GENAQ: An EIC Accelerator Story of Drinking Water From Air

Air holds water, and a refrigerator coil can pull it out. GENAQ, a company from the refrigeration town of Lucena in Córdoba province, has sold machines that do this on oil rigs, in army camps and after hurricanes. In June 2019 the EU's SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, backed a harder idea: shrink the machine into an appliance that could stand in a kitchen, an office or a restaurant and replace bottled water. The STRATUS project received an EU contribution of €1,064,906.50 towards a total cost of €1,521,295, according to CORDIS.

Seven years later the company is active and better capitalised than ever. The two larger STRATUS models are on its price list. The smallest one, the 20-litre household unit that was the closest thing to a mass-market product in the plan, is still listed as "Coming soon" on GENAQ's own product page.

What GENAQ Is Doing Now

GENAQ is operating, with recent public activity in all three places that count: the register, the market and research. In January 2026 it supplied eight water-from-air fountains spread across the halls of FITUR, Madrid's international tourism fair, to cut the use of single-use bottles, according to Prensa Mercosur and GENAQ's own account of the fair. In June 2026 it was named as a partner in NEBAW, a 36-month Spanish research project led by GFM Fotovoltaica that aims to make green hydrogen in places with no water supply, using solar power and water taken from the air; the project budget is €2,770,326, financed by the IDAE with NextGenerationEU money, according to Energías Renovables. GENAQ also describes the project on its website.

The commercial register shows a company being reorganised inside its group rather than one winding down. In February 2025 Keyter Intarcon Operations SL, which carries the name of the refrigeration group GENAQ belongs to, was appointed managing director (consejero delegado) in place of José María Raya Portero. In October 2025 the share capital was raised by €1,671,000 to €1,951,000, and in February 2026 Carlos García Blázquez was given a new power of attorney, according to BORME entries listed by DatosCif and Empresia. Who subscribed the 2025 increase is not published, and it could not be verified whether it was cash from the group or a conversion of loans.

The Technology: Rain Made by a Refrigerator

An atmospheric water generator pulls in outside air, filters it, cools it below its dew point so the moisture condenses, and then treats the water. Carlos García, GENAQ's general director, described a six-stage air and water filtration process, ultraviolet preservation and remineralisation in a 2020 interview with Defensa. He said the output of each machine had been measured in GENAQ's own climate chamber and that those tests were audited by TÜV Rheinland. Output depends on the weather: GENAQ quotes figures at a nominal 30°C and 80% relative humidity, which flatters any site that is cooler or drier. García himself told Horizon magazine, republished by TechXplore, in November 2022 that the machines work best in hot, humid climates.

The physics is old; refrigerators condense water every day. What GENAQ sells is efficiency, which decides whether a litre from the air can compete with a litre from a bottle. The STRATUS proposal claimed "50% higher water production and 150% reduced energy consumption compared to available AWGs" and a one-year payback, according to CORDIS. "150% reduced" energy is not physically meaningful as written, and no independent comparison with competing generators has been published.

The company's current spec sheet shows why the household market is harder than the industrial one. The 202-litre Stratus S200 is rated at 0.19 kWh per litre, the figure the project reported. The 52-litre Stratus S50 needs 0.39 kWh per litre, about twice as much, according to GENAQ. Smaller machines lose efficiency, and the smallest STRATUS, the S20, has no published figures at all.

What STRATUS Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

GENAQ was one of the Spanish winners on the European Commission's list of EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 companies selected at the 5 June 2019 cut-off, as the only beneficiary of STRATUS. The grant agreement was signed on 22 October 2019 and the project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 October 2021, on the dates CORDIS gives, with no extension recorded. A year earlier the company had won a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 grant for a four-month feasibility study of the same STRATUS range, in which it forecast "a cumulative turnover of €135.6M by 2025", sales of "over 17,000 units/year" and "356 new jobs after five years of commercialization", according to CORDIS. These are the only two EU research projects CORDIS lists for the company.

The final periodic report is detailed about the engineering. GENAQ completed the refrigeration, ventilation, hydraulic, water treatment, control and interface design for all three models, the S20, S50 and S200, and added hot and cold water and an Internet of Things interface. It built a climate chamber and five prototypes: one S20, two S50 and two S200. It obtained CE marking and certificates for hazardous substances, fluorinated gases, water generation, water quality and food-grade materials, signed up sales channels through a water-cooler association, and registered the brand. The technology was protected as a trade secret, not by patents. The report claims the second prototypes reached 0.2 kWh per litre and puts the payback against bottled water at "around 2 years", not the one year the proposal promised.

1. Stratus S50 and S200 on the marketDeliveredBoth on GENAQ's product page; an S200 is installed on a Sapura oil tanker, per GENAQ's projects page.
2. Stratus S20 for householdsNot deliveredOne prototype built by 2021; still "Coming soon" in 2026.
3. CertificationDeliveredCE marking, water quality and food-grade certificates, per the CORDIS report.
4. Market-leading efficiencyPartly0.19 kWh/l for the S200, 0.39 for the S50; company figures, no independent comparison published.
5. One-year paybackRevisedThe project's own report says about two years.
6. €135.6M cumulative turnover by 2025Missed2024 sales in the €1M to €2.5M band, per Empresia.

What GENAQ Has Achieved Since the Award

The record after the grant is one of steady presence rather than a breakthrough. In January 2023 the European Commission's representation in Spain featured GENAQ as an EIC success story. It reported that the funding cut the development time from six years to two and allowed the company to triple its revenue, staff and international presence, and that commercialisation was expected by the end of 2023, according to the Commission. The tripling is the company's own statement and no base figures were given. In the same piece García set a target: "De aquí a 5 años queremos reemplazar el 3% del agua embotellada del mundo".

The household price points were set out in November 2022: about €2,500 for the 20-litre version and €14,500 for the 200-litre one, with a launch planned in Spain, France and Germany, where bottled water consumption is high, according to TechXplore. A 20-litre appliance at €2,500 is a hard sell against bottled water at the €0.34 per litre the CORDIS report cites, and the S20 has not reached the market.

The customer list GENAQ publishes is mostly industrial and humanitarian. In a November 2021 interview with Interempresas it named the United Nations, the armed forces of the United States, Spain, Pakistan and Malaysia, the government of Panama and the oil companies ENSCO, Petronas and Sapura. In 2020 García told Defensa that its machines had been used in Panama, Nigeria and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017. None of these customers has issued its own statement about GENAQ that could be found. The company's projects page adds a solar-powered unit at a school in Fiji, a palm oil estate in Sabah and a school in La Guajira, Colombia.

The Money

GENAQ has never announced an outside funding round, and it is not in the EIC Fund's portfolio of invested companies; all 16 pages of the list were checked for this article. STRATUS was a grant-only award. The money behind the company is its group's. GENAQ belongs to the Keyter Intarcon refrigeration and air conditioning group of Lucena, which García put at more than €40 million of operating income in 2020. When the group laid the foundation stone of a new 40,000 m² plant in February 2023, it reported a 2022 turnover of €85 million and more than 600 direct staff, according to Keyter. Interempresas reported a group revenue of more than €60 million for 2021.

GENAQ's own accounts are filed in Córdoba but are not free to read. Empresia lists the 2024 accounts as the latest filed and puts annual sales between €1 million and €2.5 million. Infoempresa's free summary, based on the 2018 accounts, shows revenue of €122,000 and a profit of €32,000, according to Infoempresa. Read together, that is roughly a tenfold rise in sales over six years. It is still nowhere near the €135.6 million of cumulative turnover by 2025 the company forecast to the EU in 2018. Staff numbers, profit after 2018 and equity in recent years could not be verified from free sources.

Why Europe Should Care

Water has moved up the EU agenda since GENAQ won its grant. On 4 June 2025 the Commission adopted a Water Resilience Strategy with more than 30 actions, including a "water-smart economy" built on European water technology and innovation, as Squire Patton Boggs summarised it for businesses. A European maker of water-from-air units also has a defence and civil protection angle, which is where most of GENAQ's documented customers sit.

The fit has a limit. Condensing water costs electricity, roughly 0.2 to 0.4 kWh per litre on GENAQ's own figures, so the machines make most sense where the alternative is trucked or bottled water, or where solar power is free. As a replacement for tap water in a European home they are a harder case, and that is the market the unreleased S20 was meant to open.

The Verdict

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