eggXYt's EIC Accelerator Project: Egg Sexing Goals Against Record

Every year the egg industry hatches billions of male chicks it has no use for: they lay no eggs and grow too slowly for meat, so they are killed on their first day. eggXYt, a Jerusalem start-up, proposed to stop that before incubation even begins. Its plan is to gene-edit hens so that every male egg they lay carries a fluorescent marker, and to sort the eggs with a scanner on the day they are laid. In the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected the company for a grant, according to its list of selected companies, which names EGGXYT LTD of Jerusalem as the only beneficiary of the project.

CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,329,250 towards a total cost of €3,327,500, from 1 October 2019 to 31 March 2022. The stated objective was "a market ready eggXYt version for commercial launch in strategic markets", and the company told the EU the project should lead to "annual net revenues of €20.5 million by end 2025 & the employment of 20 full-time staff". No product, customer or revenue has been made public since.

Where eggXYt Stands Now

The company still exists. The Israeli Corporations Authority's register, published on the government's open data portal, lists EGGXYT LTD as active, with no violation flag and an annual report filed for 2025. Israeli private companies do not publish accounts, so revenue, losses and headcount are not public. Its website names six people, from the two co-founders to an executive administrator, and its most recent news item is dated 17 July 2024.

That news was an investment. Amuse Inc., which the release calls "a leading Japanese poultry grower and egg products producer", invested an undisclosed amount, which Elram called Amuse's "first ever investment in Israel", in a deal arranged by the Japanese-Israeli venture firm Corundum Innovation. The animal agriculture think tank Innovate Animal Ag reported the deal in its October 2024 roundup, describing Amuse as a fully integrated egg company with breeding farms, hatcheries and layer farms. Amuse's chief executive Yasuo Akagi said the company "looks forward to utilizing and implementing" the technology; no implementation has been announced since.

The clearest sign of recent activity is a patent fight. eggXYt's European patent EP3629719, which covers sex determination through a fluorescent marker on a sex chromosome, was granted in August 2023, according to Google Patents, which lists Daniel Offen as inventor and a priority date of 25 May 2017. The Dutch patent firm Nederlandsch Octrooibureau filed an opposition on 23 May 2024, without naming a client. The European Patent Office file, as mirrored by IP Verse, shows twelve auxiliary requests filed in April 2026 to save the patent, oral proceedings in June 2026 and a "Decision revoking the European patent" dated 7 July 2026. The decision can be appealed; whether eggXYt has appealed is not public, and the revocation could not be confirmed in a second source because the EPO register blocked automated access.

The Technology: A Hen That Marks Her Sons

Commercial in-ovo sexing today works inside the incubating egg: FoodNavigator reported in 2021 that Respeggt's method works 8 to 9 days into incubation. eggXYt's idea removes incubation from the question. Using CRISPR, the company inserts a gene for a red fluorescent protein into the Z chromosome of a breeding hen. Hens pass their Z chromosome only to sons, so every male egg she lays carries the marker, while her daughters, which become the laying hens, do not.

"We haven't intervened in the genetics of the females," Elram told the EU's CORDIS results service. "Their DNA is 100% identical to the DNA of layers we know today," he told FoodNavigator in January 2021. The male eggs, never incubated, would go to cosmetics or other non-food uses. The company's head of research, Eliran Kadosh, told CORDIS the scanner detects the marker's wavelength through the shell, but that the natural autofluorescence of eggs "varies between eggs", so only "most eggs" fall in a range that allows the two sexes to be told apart with high confidence.

That hen is the whole business. The scanner has nothing to detect until a breeding company produces and multiplies a stable gene-edited line. Gene editing is also the method's weakness in markets: in a May 2023 AgFunderNews piece, Jeffrey Rosichan of the US Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research said that "in a number of those geographies, gene editing currently is not an accepted methodology", which is why the Egg-Tech Prize he ran left it out.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant followed a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study from March to August 2017, recorded on CORDIS. Phase 2 was signed on 24 September 2019 and ran for 30 months. Its final periodic report, covering October 2020 to March 2022, lists what was achieved: the team "was able to master complex protocols" for culturing and gene-editing the chicken germ cells needed for inheritable traits, made "significant progress" on its seXYt scanner, and "began a commercial pilot with one of the largest chicken genetics companies in the world to develop the first ever sex detectable chicken flock". The genetics company is not named.

The report also lists a commercial relationship with TBG AG, the holding company of the hatchery equipment makers Moba, Petersime, Jamesway and Chick Master, which it says serve 66% of layer hatcheries worldwide and which is also an investor. FoodNavigator and Israel21c both reported TBG as a strategic investor in early 2021, when the company said it was raising a Series A. No Series A has been announced.

1. Gene-edited chicken cells carrying the markerDeliveredEdited germ cells reported in the CORDIS final report and results article.
2. seXYt scannerPrototypeRenderings and a system model in the report; no scanner sold or installed.
3. First sex-detectable chicken flockNot achievedPilot with an unnamed genetics firm began; no flock announced since.
4. Market-ready version for commercial launchNot achievedNo launch, customer or hatchery installation announced.
5. €20.5M annual revenue and 20 staff by end 2025Not publicNo accounts published; six people named on the website.
6. Patent protectionContested51 pending applications reported in 2022; the granted EP patent was revoked in July 2026.

The project was delivered on its original 30-month schedule, and the laboratory work it funded is real. The commercial objective was not met. A sex-detectable flock was, by the company's own account, the precondition for any sale, and in February 2021 Elram told Israel21c that creating gene-edited, stable founder flocks for the company's separate bird flu programme would take about 40 months. More than four years after the project closed, no such flock has been announced for either programme.

What eggXYt Has Achieved Since the Award

The record after March 2022 is thin. The company widened its pitch to animal health: Israel21c reported in February 2021 that it had licensed the GEiGS gene-silencing platform from the UK's Tropic Biosciences to breed chickens resistant to avian influenza, and its website still lists bird flu resistance, protein secretion and cell sorting among its work. No result from that programme has been published. Data providers count little private money: CB Insights lists $140,000 raised over six rounds, the latest a $100,000 round on 3 November 2023, a total that leaves out the EU grants and the undisclosed investments by TBG and Amuse. The company has published no funding totals itself.

Visibility was strongest before and during the EIC project: a TechCrunch feature in September 2017, an Times of Israel report in February 2018 that expected pilot testing in early 2019, and selection by MIT Solve for its Sustainable Food Systems challenge. A May 2021 Freethink feature still described the method as a plan. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company besides the two SME Instrument grants, and eggXYt is not in the EIC Fund's list of 301 invested companies, consistent with its grant-only award.

Why Europe Should Care

Ending chick culling is EU policy in the making. Germany outlawed it in a law of May 2021 that, from 2024, also bars sexing methods acting after day 6 of incubation, as eggXYt's CORDIS report notes, and France has also outlawed the practice. In July 2026 the Commission's livestock strategy committed to a 2026 proposal on laying hen welfare that includes measures to end the systematic killing of male chicks "through in-ovo sexing technologies", according to Animal Equality and Yumda, which date the strategy 8 and 7 July respectively. The promise is not new: in October 2022 Commissioner Stella Kyriakides announced a proposal to end the practice across the EU, according to Eurogroup for Animals, which also reported the French ban; no proposal followed. A sexing method that acts before incubation would meet any day limit a future law could set.

The market has not waited. As of 1 June 2026, 40% of the EU's commercial laying flock was sexed in the egg, according to research by Innovate Animal Ag published by HumanProgress, using methods that work during incubation. Omegga, another EIC-backed company, has built and trialled an optical system for eggs in incubation. eggXYt's route also faces a regulatory hurdle in the EU: the new rules on new genomic techniques, provisionally agreed in December 2025 and approved by Parliament in June 2026, cover plants, not animals, and eggXYt's own patent describes its breeding birds as "transgenic".

The Verdict

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