Innomar Now Sells Buoys, Not Its EIC Accelerator Fish Traps

In May 2020 the European Innovation Council picked a small company from Fevik, on Norway's southern coast, to change how fish are caught. Innomar AS promised InnoCatch, a large collapsible trap that would lure fish with light instead of bait, report its catch to the surface through sensors, and cut bycatch by 75%, according to the project's CORDIS fact sheet. It was one of the winners of the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot, listed with blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity, in the Commission's list of selected companies, where it appears as the only beneficiary of its project.

The company still exists, but under another name and with another lead product. Since May 2023 it has been registered as Smart Ocean AS, according to the Brønnøysund Register Centre. Its fisheries page now offers GPS buoys and an app; traps, the light lure and the underwater camera link are not mentioned.

What Smart Ocean Sells Today

Smart Ocean sells buoys that fishermen tie to their gear so they can see where it is. The company's fisheries page lists three models, the Offshore Buoy II, the Coastal Buoy II and the Coastal Marker, with position tracking, geofence alarms when gear drifts, a "ghost mode" that hides the user from others in the app, and links to the navigation tools Olex, SailorsMate and BarentsWatch. Its home page extends the pitch to aquaculture, ports and offshore energy, with data loggers that send turbidity, salinity, oxygen and wave data over 4G or satellite. In October 2025 it added near-real-time wave readings, refreshed every 15 minutes, to every buoy in its fleet, according to Ocean News and GeoConnexion. Neither report gives the number of buoys in use.

Regulation has helped the buoy. Norway banned AIS transponders on fishing gear from 1 January 2025, so many fishermen needed a replacement, and Smart Ocean markets its buoy as a compliant alternative, according to We Are Aquaculture. The ban could not be checked in an official Norwegian Coastal Administration notice for this article.

The leadership has changed since the EIC award. Founder Tore Halvorsen was still quoted as chief executive in October 2025, in the Ocean News report. The register now names Kristian Ødegård as managing director, with Jon Erik Reinhardsen, chairman of Equinor, as board chair, and Ocean Impact partner Robin Ramm-Ericson among the board members, according to the register's list of roles. When the change at the top took place is not public. Reinhardsen's appointment was reported in January 2025 by We Are Aquaculture.

The Technology: A Trap That Talks to the Surface

Most of the world's fish are caught with trawls, seines and gillnets. The SUNFISH reports on CORDIS list the problems the company set out to avoid: seabed damage from bottom trawls, bycatch, lost gear that keeps catching fish as "ghost" nets, and plastic pollution. Pots and traps are an old alternative, and they are passive: fish swim in and stay alive until the gear is hauled. Their weakness is volume. Innomar's answer had four parts:

1. A proprietary trap that could be built much larger than usual and still fold flat and stack on deck, so a boat could carry more of them.
2. A smart buoy on the surface, giving position, owner and gear type, and relaying signals from a transducer on the trap that would measure the catch in real time.
3. A light attractant that draws krill and other prey, and so fish, without bait.
4. Software for fishermen, with a back end that could also serve regulators monitoring gear at sea.

The trap design goes back to a fish pot that Halvorsen filed for patent in Norway in December 2018: a pot with an inward inlet funnel above a lower antechamber with its own funnel, meant to lure cod. The Norwegian patent, NO345197B1, was granted on 2 November 2020, but the US application was abandoned in January 2024 and the European application was withdrawn, according to Google Patents. In 2020 the Research Council of Norway also gave Innomar NOK 74,999 of support to prepare EU projects for this trap, its sensors and the software, according to its project database.

No independent test of the 75% bycatch figure has been published. It appears only as a project target.

What SUNFISH Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

SUNFISH ran for 24 months, from 1 September 2020 to 31 August 2022, under the Green Deal topic of the EIC Accelerator pilot. The grant agreement was signed on 4 December 2020, three months after the start date. The EU contributed €2,414,825 of a total cost of €3,449,750, according to CORDIS.

The company's final report, covering September 2021 to August 2022, says a full commercial version of the fish trap, the topside buoy and the software platform had been launched and was "in active use with customers", and that the buoy had been integrated into commonly used navigation systems. It names a distribution agreement with OK Marine, tests with Kongsberg Maritime in which colour pictures were sent wirelessly from the trap to the buoy, a demonstration for the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, and an event hosted at the European Parliament in November 2021. It also records what was not finished: the transducer that was to measure the catch reached technology readiness level 7 but was "stalled somewhat" because FPGA chips had a lead time of 86 weeks, and ISO certification was still pending, according to the periodic report. The report says the company aimed "to sell several thousand units of buoys and fish traps in 2023".

1. Commercial smart buoy with geolocationDeliveredLaunched during the project per CORDIS; three models on sale on the company site.
2. Software platform for fishermenDeliveredApp with geofence and integrations to Olex, SailorsMate and BarentsWatch.
3. Collapsible, stackable fish trapPartlyLaunched commercially per CORDIS and described in January 2023; no longer offered on the company's fisheries page.
4. Transducer measuring catch in the trapNot achievedTRL 7 at project end, stalled by chip shortages; no launch announced since.
5. Light attractant instead of baitNot achievedNot mentioned in the final report or in any product listing.
6. 75% less bycatchNot achievedNo published measurement.
7. Several thousand buoys and traps sold in 2023Not achievedNo sales volume announced; 2023 operating income was NOK 2.42 million.

The project ended on schedule, and its two digital components became real products. The core of the proposal, a bait-free trap that reports its own catch, did not reach the market in the form described. CORDIS itself recorded the shift: the buoys, its report says, had become "a stand-alone product".

What Came After the Grant

Four months after SUNFISH ended, Innomar announced a $4.2 million round led by the Swedish investor Ocean Impact and the EIC Fund, with 15 existing shareholders including OK Marine, part of Egersund Group, and the pension fund MP Pensjon PK, according to Marine Technology News. The EIC Fund lists the company as "Smart Ocean (Innomar AS)" on page 14 of its portfolio of invested companies, with its own profile page. Neither the EIC nor the company has published the size or date of the EIC equity investment, so whether the EIC Fund's part of the 2022 round was the equity half of the 2020 blended award could not be verified.

In January 2023 Europêche, the body representing Europe's fishing fleets, signed a memorandum of understanding with Innomar to explore new fishing methods. At that point the company still described traps for single-handed use, strings of traps and "very large traps for industrial fisheries", alongside its buoys, according to Fiskerforum. No result of the agreement has been published. Four months later the company changed its name to Smart Ocean.

In December 2024 Smart Ocean hired the consultancy BearingPoint to help it raise more capital in 2025, according to Consultancy.eu, which also reported that the European Investment Bank had given it advisory support in 2024. No new round has been announced. The accounts, however, show fresh equity: total equity rose from NOK 22.5 million at the end of 2023 to NOK 23.1 million in 2024 and NOK 31.9 million in 2025, despite losses of NOK 28.1 million and NOK 22.4 million in those years, and the registered share capital was last changed in February 2026, according to the Register of Company Accounts and the company register. Who supplied the money is not public.

The Money

The three sets of accounts available from the Norwegian register show sales growing from a low base and losses shrinking, but far larger than income. Operating income rose from NOK 2.42 million in 2023 to NOK 4.89 million in 2024 and NOK 6.58 million in 2025. The net loss went from NOK 33.2 million to NOK 28.1 million to NOK 22.4 million; the 2024 figure includes a tax charge of NOK 7.57 million. Cash at the end of 2025 was NOK 18.2 million and debt NOK 11.9 million. The data aggregator Funnelfeedr shows the same NOK 4.9 million income and 11 employees. Accounts from the project years 2020 to 2022 could not be retrieved for this article.

The team is smaller than during the EIC project. The final SUNFISH report put the total workforce at 21; the register lists 11 employees, last updated in September 2026. Wage costs fell from NOK 14.0 million in 2023 to NOK 10.3 million in 2025.

Why Europe Should Care

Lost and unmarked gear is now a European enforcement topic. The EU's revised fisheries Control Regulation, (EU) 2023/2842, entered into force on 9 January 2024 and requires vessels to carry equipment to retrieve lost gear and record it in their electronic logbooks, with most rules applying in 2026 and some only in 2028, according to the European Commission. A February 2025 presentation by the Commission's fisheries department, published by OSPAR, lists mandatory gear marking for commercial and recreational fisheries and better reporting of lost gear among the main changes.

Products that make passive gear traceable fit those rules, and they fit the Green Deal topic SUNFISH was funded under. Norway is not in the EU, but its market for gear trackers was reshaped by its own AIS ban. The original promise, a trap that could replace part of the trawl fleet's catch, is the piece that would have mattered most for fish stocks and seabeds, and it is the piece the company no longer sells.

The Verdict

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