Cellugy Pitched the EIC Accelerator on Coatings, Not Cosmetics

In May 2020 the European Innovation Council picked a two-year-old Aarhus start-up to help replace the plastic film inside paper cups and food cartons. Cellugy grows cellulose with bacteria and yeast that feed on sugar, and its pitch was EcoFLEXY, "a natural and biodegradable nanocellulose alternative to plastic barrier coatings". The EU put up €2,380,644 of a €3,400,920 project, according to CORDIS, and the fact sheet sets out the plan plainly: "Cellugy will first sell EcoFLEXY to packaging companies and chemical companies serving them."

Six years later Cellugy still sells EcoFLEXY, but not to packaging companies. The name now stands for a powder that thickens and stabilises skin creams and sunscreens. Its first commercial use, in February 2025, was a day cream from the skin care start-up Bioli, according to the company's press release and Personal Care Magazine. The EIC funded the factory process; the market is a different one.

What Cellugy Does Now

Cellugy is active. It filed its 2025 annual report in April 2026, and the register shows it as an active private limited company with 18 full-time equivalents in July 2026, according to ownr and North Data. No insolvency filing appears in the publications North Data shows.

Its website offers three ingredients, all for cosmetics: EcoFLEXY Rheo, a rheology modifier that builds viscosity in creams, serums and sunscreen; EcoFLEXY Sun, which the company says boosts the effect of organic UV filters; and EcoFLEXY Color, a pigment dispersant, according to its product pages. Packaging is not mentioned. On 8 October 2026 the company said it had run its fermentation at 15,000 litres, ten times its previous scale, at the Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant in Belgium, and called EcoFLEXY Rheo "the first product developed from the platform". That run is reported only by Cellugy, with quotes from the Belgian pilot plant; no independent report of it could be found.

The Technology: Cellulose Grown, Not Pulped

Cellulose is usually extracted from wood or cotton with energy, water and chemicals. Some bacteria make it themselves, as a fine, pure network of fibres. Cellugy's process uses "a mixture of bacteria and yeast strains that feed on sugars", producing a bio-cellulose that is "chemically equivalent to the cellulose extracted from vegetal sources, but 100 times smaller in diameter", Alvarez-Martos told CORDIS in 2020. The EIC fact sheet adds that it can run on sugar or agro-industrial waste and claims 94% lower CO2 emissions than conventional plastics; no independent life-cycle study of that figure is public.

The difficulty with bacterial cellulose has always been price and handling: it comes out of the fermenter as a wet gel. Cellugy's current pitch is a dry powder that disperses again in water. In personal care it competes with xanthan and cellulose gums on the natural side and with carbomers, synthetic acrylic thickeners, on the fossil side. The company claims "superior performance" over "xanthan and cellulose gums", per Bioenergy International, and Cosmetics Business describes EcoFLEXY as engineered as an alternative to synthetic carbomers; no comparative test by a third party has been published. Its product pages cite soil, estuarine and marine biodegradation tests, including 82% absolute biodegradation in seawater after 28 days under ASTM D6691, without naming the laboratory.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of the 19 May 2020 Green Deal winners names Cellugy of Aarhus as the only company on the EcoFLEXY project, with the funding type "grant" and the aim of "obtaining a biomaterial able to replace plastics in several packaging applications". The rasph source table lists the award as blended finance. Nothing supports that label: CORDIS records only the grant, and Cellugy is not among the 319 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across every page of the list for this article. Its investors, listed below, are private funds and Denmark's EIFO.

The project had a precursor. In 2019 Cellugy received €50,000 under the SME Instrument Phase 1 for a four-month feasibility study, titled "Innovative nanocellulose bioplastic film from fruit waste", according to CORDIS. The main grant agreement was signed on 24 November 2020, and the project ran for 30 months from 1 April 2021 to 30 September 2023. It promised to scale production "from the laboratory to a full industrial volume scale in a stepwise manner", to sell to packaging and chemical companies starting in Northern Europe, and to price EcoFLEXY competitively with bioplastics.

The final report claims real engineering progress. Fermentation went from 2 litres to "a minimum of 150 L", a pilot plant was built at Alfa Laval Innovation House in Søborg, three patent applications were filed with a fourth in draft, and EcoFLEXY was trialled with "a broad base of validation partners", none of them named. It also states that "the go-to-market plan was revised based on market research and trial users' feedback". A CORDIS results story from February 2024 says the commercial validation was hit by the pandemic, inflation and the war in Ukraine, and that the company refocused on chemical companies and distributors. The same story mentions cosmetics only as a possible future use.

1. Scale from lab to pilot productionDelivered2 L to at least 150 L and a pilot plant in Søborg, per the CORDIS report.
2. Protect the technologyDeliveredThree patent applications filed during the project, per CORDIS.
3. Full industrial volume scaleLateNot within the project; a 15,000-litre run was announced by the company in October 2026, three years after it ended.
4. Sales to packaging companiesNot achievedNo packaging customer has been announced; the 2024 accounts report no revenue at all.
5. Market launch as a barrier coatingNot achievedThe current product range is cosmetics only.

The score is mixed. The part of the plan that depended on the company's own engineering was delivered on time. The part that depended on customers, a coating sold to packaging makers, did not happen, and the company now uses the process the EIC paid to scale up for a product the grant did not describe. That is the definition of a pivot, and the money did help build the platform behind it.

What Cellugy Has Achieved Since the Award

The private money came after the project ended, and it came for personal care. The company's own timeline says it closed a pre-seed round with PSV Hafnium, The Footprint Firm and EIFO in 2023, when its accounts show a capital increase of DKK 9.9 million. In May 2024 it announced a €4.9 million seed round co-led by ICIG Ventures of Frankfurt and Unconventional Ventures of Denmark, with Joyance Partners of the US, to scale production "from kilos to several tonnes per year", according to Personal Care Magazine and Vestbee. Its 2024 accounts record a capital increase of DKK 41.9 million.

In June 2025 the EU's LIFE Programme awarded Cellugy €8.1 million over four years for BIOCARE4LIFE, a project with The Footprint Firm and the Berlin data company Sci2sci to scale EcoFLEXY as a replacement for fossil-based carbomers in personal care, according to Tech.eu and Bioenergy International. The project targets 259 tonnes of microplastics avoided per year at its end, rising to 1,289 tonnes a year by 2034. A smaller regional project with the Danish Technological Institute, from September 2024 to February 2025, worked on a cheaper downstream process for the cellulose, according to DTI.

The board has moved toward the beauty industry as well: Steven Schnittger, listed on Cellugy's team page as a former Estée Lauder executive, joined in autumn 2025, according to North Data. The same page lists a chief commercial officer, Koen Paesmans.

Customers are the gap. Bioli's day cream is the only commercial product publicly named as using EcoFLEXY. When it launched, Cellugy said it was negotiating distribution deals for eleven cosmetics markets in the EU and the US and targeting a "full commercial launch in April 2025" at the In-cosmetics Global show, per its release. No distributor and no second brand customer have been announced since, and whether the April 2025 launch took place could not be verified.

The Money

Cellugy files small-company accounts that show a gross result rather than revenue, and they are compiled, not audited. The filings with the Danish Business Authority show a company that lived on grants until 2023 and on equity since. Grants are booked as other operating income inside that gross result, which was positive in 2021 and 2022 and turned to a loss of DKK 4.1 million in 2023, DKK 8.5 million in 2024 and DKK 11.1 million in 2025. The 2024 management review says plainly that "no revenue has been generated yet".

The balance sheet was thin through the whole EIC project. Equity was negative from 2020 to 2023, reaching minus DKK 2.05 million at the end of 2022. In the 2023 report management wrote that closing a fundraising round by the end of the first quarter of 2024 was "a premise for continued operations". The seed round arrived in time. At the end of 2025 the company had DKK 14.7 million in cash and DKK 12.9 million in equity, after a DKK 17.2 million loss. Deferred income jumped from DKK 0.19 million to DKK 9.9 million in 2025; the accounts do not say what it is.

Why Europe Should Care

The pivot moved Cellugy from one EU policy target to another. Its 2020 award came under the EIC's first Green Deal call, aimed at plastic packaging. Its current market is shaped by the restriction on intentionally added microplastics, adopted on 25 September 2023, which the Commission says will prevent the release of about half a million tonnes of microplastics and which names cosmetics that use them "for obtaining a specific texture", per the Commission's announcement. Leave-on cosmetics containing such microplastics may be sold until 16 October 2029, according to the Commission's guidance page. Cellugy and the LIFE project call fossil carbomers microplastics; whether a given carbomer falls under the restriction depends on whether it meets the regulation's definition, and the coverage reviewed for this article does not settle that.

Cellugy's scale-up so far has run on shared facilities: Alfa Laval's innovation house in Søborg, the Danish Technological Institute and a pilot plant in Belgium. It has not announced a commercial manufacturing partner or plant, which is the step between a 15,000-litre demonstration and supplying cosmetics makers at volume.

The Verdict

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