Evologic's EIC Accelerator Project: Bulk Mycorrhiza Against a CDMO

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi live on plant roots and help crops take up water and nutrients, which makes them one of the most promoted biological alternatives to fertiliser. They are also hard to manufacture, because they cannot grow without a living host root. Evologic Technologies, a 2016 spin-off from TU Wien, told the European Commission it had solved that problem with a new bioreactor. In the June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 it won an EU grant of €2,387,612.50 for MycoProScale, a €3,422,125 project to scale the process up, according to CORDIS. The promise was large: "By the end of MycoProScale, Evologic will be producing AMF at a 30 000 times larger scale than the currently described state-of-the-art", and the fungi would reach farmers on AMF-coated crop seeds at "an unprecedented pricing strategy".

Seven years after the cut-off, Evologic is still in business in Vienna, has six times as many staff as in 2019 and owns a fermentation plant. But no AMF-coated seed has been launched, no buyer of its mycorrhiza has been named, and the company's website now leads with something else: fermentation, formulation and scale-up services for "Any Biological. Any Scale. Anywhere."

What Evologic Does Today

Evologic describes itself as a manufacturer for other companies' microbes. Its services page walks a client from a strain with no production method through fermentation, formulation, optimisation and scale-up to "end-to-end manufacturing services for your microbial products at industrial scale", and a "decentralized smart production" offer that monitors fermentation in other companies' plants remotely. Its FAQ answers the question "Are you a CDMO?" by saying Evologic "offers much more than standard CDMOs". The company lists bacteria, filamentous fungi and hairy root cultures as the organisms it grows, and names its own platforms: Mycotec for fungal fermentation and Bioshield for encapsulation.

Its capabilities page gives the size of the operation: a 1,000 m² facility with 25 lab bioreactors of 2 to 4 litres, ten pilot and technical-scale bioreactors from 20 to 1,000 litres, and two industrial bioreactors of 4,000 litres, plus spray, fluid-bed and freeze dryers. The annual accounts for 2025, filed on 22 September 2026, report 36 employees, according to North Data; the company's team page says "30+ employees" from more than ten countries.

Mycorrhiza has not disappeared. In a blog post of 7 September 2026, Evologic says it has "produced 1,000 litres of AMF product in a single run", with spore concentrations seven times the state of the art, and that it offers AMF "as a white-label active ingredient" to companies selling mycorrhizal products. The same seven-fold figure appears in an April 2025 partner article on Mycostories. Both rest on the company's own statements; no independent test and no customer for the AMF could be found.

Because the company's lead offer is now contract development and manufacturing across many microbes, with AMF one ingredient among several, this article classifies Evologic as pivoted rather than as a mycorrhiza producer.

The Technology: Fungi That Need a Root

Mycorrhizal fungi are obligate symbionts: they feed on sugars and lipids from a living root and cannot be grown in a plain tank of nutrient broth, as bacteria such as Bacillus or fungi such as Trichoderma can. Producers therefore grow them on plants in greenhouses, which takes months and invites contamination, or in vitro on "hairy roots" in Petri dishes and flat beds, which is cleaner but scales only with surface area, as Evologic's own April 2025 overview explains.

Evologic's answer is to grow the hairy roots, and the fungi on them, inside a stirred bioreactor. Its US patent 12,018,242, "Bioreactors for root organ cultures", filed in December 2018 with a European priority date of 22 December 2017 and granted on 25 June 2024, covers a reactor of 1 to 100,000 litres with a fast rotating knife at the bottom that lets root cultures be inoculated, grown and harvested without an aseptic clean room. The inventors are Markus Brillmann, Paul Krautwaschl, Wieland Reichelt and Christoph Herwig. A second, broader process, "pseudo solid state fermentation" for filamentous fungi, has been marketed since at least 2021 and appeared as a patent publication in April 2026, according to North Data.

The quality problem Reichelt describes is real and documented: a meta-analysis cited by Evologic found that 85% of lab-scale AMF inoculants had the desired effect, against 16% of commercial products. Whether bioreactor-grown spores close that gap in the field is not shown by any published trial the company links to.

What MycoProScale Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of the June 2019 EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 winners names Evologic Technologies GmbH of Vienna as the only company on the MycoProScale project; no partner rows are listed. The grant agreement was signed on 9 December 2019, the project started on 1 January 2020 and ended on 30 September 2023, a run of 45 months, according to CORDIS.

The final periodic report, covering January 2021 to September 2023, is brief. It says the first year was spent "finding work arounds" for the pandemic, which "delayed parts of the project and made some adaptations in the workplan necessary". Evologic found and moved to a new site, established "an industrial production site for a biological product in agriculture", and was, at the project's end, "currently finalizing the scale up of the production process to commercial scale". It adds that "a solid data basis to optimize the process to reach the COG targets", the cost-of-goods goals, was laid. The report does not say the cost targets were reached, gives no production volume and does not mention coated seeds.

The results page lists three public deliverables: a product formulation "securing a shelf life > 120 days", presentations at two trade events and one peer-reviewed article, and a completed life-cycle assessment. The documents themselves are not reproduced on the page.

1. Industrial production siteDeliveredReported in the CORDIS report; the company lists a 1,000 m² plant with 4,000-litre reactors.
2. AMF production at commercial scaleLateStill "finalizing" at project end in 2023; the company claims a 1,000-litre run in 2026, not independently confirmed.
3. 30,000 times the state-of-the-art scaleUnverifiedNo production figure in CORDIS or elsewhere to test the claim.
4. Low-cost AMF-coated crop seedsNot achievedNo seed product, price or seed partner announced by the company or a third party.
5. Formulation with over 120 days shelf lifeReportedListed as a deliverable on the CORDIS results page.

On balance, the grant paid for what it was mainly meant to buy, a scaled production process and the site to run it, but the commercial half of the plan, a cheap seed coating for farmers, has not appeared. That makes MycoProScale partly delivered.

What Evologic Has Achieved Since the Award

The private money came in early 2021. Evologic closed a €2.5 million round led by ASKUR Invest of Leverkusen, with existing investors RWA, BayWa, Mauthner and Vivida and support from the Austrian development bank aws and the European Investment Fund, to expand its production and development site in Vienna, according to LISAvienna and pressetext. Both put the staff at 18 at the time. RWA, the Austrian agricultural trader, and BayWa, the German one, are the kind of distributors Reichelt told AgFunderNews he wanted to sell through instead of selling to farmers directly. In April 2021 the start-up was also working on a bioherbicide as a glyphosate replacement and on rhizobia bacteria for soybeans, according to Trending Topics; no launch of the bioherbicide could be found.

The register shows a further capital increase in July 2025, which raised the share capital from €49,427 to €52,837, according to North Data and the Austrian official gazette (EVI), which records shareholder changes on 15 July 2025. The amount paid in and the investors behind it are not public.

The clearest commercial sign is a contract outside agriculture. In October 2022 Calyxt, then listed on Nasdaq, named Evologic its manufacturing partner to scale up its Plant Cell Matrix technology for plant-based ingredients in cosmetics, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals, according to the release on StockTitan and on Cibus's investor site. "Manufacturing is clearly the key for high product quality at reasonable costs," Reichelt said. Financial terms were not disclosed, and no later update on the work could be found. Evologic has also been a partner in the Horizon 2020 project InnCoCells on cosmetic ingredients from plant cells, with an EU contribution of €186,000 from May 2021 to September 2025.

Public support beyond the EIC was substantial for a company of its size. North Data lists €770,000 of state aid under the aws seed financing programme, published in September 2018, and €248,286 under the FFG SME guideline, published in September 2024; these figures come from the EU state aid transparency register as shown by North Data and were not cross-checked elsewhere. In 2026 Evologic registered for the Eureka Biotech Call matchmaking as a fermentation and formulation partner.

The Money

Evologic's revenue and annual results are not publicly available free of charge. The balance sheet at 31 December 2025, the only one whose details North Data shows, tells the story of a company that has spent nearly all the equity it raised. Capital reserves of €2,855,002 stand against an accumulated loss of €2,571,091, leaving equity of €336,748. Liabilities were €2,427,994, more than seven times equity, against total assets of €2,944,768, of which €1,161,007 were property, plant and equipment and €739,642 cash. Who holds the debt is not disclosed.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Farm to Fork strategy aims to halve nutrient losses by 2030 and cut fertiliser use by at least 20%, as a 2025 study in Nature Food summarises it. Biological inputs are one of the tools meant to make that possible, and mycorrhizal fungi have a privileged legal position: they are one of only four groups of microorganisms that may go into CE-marked biostimulants under the EU Fertilising Products Regulation, according to HortiDaily. A European producer able to deliver clean, consistent AMF at volume would address the quality gap that Evologic and the meta-analysis it cites describe.

The Verdict

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