Infinited Fiber: From EIC Accelerator Grant to Unbuilt Fibre Plant

Less than 1% of the material in clothing is recycled into new clothing, according to the European Commission. Infinited Fiber Company, a spin-out of Finland's VTT research centre, has spent a decade trying to change that with a fibre made from worn-out cotton. Its fibre, sold as Infinna, has the look and feel of cotton and has been tested by Zara's owner Inditex, H&M, adidas and Patagonia. Selling it in volume needs a factory, and that factory has not been built.

In the EU's 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the company won a grant for NewNormal, a project to take its pilot production to the next scale, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names it as "Infinited Fiber Company Inc" of Espoo and lists no partner company for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,953,875 towards a total cost of €2,791,250, from 1 October 2019 to 31 March 2021. Seven years after the selection, the company is active, has a new chief executive and an environmental permit for a plant in Kemi, Lapland, but no decision to build it.

Where Infinited Fiber Stands Now

The company is operating. The Finnish Trade Register (YTJ) lists it as registered, with no liquidation or restructuring entry, and it filed accounts for 2025. Its last public news is from March 2026, when Finland's Licensing and Supervision Agency granted an environmental permit for a fibre plant at Veitsiluoto in Kemi, which then entered the statutory appeal phase, according to the company and the City of Kemi. "No investment decision has been made," the recycling trade site Uusiouutiset reported the next day. The company's own release calls Kemi the site of "a potential facility". No news from the company between April and October 2026 could be found.

The bigger change came in January. When the board made acting chief Sahil Kaushik permanent chief executive, it said the company had made a "strategic pivot toward industrial realism and capital-efficient scaling", according to the company. The next step is no longer the 30,000-tonne plant but a "Circular Fiber Center" of 200 tonnes a year, with India, Bangladesh and China among the locations being assessed. The analyst newsletter Decypher summed the plan up in September 2026 as a 200-tonne unit first, "followed at some later point" by the large plant. No site, budget or date for the Circular Fiber Center has been published.

The Technology: Cotton Waste, Urea and No Carbon Disulfide

The process grew out of carbamate research at VTT, which, by its own account, nearly shelved its textile research in the early 2000s; Infinited is "a spin-off that got its start at VTT", according to VTT. Textile waste that is about 88% cotton is shredded, stripped of buttons and zips, and separated from polyester and dyes. The cellulose that remains reacts with urea to form cellulose carbamate, a stable powder that is dissolved and wet-spun into new staple fibre, the company's technology page says.

The difference from the established alternative is the chemistry. Viscose, the main man-made cellulose fibre, is made with carbon disulfide, a toxic solvent; Infinited's process avoids it. Unlike mechanical recycling, which shortens cotton fibres, it rebuilds the fibre from dissolved cellulose. Unlike polyester, the result contains no plastic. The cost is a chemical plant, and that is where the business has stalled.

What NewNormal Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective describes a company that had "already built an industrial pilot for producing 50 tons of Infinited Fiber annually", whose output had been bought in full by "some of the biggest fashion brands in the world", and which more than 15 brands had tested. NewNormal was to "support the scale-up" and take the fibre to the "commercialisation phase". The final CORDIS report is candid about where the project fell short.

1. Pilot capacity to 300 tonnes a yearPartlyRaised from 50 to 150 tonnes with a second line from 1 February 2020; the report says 300 tonnes "would have been too large" an investment.
2. Continuous production processPartlyContinuous except for dissolving, which was validated only at small pilot scale.
3. Fibre quality and 24/7 pilot runsDeliveredPilot ran around the clock and met its quality targets, per the report.
4. Brand customersDelivered10 brands signed and 7 capsule collections agreed; later offtake deals with Inditex (2022), Patagonia, H&M Group and others.
5. First industrial factory, decision expected in 2022Not achievedNo investment decision for any industrial plant by October 2026.

The report also lists a blueprint for a 30,000-tonne carbamation plant, a model for licence sales, a life cycle assessment written as a master's thesis, a trademark application and 16 new hires. It says the company was focusing on two factory projects, "one in China and other one in Europe", and expected final investment decisions on both "during 2022". The project ended on time in March 2021. Measured against its own commercial aim, NewNormal delivered the pilot and the customers but not the step to commercial production, which is why this article rates it as partly delivered.

What Happened After the Grant

For two years the record moved fast. In June 2021 the company raised €30 million in a round led by H&M Group, with adidas and Bestseller's investment arm joining, to prepare a flagship factory then planned for 2024, according to Nordic9. In May 2022 Inditex agreed to buy 30% of the future plant's output for three years in a deal worth more than €100 million, starting when the plant opened, according to FashionUnited. In June 2022 the company chose the site: a former paper machine hall at Stora Enso's Veitsiluoto mill in Kemi, a €400 million investment for 30,000 tonnes a year and about 270 jobs, at full capacity by 2025, according to High North News and Stora Enso.

The timetable then slipped. In October 2022 the company moved the first commercial deliveries to January 2026, citing longer equipment delivery times, Finnish electricity prices that had roughly tripled and chemical prices up 200 to 300% after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to Just Style and Innovation in Textiles. Construction was then still expected to start in 2023. It did not.

In December 2023 the company opened change negotiations with staff of both its Finnish companies because the financing market for growth companies "remained challenging", according to the company. They ended in February 2024 with temporary layoffs and permanent dismissals across all functions, the company and Outdoor Industry Compass reported; the number affected was not published. A month later the company closed a €40 million development round in two parts, with Inditex, TTY Management (the investment company of Fast Retailing's Tadashi Yanai), Youngone and Goldwin joining H&M Group, adidas, Bestseller and Zalando, according to the company and Waste Dive. Waste Dive noted that the Swedish competitor Renewcell had filed for bankruptcy weeks earlier after failing to secure financing.

The money did not unlock the plant. In October 2024 the company said its conditional lease with Stora Enso for the Veitsiluoto site had expired "as preconditions were not met within the agreed timeline", while saying Kemi remained its most advanced location and that the plant needed "the permit and financing" before going ahead, according to its project update. The same release says most of the future plant's capacity had been sold for several years ahead, to Inditex, Patagonia, PANGAIA, H&M Group, Bestseller, PVH Europe and Lindex. In May 2025 co-founder Petri Alava stepped down after nearly ten years as chief executive, with the chairman saying "competitiveness is now front and center", according to the company and TextilWirtschaft. In February 2026 the executive chair, Vibeke Krohn, and a second board member left the board, and Markus Mannström became chair, per the company.

The Money

The filed accounts show a pre-revenue industrial project, not a fibre business. Revenue was €839,000 in 2021, fell to €71,000 in 2024 and was €186,000 in 2025. The operating loss rose to €16.6 million in 2023 and was cut to €7.3 million in 2025, according to Asiakastieto. Vainu gives the same revenue figures, a 2025 balance sheet total of €9.4 million and an equity ratio of 89%, close to Asiakastieto's 90%. Vainu also shows a net loss of €21.2 million, but its table does not make clear which year that figure belongs to, so it is not used here.

The Kemi subsidiary tells its own story. Infinited Fiber Kemi Oy had two staff in 2023 and none in 2024 or 2025; its operating loss was €12.6 million in 2024, against €23,000 in 2025, according to Asiakastieto. The trade register shows it left the employer register on 31 August 2025, per YTJ. What the 2024 loss consisted of is not public.

Staff in the parent company rose from 28 in 2021 to 70 in 2023 and fell to 46 in 2025, according to Asiakastieto. Tracxn counted 43 employees in August 2026 and Dealroom 44. The company is not in the EIC Fund portfolio, which is consistent with a grant-only award.

Other EU Funding

Infinited went on to coordinate a larger Horizon 2020 project. The New Cotton Project (grant agreement 101000559) ran from October 2020 to March 2024 with 12 participants, including adidas and H&M, a total cost of €8,813,414.60 and an EU contribution of €6,745,801.25, of which €2,215,712.61 went to Infinited. Its aim was to bring garments made from regenerated fibre to consumers through a circular supply chain. In December 2024 the company also joined TEX-INSECT, an EU-funded project led by Norbite that uses insect larvae to break down the synthetic residues from textile waste, supplying those residues, according to the company and Renewable Carbon News.

Why Europe Should Care

Few EIC beneficiaries fit EU policy as squarely. The Commission's Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, adopted on 30 March 2022, wants textiles on the EU market by 2030 to be "largely" made of recycled fibres. Since 1 January 2025, member states have had to collect textiles separately, as Just Style reported, and the revised Waste Framework Directive, in force since 16 October 2025, requires extended producer responsibility schemes for textiles by April 2028, making brands pay for collection, sorting and recycling, according to Debevoise & Plimpton. Europe will have more sorted textile waste. What it lacks is plants that turn that waste into fibre, and Infinited's 2026 plan to build its next unit in a major textile region in Asia, rather than in Finland, shows where the economics of those plants currently point.

The Verdict

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