HPNow's EIC Accelerator Bet on Making Peroxide On Site, Revisited

Hydrogen peroxide is made in large chemical plants, shipped at 30% to 70% strength and then diluted at the point of use to a few parts per million. HPNow, a spin-out from the Technical University of Denmark, builds machines that skip the chain: they make a dilute solution on site from water, air and electricity. In March 2020 the European Innovation Council selected the company in the EIC Accelerator pilot, and the EU paid €1,786,750 of a €2,552,500 project, PeroxyPro, to take the generator to market, according to CORDIS. Evonik, one of the world's largest peroxide producers and an HPNow shareholder, said at the time that HPNow was one of only 36 companies funded in that round's call against the coronavirus pandemic, out of about 1,400 applicants, according to its press release.

Six years on, HPNow is still trading and still selling its HPGen units, and it raised €14 million in 2023. But its 2025 annual accounts, filed on 2 July 2026 with the Danish Business Authority, report that "during 2025 sales activities were reduced" while development was refocused, that all capitalised development projects were written off, and that the company ended the year with €1,777,259 in the bank after a net loss of €5,684,154.

Where HPNow Stands in 2026

HPNow is active. It filed its 2025 accounts in July 2026, and the register shows board changes as recently as May 2026, according to North Data, which lists no insolvency or liquidation notice. Its website, now at hpnow.com, markets the generators for agriculture, data centre cooling, industrial water and municipal odour control.

The leadership has changed. Ziv Gottesfeld, named as chief executive in the 2020, 2022 and 2023 announcements cited below and a member of the executive board in every set of accounts from 2016 to 2023, left the register in November 2024, according to North Data. The 2024 and 2025 accounts name Rasmus Frydendal and Arnau Verdaguer Casadevall, both on the management registered at the 2015 founding, as the executive board. Fredrik Östbye became chairman in January 2026. No public announcement of the change or of a new chief executive title could be found.

The clearest signal of the company's direction is in the 2025 accounts. The note on development projects says the work covered "better performance of current units, both efficiency and durability" and "development activities towards larger modular units", and that "as market potential for these projects compared to the carrying value is uncertain, the projects are fully impaired". The write-off came to €1,704,861. The same note says "future sales depend on the ability to enhance the products". In August 2020, a month into the EIC project, HPNow's product page listed four lines: the A-Series for 0.5 to 2 kg of peroxide a day, the I-Series for "larger-scale demanding applications, requiring 5 kg / day and above", an embedded E-Series for appliances such as dishwashers, and an H-Series for disinfectant. The current technology page describes only the A-Series.

The Technology: Peroxide From Air at the Point of Use

Almost all hydrogen peroxide is made by the anthraquinone process in large plants, which the PeroxyPro objective says emit greenhouse gases "equivalent to the emissions of 3M cars" and over 60 million tonnes of toxic waste a year, figures that are the company's own and that could not be checked against an independent source. The concentrated product is hazardous to ship and store.

HPNow reduces oxygen from air at the cathode of a compact electrolytic cell, with a solid polymer membrane in place of a liquid electrolyte and a proprietary oxygen reduction catalyst, according to its technology page. The output is a dilute solution, which trade coverage of its GOgen systems puts at 1% (DataCenter News, Smart Water Magazine), and which the company says is not classified as hazardous. The research roots are at DTU's SURFCAT catalysis section, which lists HPNow as a spin-out; Novo Holdings dates the spin-out to 2015 and describes the machines as roughly the size of a large household freezer (Novo Holdings).

The trade-off is scale. A freezer-sized unit suits greenhouses, livestock water and cooling towers. Municipal and industrial plants that use peroxide in bulk need larger systems, and those are the development projects HPNow wrote off in 2025.

What PeroxyPro Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of EIC Accelerator pilot winners for the March and May 2020 cut-offs shows HPNow, Copenhagen, with PeroxyPro as a grant-only award; no other company is listed for the project. CORDIS shows a signature on 30 June 2020 and a project from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2022. HPNow's Israeli subsidiary, HPNow Ltd of Gan Yoshiya, took part as a linked third party and received €446,250 of the EU contribution. It was HPNow's second EU grant: a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study, HPGen, ran in 2016 and aimed the generator at irrigation and livestock.

The objective promised "the world's first and only commercial technology solution for the on-site generation of hydrogen peroxide through direct electrochemical synthesis", to replace the centralised supply chain in water treatment, pulp and paper, textiles, medical and electronics uses. The final report says the project took the product "from TRL 6 to full commercialization in the Water Safety market segment". Its claims are specific, but most are the company's own and were not confirmed by the customers it names.

1. Commercial on-site generatorDeliveredHPGen sold through Royal Brinkman to growers from 2022, per HortiDaily; still on sale on hpnow.com.
2. Pilots turned into paying customersCompany-reportedCORDIS report: two pathogen-control pilots converted, three advanced oxidation pilots. Customers unnamed, except a Danish cooling tower in HPNow's own partner content.
3. Patent and US EPA device statusCompany-reportedReport cites a granted patent and an EPA "pesticide device" determination; the results page lists one deliverable naming EPA, NSF, BPR, CE and UL. No register entry was checked.
4. Drinking water use in South African minesNot announcedReport said it would "soon" start; no announcement since.
5. Larger-scale municipal and industrial systemsNot deliveredDevelopment towards "larger modular units" written off in the 2025 accounts; no municipal plant announced.

The record supports a working, sold product. It does not support the larger claim that PeroxyPro would displace centralised production in the industries the objective listed. The project closed on time, but the scale-up beyond small units, which the final report presented as under way, has not been announced, and the 2025 write-off suggests it stalled.

What Came After the Grant

The private money followed. In November 2020 HPNow closed a €5 million round led by AP Ventures with Evonik's venture arm, according to HortiDaily and Evonik, which first invested in 2017. In September 2023 the company announced a €14 million round led by Denmark's export and investment fund EIFO and Novo Holdings, with MatiTech, Evonik Venture Capital and AP Ventures, to scale up "marketing, sales, technical support and production capacity", according to Novo Holdings and VerticalFarmDaily. The accounts confirm it: share premium rose by about €14.1 million in 2023.

The round came just in time. The 2022 accounts, approved in June 2023, carried a going-concern warning: the budget relied on "an expected capital raise to be finalized in 2023", and without it there was "a material uncertainty that may cast significant doubt on the entity's ability to continue as a going concern". Equity had fallen to €678,002.

Commercial traction is hard to measure. HPNow reports a gross loss, not revenue, under Danish small-company rules, and that gross loss was negative in every year from 2019 to 2025, meaning revenue did not cover the cost of goods and other external costs. In 2025 the gross loss was €2,257,528. Partnerships were announced with Royal Brinkman for horticulture in 2022, and with BSH, the maker of Bosch and Siemens dishwashers, according to Evonik in 2020; no product from the BSH partnership has been announced. Named paying customers remain scarce in public sources.

The Money

HPNow lost €17.54 million in the six years from 2020 to 2025, against €19.08 million of share premium paid in by its shareholders since 2015. The annual loss grew from €534,065 in 2019, the year before the grant, to €5,684,154 in 2025, which includes the €1,704,861 impairment. Equity fell from €12.60 million at the end of 2023 to €3.08 million at the end of 2025, and cash from €9.94 million to €1.78 million.

The EIC Fund took no stake. PeroxyPro was a grant-only award, and HPNow does not appear among the 323 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all pages on 14 October 2026.

Why Europe Should Care

On-site oxidants fit two strands of EU water policy. The revised Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, given final approval by the Council on 5 November 2024, requires plants serving 150,000 population equivalents or more to add quaternary treatment to remove micropollutants by 2045, with pharmaceutical and cosmetics producers paying at least 80% of the extra cost, according to Recycling Portal. Advanced oxidation, the process HPNow tested with water technology firms during PeroxyPro, is one candidate. The Commission's Water Resilience Strategy of 4 June 2025 calls for tackling pollutants in drinking water and notes that EU researchers and companies hold about 40% of global water technology patents.

There is also a supply-chain argument. The PeroxyPro objective, written in spring 2020, noted that a peroxide shortage was "already felt in the market" during the first COVID-19 wave. Distributed production makes users less dependent on a few chemical plants and on the transport of a hazardous concentrate. That argument holds only if the generators can be built at the scale bulk users need.

The Verdict

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