Cascoda: 7 Staff, 7 Years After an EIC Accelerator IoT Radio Grant

Cascoda Limited, a fabless chip designer in Southampton, has spent nineteen years on one idea: a 2.4 GHz radio receiver sensitive enough to give battery-powered building sensors the range of Wi-Fi without an extra amplifier. In the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 programme that became the EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected its project SMARTRange. The Commission's winner list names Cascoda as the only beneficiary. According to CORDIS, the EU paid €900,675.30 of a €1,286,679 project that ran from 1 October 2019 to 31 May 2022, as a grant only.

The proposal promised a lot: a share of a low-power wireless market worth more than €3 billion, €48 million in cumulative revenue and €27 million in operating profit by 2025, and up to 184 skilled jobs, as the CORDIS summary records. Seven years after the award, Cascoda is still trading and still selling products built on its radio. Its latest accounts at Companies House show an average of seven staff, £3,671 in the bank and net liabilities of £453,506 at 31 March 2026.

Still Trading, on Shareholder Money

Cascoda is active. Companies House lists it as active with accounts filed up to 31 March 2026, and its two co-founders, Bruno Johnson and Wolfgang Bruchner, have been directors since the day it was incorporated, according to the register of officers. North Data shows the same status and filings. The company's website carried new technical posts in May and June 2026.

The money that keeps it going comes in small amounts. Since 2023 Cascoda has filed dozens of share allotments, often one a month, in the filing history. In the year to March 2026 it issued 21,652 shares at £7.86 each, about £170,000, according to the accounts. The share premium account, which totals what investors have paid above the nominal value of their shares, rose from £705,678 in March 2023 to £1,855,985 in March 2026. The accounts say the company "receives investment from shareholders and R&D refunds from HMRC to support ongoing research activities". Directors' loans of £181,332 at 1% interest were outstanding in March 2026, and long-term creditors rose from £181,616 to £401,858 in the year. No named investor, venture round or acquisition has been announced, and searches found none.

The Technology: Range From the Receiver, Not the Transmitter

European rules cap the transmit power of these devices at 10 mW, the SMARTRange final report notes, so the practical way to reach further is to hear weaker signals. Cascoda's patented receiver design improves sensitivity enough, it says, to roughly double the range of a standard 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.15.4 radio without an external power amplifier, which it claims cuts power use by a factor of six and equipment cost by a factor of five. Its CA-8211 data sheet gives a receive sensitivity of -105 dBm. Those range and power factors are the company's own; no independent benchmark was found.

The chip matters less than the software stacked on it. Low-power building networks compete on standards: Thread for the mesh network, and an application layer on top. Cascoda, which chaired the Thread Group's low-power working group in 2019, combined Thread with the Open Connectivity Foundation's application layer, a pairing the two bodies announced as certifiable in November 2019, crediting Cascoda as its developer, according to the Thread Group. The established alternatives are Zigbee and Bluetooth mesh on the same frequency band, and sub-GHz radios with longer range but, as Cascoda's report argues, weaker security and interoperability.

What SMARTRange Promised, and What It Delivered

The project was to optimise and certify Cascoda's products under industry standards and demonstrate them in real buildings. On the technical side, most of that happened. The final report says the Chili2 module, built on the existing CA-8211 chip, was certified for FCC, IC and EU radio rules and for Thread 1.1, that Zigbee and OCF stacks were developed and certified, and that a new chip for smart buildings, the CA-8212, was manufactured and tested. UL Solutions confirms in a 2023 case study that it tested the Chili2 for FCC and EU radio approval and that the module became the first certified OCF-over-Thread module. In May 2021 Cascoda announced that the Chili2 had passed the IASME IoT Security Assured scheme.

Real installations also exist. The report lists 3.6 km of street lighting at National Taipei University in Taiwan and warehouse lighting in the UK, and says a Taiwanese customer designed the Chili module into parking meters used in Hong Kong, Macau and Japan. UL's case study confirms the Taipei street lights and the parking meters in Hong Kong and Macau; Cascoda announced its partner in Taipei, Green Ideas Technology, in November 2020. Japan and the UK warehouse could not be confirmed from a second source.

Two things did not come through. The CA-8212 was not certified to Thread 1.2, which the report blames on pandemic delays to the standard, and the chip does not appear among the products on Cascoda's website, which lists only the CA-8210 and CA-8211. The report also mentions a new patent filing for sensing applications, which could not be checked. And the commercial forecast was missed by a wide margin. The report, published in November 2022, says the company was "already exceeding its revenue targets by a significant margin". Cascoda files small-company accounts without a profit and loss statement, so its revenue is not public. But its balance sheets have shown net liabilities every year, trade debtors of £0 in March 2025 and £6,554 in March 2026, and never more than 11 staff, which does not square with €48 million of revenue or 184 jobs by 2025.

1. Certify Chili2 module (radio, Thread, OCF)DeliveredCORDIS report; UL Solutions.
2. Real-world demonstrationsDeliveredTaipei street lights and parking meters, confirmed by UL.
3. New CA-8212 chip, Thread 1.2 certifiedPartlyBuilt and tested; not certified, not on sale.
4. €48M cumulative revenue by 2025Not achievedNo revenue filed; net liabilities every year.
5. Up to 184 skilled jobsNot achieved7 staff on average in 2025/26.

After the Grant: A Turn to KNX

Since the project ended, Cascoda has tied its future to KNX, a standard for home and building control. In November 2023 its chief executive and chief operating officer wrote on the KNX website that "the KNX Association took the opportunity to fund the implementation of KNX IoT open-source stack, and this stack was implemented by Cascoda on behalf of the KNX Association". The company's product range is now built around that: a KNX IoT hub, a mesh extender, environment and presence sensors and development kits, all running over Thread on its Chili modules.

Its first named KNX IoT installation came in 2025. In a KNX Association case study published in July 2025, the Cascoda KNX IoT Environment Sensor, described as the first certified KNX IoT product, monitors air quality in a hair salon in Berkhamsted, installed through the distributor Innovelec. Cascoda and Innovelec announced the sensor's general availability on 25 June 2025. How many units have been sold is not public.

The headcount has not moved with the product line. The accounts show 9 staff in the year to March 2020, 11 in 2021, 9 from 2022 to 2024, 11 in 2025 and 7 in 2026. North Data lists two small UK research grants besides the EU money, £55,366 in 2012 and £20,069 in 2022. Cascoda is not in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all pages on 8 October 2026, which is expected for a grant-only award from 2019.

The Money

Cascoda's equity has been negative at every year end in the filed accounts since 2017. Net liabilities grew from £319,633 in March 2018 to £770,012 in March 2023, then shrank to £209,601 by March 2025 as new shares were sold, and widened again to £453,506 in March 2026. The accumulated deficit in the profit and loss reserve reached £2,310,689. The figures for March 2020 differ between filings: the 2020 accounts give net liabilities of £698,579, the 2021 accounts restate them as £615,299 without a public explanation. Cash at the year end has stayed below £40,000 in every year except March 2021, when it was £172,474, during the EU project.

Why It Matters for Europe

Cascoda's field sits where three EU policies meet. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive pushes building automation and indoor air quality monitoring, which Cascoda cites in marketing its environment sensor. The Cyber Resilience Act sets security rules for connected products, the kind of baseline Cascoda says its certified OCF-over-Thread stack meets. And the European Chips Act aims to keep chip design in Europe. An open KNX IoT stack, free for any manufacturer to use, lowers the cost of secure wireless devices for building makers. The caveat: Cascoda is a British company, and the United Kingdom left the EU in January 2020, four months after SMARTRange began.

The Verdict

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