InPhoTech: 7-Core Fibre Made With EIC Accelerator Money

InPhoTech, a photonics company founded in Warsaw in 2010 by the scientist Tomasz Nasiłowski, set out to become "the world's first mass-scale multicore optical fibre supplier". Its product, IPT-Core, puts seven light-carrying cores inside one standard-sized glass fibre, so that one strand can do the work of seven. The European Commission selected it in the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot that preceded the EIC Accelerator, and paid €2,153,025 towards a €3,075,750 project, according to CORDIS. The grant was reported at the time by the Foundation for Polish Science, which put it at EUR 2.153 million.

The engineering went to plan. The company's final report says it made a 10 km span of the fibre, built the connectors that feed each core separately and ran tests with network operators, and in August 2021 Orange Polska pushed 11.2 terabits per second through it, according to Telepolis and Lightwave. What did not follow was mass production. The group company that was to make the fibre changed hands in 2024, and InPhoTech has been under court restructuring since, according to the National Court Register (KRS).

Where InPhoTech Stands Now

InPhoTech is still registered and trading, but it is working under court protection, and because this is a court restructuring, this series classes it as insolvent since April 2024. The KRS entry of 5 April 2024 records arrangement proceedings (postępowanie układowe) at the XVIII commercial division of the Warsaw district court under case WA1M/GR/33/2023, with a court supervisor and an enforceability clause dated 8 November 2023. Rejestr.io, which mirrors the register, lists the restructuring supervisor from 5 April 2024. On 7 April 2026, in a new case (WA1M/GR/23/2026), the same court secured the company's assets by appointing a temporary court supervisor, according to the register entry of 17 April 2026. The terms of the arrangement, the size of the debts and the purpose of the 2026 case are not public in the register.

The company has filed no annual accounts since those for 2023, which it submitted on 1 July 2024; the accounts for 2024 and 2025 are missing from the KRS list of filed documents. For 2023, rejestr.io shows total assets of PLN 145.8 million and a profit of PLN 1.2 million. Other company-data sites show different 2023 figures, and the filing itself could not be opened to settle the difference. Its website at inphotech.pl shows only a maintenance page saying the company "is operating as normal".

The most recent sign of business is a letter of intent signed on 21 July 2026 with FORPOSTA S.A., a Poznań company, to develop photonic and fibre technology for unmanned systems. The letter is non-binding and names no money, according to the announcement reprinted by Parkiet.

The Technology: Seven Cores in One Strand

A standard telecom fibre is 250 micrometres across and carries light in a single core. InPhoTech's fibre keeps the same outer size but holds seven separate cores, each meeting the ITU-T G.652 standard for ordinary single-mode fibre, so that existing transmission equipment can drive each one, the project's final report says. The approach is called space division multiplexing. Its selling point is space: where cable ducts are full, an operator could in principle get seven times the capacity without digging. Its weak point is everything at the ends of the cable. Each core needs its own input and output, which is why the project also built fan-in/fan-out components, small devices that split the seven cores back into seven normal fibres.

Multicore fibre is not unique to InPhoTech; the report itself calls the company one of "the most developed" in a field with other players. What it claimed as its own was a microstructured design and a manufacturing process aimed at volume. A patent publication titled "Microstructured Multicore Optical Fiber" is dated 12 February 2025, according to North Data, and CORDIS lists 17 trademark filings for the name IPT-CORE in 2022, from the United States and Japan to Ukraine and Israel, on the project's results page.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 29 October 2019 and the project ran from 1 January 2020 to 31 March 2023, with InPhoTech as the only beneficiary. The Commission's list of June 2019 winners gives the project one row, and no partner company. The proposal promised a fibre for 5G operators, fibre-to-the-home providers, long-distance links and data centres, and said the technology would bring the company "€23 million in profit 5 years after deployment".

The final report, for the period to 31 March 2023, says "the work performed from the beginning of the project led to reaching all of the planned outputs". It lists four achievements: a 10 km span of IPT-Core fibre, low-loss fan-in/fan-out components, two external system tests with network operators and "a global manufacturer of state of the art optical transmission equipment" at 11.2 and 22.4 Tb/s, and one installation of the fibre in a production facility. The 11.2 Tb/s test is confirmed independently: Orange Polska ran it with Infinera's ICE6 800G equipment, each core carrying two 800 Gb/s channels, according to Telepolis and Lightwave. The 22.4 Tb/s result appears only in the company's report; no operator or paper confirming it was found. The report names no paying customer and gives no sales.

1. Manufacture IPT-Core fibreDelivered10 km span made, per the final report.
2. Fan-in/fan-out componentsDeliveredSeries built for tests, per CORDIS.
3. Field tests with operatorsDeliveredOrange Polska, 11.2 Tb/s, August 2021.
4. 22.4 Tb/s transmissionUnverifiedCompany report only.
5. Mass-scale multicore fibre supplyNot achievedNo volume sales or customers announced; production company sold out of the group in 2024.
6. €23M profit within 5 yearsNot achievedCourt restructuring since 2024.

The Factory That Left the Group

InPhoTech's plan was to make the fibre through a group company, IPT Fiber sp. z o.o., in Lubartów near Lublin. In May 2023 IPT Fiber laid the cornerstone of a research and production centre for specialty fibres, including the seven-core fibre, at a cost of about PLN 110 million, with more than PLN 51 million of public funding and over 50 jobs planned, according to Inżynier Budownictwa; Eurobuild CEE reported the same cost and Strabag as builder, with completion planned for the end of 2023. Whether the centre opened and produces fibre could not be verified.

IPT Fiber is no longer InPhoTech's. The KRS file of IPT Fiber shows that InPhoTech held 999 of its shares until an entry of 19 March 2024, when DC24 Alternatywna Spółka Inwestycyjna sp. z o.o., a Warsaw investment company, became its shareholder; North Data dates the change of the shareholding to the same day. IPT Fiber's capital then rose to PLN 16.93 million, and on 31 December 2025 it was renamed 7FIBER sp. z o.o. Who stands behind DC24 and what InPhoTech received for the shares is not public.

The Money Behind It

InPhoTech has been funded mostly by public money rather than venture capital. Rejestr.io lists 14 EU co-financed projects worth PLN 110.3 million, with PLN 57.4 million of EU funding, in the 2007 to 2013 and 2014 to 2020 budget periods. North Data records earlier EU awards of €50,000 in 2016 for a bio-optical probe for cancer diagnosis and €140,100 in 2017 for distributed fibre sensors. No equity round and no outside investor could be found, and the company is not on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies; IPT-Core was a grant-only award. Rejestr.io lists ten current shareholdings in other companies, among them IPT Safety, IPT Applied, IPT Kolej and IPT Baterie; what they do and earn is not covered here.

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's Digital Decade programme aims to cover every household with a gigabit network and every populated area with 5G by 2030, according to the European Commission; the EU's data portal put gigabit coverage at 78.8% of households, projected to reach 94.7% by 2030, short of the target. That build-out runs on fibre, and InPhoTech's pitch to the EIC was strategic as well as technical: a European supplier of next-generation fibre, "putting the EU at the same level as the US and Asia". A working fibre and a successful operator test are real results for a €2.15 million grant. But the strategic part depended on volume production in Poland, and the public record does not show it.

The Verdict

InPhoTech and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.