An EIC Accelerator Detour: EL-CO TECH's Poultry Bacteria Test

EL-CO TECH Elektromos-Kommunikációs Technológiák Kft. builds power lines and telecom networks around Gödöllő, east of Budapest. It is an unusual name to find at the head of a veterinary diagnostics project. Yet in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 9 January 2019 it was selected, with its Budapest partner Martin and Co Kft., for RAID, a test meant to tell a poultry farmer within two hours whether dead or sick chickens carry a bacterial infection, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which gives each of the two firms its own row. CORDIS names EL-CO TECH as coordinator and shows it received €1,192,187.50 of the project's €1,764,437.50 EU contribution.

Seven years after that cut-off, the technical part of the promise holds up: the project built a mobile laboratory in a vehicle and reported 99% accuracy against standard culture tests. The commercial part does not. No customer, service contract or product launch has been announced, the project website no longer resolves, and EL-CO TECH's register entry has carried the suffix "felszámolás alatt", under liquidation, since 10 October 2024, according to Cégcontrol and Nemzeti Cégtár.

Where EL-CO TECH Stands Now

EL-CO TECH is in liquidation. Its full registered name now ends in "felszámolás alatt", the Hungarian marker for court-ordered liquidation of an insolvent company, and Nemzeti Cégtár lists Q-Tron Reorganizációs és Felszámoló Kft. as the liquidator with signing rights. OPTEN records that "liquidation proceedings were opened", and CompanyWall shows enforcement proceedings against the company and four bank accounts marked as blocked. The court order itself, and the date on which the liquidation was ordered as opposed to registered, could not be read without a paid register extract; the 10 October 2024 date is the one from which Cégcontrol shows the new name in force.

The collapse is not visible in the last accounts the company filed. For 2023, CompanyWall reports total revenue of HUF 1.74 billion, a net profit of HUF 47.5 million and equity of HUF 1.81 billion. What the numbers do show is a shrinking workforce: average staff fell from 86 in 2021 to 82 in 2022 and 52 in 2023, and EMIS gives 18 for 2024. No 2024 accounts appear in the free register summaries. The two databases also disagree on 2023 sales: CompanyWall's HUF 1.74 billion is total income, while OPTEN and Nemzeti Cégtár give net sales of HUF 1,546,563 thousand.

Why a company with HUF 1.8 billion of book equity at the end of 2023 ended up in liquidation within a year is not explained in any public source found for this article. One of its two owners, M-Mind Holding Zrt., also carries the "felszámolás alatt" suffix in CompanyWall's ownership data. No press coverage of either liquidation could be found.

The Technology: Bacterial Fingerprints in Two Hours

Under EU rules, antibiotics may only be given to farm animals to treat a disease a veterinarian has diagnosed. On a broiler farm, proving a bacterial infection usually means culturing samples, which the RAID project summary on CORDIS says takes 24 to 72 hours and costs €10 to €50 per measurement. Until the result arrives, a vet must either wait while birds die or treat without proof.

RAID skipped the culture step. It used mass spectrometry to detect phospholipids, fat molecules that sit in high concentrations on the outer surface of bacterial cells, and treated the pattern as a "molecular fingerprint" of each species. The core of the method, CORDIS says, is an algorithm that separates the mixed signals of several bacteria in one sample. In the project's Results in Brief, the team claims it can detect several species at once, measures anaerobic bacteria reliably and costs "significantly lower" than PCR, the DNA-based alternative. Those are the project's own claims; no independent comparison was found.

The intellectual property sat mostly with the partner. The CORDIS results page lists six patent filings on the method, all in the name of Martin and Co Kft., starting with a Hungarian application of 17 October 2017 and followed by five filings dated 17 October 2018, including in Japan and Brazil. EL-CO TECH's name appears on one item: the trademark "RAID Rapid Infection Detection", filed on 5 August 2019.

What the EIC Grant Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

RAID did not start at EL-CO TECH. An earlier Horizon 2020 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study of the same name, worth €50,000 and running from November 2016 to February 2017, was coordinated by a different Hungarian firm, Tonosoft Orvostechnikai és Kutatás-Fejlesztési Kft., according to CORDIS. The project website, as archived in January 2025, presented both phases as its own and stated that the project "is executed by two companies EL-CO TECH Ltd and Martin&Co Ltd", with a laboratory at Berlini Park in Budapest.

The Phase 2 grant agreement was signed on 10 May 2019, and CORDIS gives the project's dates as 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2021, with the final report covering the period up to that end date. Of the €2,520,625 total cost, EL-CO TECH budgeted €1,703,125 and Martin and Co €817,500, with the EU covering 70% of each share.

The objective on CORDIS lists the work plan: raise the number of detectable bacteria to at least 50, raise reliability to at least 98%, improve and automate sample processing, build a mobile RAID laboratory, validate and certify the method, and end the project with "signed service contracts and purchase orders". The final periodic report, covering April 2020 to March 2021, reports the mobile laboratory finished and a validation that reached 99% accuracy, 99% sensitivity and 100% specificity on samples from poultry farms. It says the business plan and go-to-market strategy were refined, and that the pandemic pushed dissemination online.

1. Reliability of at least 98%Delivered99% accuracy in the best set-up and in the mobile lab, per the final report.
2. Mobile RAID laboratoryDeliveredBuilt in a vehicle and used to collect samples in several European countries, per Results in Brief.
3. Automated sample processingDeliveredSpectrum evaluation automated, per Results in Brief.
4. At least 50 detectable bacteriaNot shownCORDIS speaks only of "several relevant bacterial species"; no number is given.
5. Validation and certificationUnverifiedDeliverables "Certified RAID measurement" and lab permissions are listed, but the files could not be downloaded.
6. Service contracts and purchase ordersNot deliveredNone announced by the companies or any customer.

What Happened After the Project

The trail goes quiet when the grant ends. The latest news item on the archived project site is a project video from 23 March 2021, a week before the project closed, and the last archived snapshot of the site with content dates from January 2025; the domain no longer resolves. The website listed for EL-CO TECH among the 2019 winners, elmuszolg.hu, does not resolve either, and EMIS's listed site, elcotech.hu, shows only a hosting provider's default page. Searches in English and Hungarian found no customer, distributor, certification body, follow-on funding round or press coverage for RAID after 2021. Nemzeti Cégtár records no EU grant won by EL-CO TECH in the past two years. RAID was a grant-only award, so no EIC equity was part of it, and no investment in either company has been reported.

The Results in Brief closes with a plan to extend the method to cattle, where mastitis drives frequent antibiotic use. No public trace of that work was found either.

Why Europe Should Care

The problem RAID addressed has only grown more pressing in EU law. Since 28 January 2022, Regulation (EU) 2019/6 on veterinary medicinal products has applied across the EU and restricts "the preventive use of antimicrobials, especially in groups of animals", according to the European Commission. The Farm to Fork Strategy sets a target of halving EU sales of antimicrobials for farmed animals and aquaculture by 2030, as Food Safety News reported when it was published in May 2020. A fast, cheap on-farm test that tells a vet whether antibiotics are justified fits both aims directly.

The Verdict

EL-CO TECH, its liquidator and Martin and Co have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.