Inside Hypermemo's EIC Accelerator Project on Laser Glass Cutting

Almost all glass is still cut the way it was a century ago: scored with a wheel, snapped, then ground, polished, washed and dried on separate machines. Hypermemo, a small company in Joensuu in eastern Finland, set out to replace that whole line with a single laser. In the European Innovation Council's January 2020 round it was one of two Finnish winners, selected for blended finance, a grant plus equity, for a project called GLAZER, according to the Commission's list of selected companies and optics.org. The EU committed €2,137,625 towards a €3,053,750 project, CORDIS shows, and in November 2021 the EIC Fund signed an investment agreement with the company.

The machines were built. The customers did not follow, at least not in public. On 27 November 2025 HyperMemo Oy was registered as bankrupt, according to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office, and the credit agencies Asiakastieto and Taloustutka both record the bankruptcy. Its last filed year, 2024, brought revenue of €48,950.

Where Hypermemo Stands Now

The Finnish register lists HyperMemo Oy with the situation code for bankruptcy, dated 27 November 2025, and ended its tax registrations, including VAT, on the same day, the PRH open data record shows. A separate entity, HyperMemo Oy konkurssipesä, the bankruptcy estate, was registered in 2025 with a postal address care of a Joensuu law firm, according to Asiakastieto. No public notice of a sale of the company's lasers, patents or business could be found, and no news report on the bankruptcy was found either.

The last public sign of commercial activity is an undated post on the company's news page inviting visitors to its stand at Glasstec in Düsseldorf on 22 to 25 October, the dates of the trade fair's 2024 edition according to Fraunhofer ISC, an exhibitor that year. The post noted that the number of laser companies at the fair had grown since 2022 and "the competition is getting harder". The site still carried a 2025 copyright line when checked.

The EIC Fund also no longer shows the company. A March 2026 copy of the EIC Fund portfolio page for HyperMemo Oy describes it as a "Finnish start-up aiming to transform the traditional wasteful and energy intensive glass production processes". The live page now returns an error, and the company is absent from all 16 pages of the EIC Fund's list of invested companies checked for this article.

The Technology: One Laser Instead of a Machine Line

Glass absorbs the far-infrared light of a CO2 laser strongly, which is why CO2 lasers are already used to mark and score glass. Hypermemo's claim was a laser that pulses in nanoseconds at high average power, so that it could cut, bevel, treat the surface, mark and engrave with one tool and leave an edge that needs no grinding. The core is a self-seeding cavity design with a Q-switch, patented in the United States as US9407057, filed in January 2014 and granted in August 2016 with Vadim Kiyko as inventor. A 2021 company presentation lists patents in Finland, the US, Russia and China, with a European patent pending, and Yle reported in 2020 that the invention was patented in four countries; and the brand name Glaser was registered as an EU trade mark on 1 May 2021, according to IPqwery and the GLAZER final report.

The company's figures were bold. Its 2018 Phase 1 proposal promised processing "30 times faster, 3 times cheaper, and with almost zero rejects", and the 2020 objective spoke of saving "an astonishing 41TWh of energy annually" if the industry adopted it. The independent numbers are much smaller. The CORDIS results article of August 2023 reports 90% fewer consumables and 80% less waste, "according to independent assessments", and an impact tool from Delft University of Technology that put the saving at 120 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year for every 60,000 tonnes of glass processed. The company's own news page cites the same 120 tonnes as validated by Climate KIC experts in May 2022.

What GLAZER Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

GLAZER was Hypermemo's second EU grant for the same technology. A Phase 1 feasibility study under the SME Instrument, also called GLAZER, received €50,000 from September 2018 to February 2019; its report said a "fully industrial-grade equipment kit" was to reach the market "in the second half of 2019". It did not, and the January 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot award was meant to get it there. CORDIS files that award under the SME instrument phase 2 funding scheme, since the pilot ran inside the same Horizon 2020 call; the Commission's selection list names it an EIC Accelerator blended finance award. The project ran from 1 July 2020 to 31 March 2023, on schedule.

The plan in the final periodic report was concrete: build a robust industrial-grade laser, run a pilot production batch, develop two industrial-scale prototype machines, and run trials at the plants of leading glass manufacturers and machinery vendors. The report says the pilot batch of lasers was made and tested, a custom power supply passed EMC testing, the clean room was upgraded from ISO 5 to ISO 3, and both prototypes were built: a setup for cutting hot glassware and a three-axis robotic cell for automotive glass. It also reports 11 new full-time staff, an independent board member from the UK and three new inventions.

The trials are where the record thins out. Within the project, customers received samples to evaluate: hot glassware in December 2022, laminated glass after a March 2022 trial, and construction glass, where a customer report in March 2023 showed "excellent results". The first trial at a customer's own factory took place from 27 April to 5 May 2023, after the project had ended, and a second phase with the automotive customer was scheduled for May and June 2023, also outside the project. No customer is named in any report. In August 2023 Raita told CORDIS that trials were continuing with companies from Japan, Turkey and the United Kingdom and that "we believe we will sign the first commercial contracts by the end of this year". No contract was announced.

1. Industrial-grade laser and pilot batchDeliveredPilot batch made, tested and used in trials, per the final report.
2. Two industrial-scale prototypesDeliveredHot-glassware setup and three-axis robotic cell built and tested.
3. Trials in customers' productionPartlySamples evaluated during the project; first on-site trial in April and May 2023, after it ended.
4. Market launch and first salesNot achievedShown at Glasstec 2022; no contract announced; revenue €5,000 in 2023 and €48,950 in 2024.
5. Industrial-scale production siteNot achievedA 5,000 m² production site planned for 2022 in the 2021 presentation; none reported.
6. New jobs in JoensuuReversed10 new jobs by month 33 per CORDIS; 5 staff estimated for 2024.

The Money After the Grant

Before the EIC, Hypermemo was a five-person company in a clean room inside a workshop building in Joensuu's Käpykangas district, funded by business angels, Business Finland and Butterfly Ventures, optics.org reported in April 2020, repeating a release also published by Photonics Finland. In June 2020 Yle reported a €100,000 investment from Start Up Fund Joensuu, a local fund run by a Business Joensuu subsidiary, and a plan to grow to about 15 staff within two years. The company reached 15 in April 2021, its news page says.

The equity side of the EIC award took longer. On 19 November 2021 the company announced that it had "signed an investment agreement with the EIC Fund" to "enable the industrial scale production and go-to-market", according to its news page, and its profile on the industry directory Glass Open Book says its investors include the European Commission "through equity investment from EIC Fund". Neither the company nor the EIC has published the amount. The April 2021 presentation by Raita valued the whole blended finance award at €6.8 million and put "angel and VC capital invested" at €4.75 million with the EIC, against €900,000 before, plus "expected private co-funding" of €3 to 5 million; how much equity was actually paid in could not be verified.

In October 2023 Hypermemo opened a Series A round of "up to €6 million", which it said was "50% co-funded by the EIC Fund", according to an archived company post. No closing of the round was ever announced.

What the Accounts Show

The filed accounts describe a company that never found buyers. Revenue was zero in 2022, €5,000 in 2023 and €48,950 in 2024, and the net loss rose from €246,291 to €279,545 and €301,436, according to PRH figures published by Taloustutka. Asiakastieto gives operating losses of €131,000 in 2020, €230,000 in 2021, €244,000 in 2022 and €299,000 in 2024, and an equity ratio of 33% at the end of 2024. The two sources disagree on 2023: Asiakastieto shows an operating profit of €30,000, Taloustutka an operating loss of €277,563. Both put the 2023 headcount at 11.

Why Europe Should Care

Glass is one of the energy-intensive industries the EU wants to decarbonise; gas "is currently burned intensively in the glass industry", Raita told CORDIS. The Commission's Clean Industrial Deal, presented on 26 February 2025, promises to mobilise more than €100 billion for clean manufacturing and treats decarbonising energy-intensive industries as a growth policy. The flat glass makers' association Glass for Europe answered in March 2025 that "decarbonisation technologies will cost more than current manufacturing processes" and that its members needed faster relief from energy costs. A European-made tool that removes grinding, washing and drying from glass processing fits that agenda. It also faced the problem Glass for Europe describes: customers under cost pressure buying new equipment slowly.

The Verdict

Hypermemo's bankruptcy estate and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.