeliveredTwo randomised trials published, both co-authored by the company's chief executive.
4. Commercial products with customersDeliveredNutrisan and Terry Naturally products in 2019; Seppic in 2023.
5. 2x growth speed, 10 to 12% ginsenosidesNot verifiedNo figures in the published report or independent tests.
6. Large-scale production facilityPartlyA vertical farm in Ghislenghien installed around 2021, per La DH; capacity not disclosed.
7. 30 to 35% of the world ginseng market by 2030Not on trackTurnover not published; gross margin of €55,321 in 2025.

The project ended on schedule. The ingredient exists, sells and is backed by published trials, which is what a development grant can fairly be asked to deliver. The industrial claims behind the market-share target are not checkable from public sources, and the company's filed numbers show a business still far from the scale the proposal described.

Customers, Partners and Money Since the Grant

In April 2019, a month after Rhizomia began, the Belgian supplement maker Nutrisan launched FocuSan with HRG80, and the US company Terry Naturally took exclusive distribution for two products in the United States and Canada, according to NutritionInsight. Botalys' website today shows the logos of L'Oréal, Haleon, Seppic and Terry Naturally among others; the terms of these relationships, apart from the published Seppic and Haleon deals, are not public.

On the money side, the company raised €6.6 million in October 2022 in a round led by ALIAD, the venture arm of Air Liquide, with Yield Lab Europe, SRIW, Hoccinvest, Vives II and family offices, to expand abroad, enlarge its research centre in Ghislenghien and add more medicinal plants, according to iGrow News and La DH. La DH also reported an earlier €5.5 million round in December 2019; the Gazette index shows a capital publication in January 2020, but the amount of that round could not be confirmed from a second source. In March 2023 Seppic, Air Liquide's healthcare ingredients subsidiary, signed a co-development and distribution agreement for ginseng-based cosmetic ingredients, according to Personal Care Magazine and NutritionInsight. The Walloon region granted the company four state aids totalling €2,761,097 in 2023, according to North Data. Botalys is not in the EIC Fund portfolio; its 2019 award was grant only, and CORDIS lists no other EU project beyond the 2017 Phase 1 study.

Why It Matters for Europe

The ginseng trade is dominated by producers outside Europe, as the CORDIS summary notes, and the wild plant is under pressure from overharvesting. Controlled indoor cultivation of medicinal plants fits the EU's bioeconomy policy, which aims at sustainable, local production of biological resources, and it offers supplement and cosmetics makers a traceable European source free of pesticides and heavy metals, which the company's report says its competitors' products often contained. The test is cost: a crop grown under lights in a clean room has to sell at a premium high enough to pay for that energy and equipment, and Botalys' accounts do not yet show that it does.

The Verdict

Botalys and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.