The Short Life of CrayoNano's EIC Accelerator UV-C LED Business

CrayoNano AS, a Trondheim company founded in 2012 to commercialise materials licensed from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), set out to make ultraviolet (UV-C) LEDs for disinfection from aluminium gallium nitride nanowires grown on graphene. The European Commission's list of EIC Accelerator pilot winners for the 7 October 2020 cut-off names CrayoNano, alone and with blended finance, for SteriLED. CORDIS records an EU grant of €2,403,187.50 towards a €3,433,125 project that ran from 1 April 2021 to 31 March 2023. On 15 January 2025 the board decided to file for bankruptcy after a convertible loan failed to reach its NOK 15 million minimum, according to the company's announcement; the Brønnøysund Register Centre dates the bankruptcy 16 January 2025.

The project promised an LED that would emit three times more light and last three times longer than standard UV-C LEDs at a quarter of the cost. What reached customers was different: CrayoNano's first volume products were built on commodity, industry-standard chips in its own package, with the nanowire chip to follow later, as the company said in February 2022, according to Semiconductor Today. No announcement found for this article says that the nanowire-on-graphene chip ever went into a product on sale.

Where CrayoNano Stands Now

CrayoNano is in bankruptcy. The register lists it as bankrupt and shows a separate bankruptcy estate, CrayoNano AS konkursbo, registered on 16 January 2025 with a Trondheim lawyer as its contact. The company has not been struck off. Its last filed accounts are for 2023.

The estate offered the company's complete technology assets, including patents, servers, hard drives and research materials, as one package in an online auction that began on 28 February 2025 and was extended to 17 March 2025 because of "high demand and requests from several participants", according to Semiconductor Today and Compound Semiconductor. The buyer and the price could not be found. Nordic Technology Group, which held about 14.9% of the shares, wrote its investment down in full by NOK 80.97 million with effect from 31 December 2024, according to its announcement. Graphene-Info now lists CrayoNano as a historic company.

The Technology: Nanowires on Graphene

UV-C light is used to disinfect water, air and surfaces, and the established source is the mercury lamp, which the company's CORDIS report calls "toxic and unsustainable". UV-C LEDs avoid mercury and are compact, but the same report names threading dislocations, crystal defects in conventional thin-film LEDs, as their "main drawback". CrayoNano's idea was to grow the light-emitting material as tiny nanowires on a graphene layer, which it said removes those defects. In its final CORDIS report the company wrote that analyses of prototype samples had "repeatedly demonstrated" that threading dislocations were "completely prevented" in its nanowire structures. That claim has not been checked independently for this article.

The commercial plan in the CORDIS objective was to start selling SteriLED "at the beginning of 2022" to makers of point-of-use water purifiers, and then move into air and surface disinfection. In February 2022 CrayoNano signed an industrialisation and development agreement with SemiLEDs of Taiwan to combine its nanowire technology with SemiLEDs' chip processing, according to the company's announcement; the release gave no dates or milestones. Days later it said it had signed its first high-volume supply contract for over 1 million packaged UV-C chips, and that these initial volumes would use commodity chips, with its own nanowire chip moved into the same package only after market entry, according to Semiconductor Today.

The first catalogue product, the CrayoLED H-Series (CLH-N3S), was launched in October 2022 with a typical output of 80 mW at 350 mA and a 275 nm peak in a 3.5 by 3.5 mm package, according to Semiconductor Today. A successor, the HE-Series (CLH1-N3S), followed in November 2024, the company said in its December 2024 update. Neither source says which chip either series used.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The final periodic report, covering January 2022 to March 2023, sets out four targets for the SteriLED LED: a wall plug efficiency of 12%, a lifetime of 20,000 hours, an optical power of 250 mW at 500 mA and a cost of €50 per watt. Against these, the company reports a packaged "test vehicle" with 100 mW, 5% wall plug efficiency and a lifetime of more than 10,000 hours. It also reports a packaged 45 mil SteriLED chip demonstrator, a production line of "well over tens of thousands of chips per day" with high yield, certification of the product to IEC 62471, NSF/ANSI Standard 55 compliance shown in product tests, and samples integrated and validated by "several OEMs" in water systems. It adds that customers were asking for the higher power and lower cost "that our future technology has the potential to deliver". The report does not say whether the certified product used nanowire chips, and it gives no cost per watt. The project ended on its scheduled date of 31 March 2023.

1. Nanowire chip demonstratorDelivered45 mil packaged demonstrator, per CORDIS.
2. Market launch in early 2022Partly deliveredH-Series launched October 2022; first volumes on commodity chips.
3. 12% wall plug efficiencyNot achieved5% on the test vehicle.
4. 250 mW optical powerNot achieved100 mW on the test vehicle; 80 mW in the H-Series.
5. 20,000 hour lifetimeNot achievedMore than 10,000 hours reported.
6. €50 per watt costNot achievedNo cost figure announced.
7. Safety certificationDeliveredIEC 62471, per the company's report.

The EC list shows SteriLED as a blended finance award, a grant plus EIC equity. CrayoNano does not appear on any page of the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which had 319 entries over 16 pages when checked for this article, and no source found reports an EIC equity investment. The EC list names no other company for the project.

The Money

CrayoNano raised about NOK 127.9 million in a private placement in September 2020, shortly before its EIC selection, and was registered on the NOTC list in October 2020, according to Graphene-Info. In January 2023 its three largest shareholders lent it €2.5 million (NOK 27.5 million), convertible into shares, while it prepared a private placement and a planned listing on Euronext Growth, according to Compound Semiconductor. The placement closed in April 2023 with about NOK 125 million in gross proceeds, the company said in its Q2 2023 update, which also reported product sales of NOK 32,000 in the quarter and a first commercial frame contract, with AquiSense, worth an estimated NOK 4 million over 12 months. The Euronext Growth listing did not follow: the shares were still on NOTC when the board asked for trading to be suspended in January 2025, according to the bankruptcy announcement.

The filed accounts in the Brønnøysund Register of Company Accounts show how far sales trailed costs. Sales revenue was NOK 303,263 in 2021, NOK 437,790 in 2022 and NOK 923,109 in 2023, while payroll costs rose from NOK 27.26 million to NOK 38.84 million and the net loss grew from NOK 31.36 million to NOK 80.52 million. Equity stood at NOK 142.12 million at the end of 2023, much of it in non-current assets of NOK 123.63 million.

The Last Year

In August 2024 the company reported "record all time high shipment deliveries" to drinking water disinfection customers in North America and a private placement of NOK 16.2 million, according to Compound Semiconductor; no unit numbers were given. A month later it said some customers had defaulted on June and July shipments, partly through non-payment and partly through bankruptcy, that the UV-C LED market was consolidating with heavy price pressure, and that "there is a risk that there is no basis for continued operation", according to its September 2024 update. In October it secured a short-term bank instrument for liquidity, according to its business update.

In December 2024 chief operating officer Sveinung Ryen replaced Thomas Dobbertin as chief executive, and the company launched a convertible loan of NOK 15 million to 30 million that would carry it only to mid-March 2025 at the minimum, while a US adviser looked for a buyer, according to the December 2024 update. At that point it reported 31 customers and 20 distribution and design-in partners. The loan did not reach its minimum, and the board filed for bankruptcy.

Other EU Funding

Before the EIC award, CrayoNano was a partner in the EU's Graphene Flagship. CORDIS lists a net EU contribution of €100,000 to the company in GrapheneCore2 (April 2018 to March 2020) and €130,000 in GrapheneCore3 (April 2020 to September 2023).

Why Europe Should Care

Two EU policies point in CrayoNano's direction. The revised EU Mercury Regulation, in force since 30 July 2024, bans the manufacture and export of six more types of mercury-containing lamps from the end of 2025 or 2026, according to the European Commission, which widens the opening for mercury-free UV sources such as LEDs. The European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to "ensure the resilience of supply chains and reduce external dependencies" in semiconductors, according to the Commission. CrayoNano developed its UV-C LED chip technology in Trondheim. Yet its first volume products relied on commodity chips and an unnamed outside packager, its chip development partner was in Taiwan, and in its last weeks it was seeking a buyer through an adviser specialised in US and China deals. Where its patents went after the 2025 auction is not public.

The Verdict

This article is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout. CrayoNano's bankruptcy estate and the EIC were not asked for comment.