Inventivio's Pin Display and the EIC Accelerator: Not Yet on Sale

Blind people read text with braille displays and screen readers, but a spreadsheet, a map or a chart is still largely closed to them. Inventivio, a family company in Nuremberg, set out to change that with the Tactonom, a tablet-sized surface of more than 10,000 pins that shows braille and tactile graphics drawn from a computer screen. In the European Innovation Council's October 2020 cut-off it was selected for a grant of €2,123,663.92 towards a €3,123,430 project to take the device from a working prototype to the market.

The project ended on 31 December 2023. In 2026 the large display, now called Tactonom Pro, is in long-term use with selected customers and will only later be offered to blind and severely visually impaired users, according to the company's product page. A SightViews podcast recorded at the SightCity 2026 trade fair describes it as a display that has been "in development for years" (translated). What Inventivio sells instead is the Tactonom Reader, a cheaper device that reads printed tactile graphics with a camera and explains them by voice.

What Inventivio Does Now

Inventivio is a going concern. The Nuremberg register lists it as active at its long-standing address, according to Online-Handelsregister, and North Data shows three new shareholder lists filed on 10 November 2025 and no insolvency or liquidation entries. Its two managing directors are the brothers Klaus-Peter and Alexander Hars; Klaus-Peter Hars said in a demonstration for the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on 6 March 2025 that the brothers founded the company because two blind people in their family motivated the work, and that "we're currently 14 people". No second source for the headcount could be found.

The business has, in effect, pivoted from the funded display to the reader. The Tactonom Reader Flex has an aid number in the German list of medical aids and can be reimbursed by German health insurers, according to its product page. A camera recognises the user's finger on a printed tactile sheet and a voice explains what lies under it. In a report that Inventivio's press page dates to 9 September 2023, a student at the Utah Schools for the Deaf and the Blind became the first in the United States to use it; the device normally costs $5,500 and the school bought two with a $500 discount, according to Fox13. Klaus-Peter Hars demonstrated it at the 2025 ATIA conference, according to Easterseals Tech. The company also sells tactile learning kits and runs a database of tactile graphics for schools.

The Technology: Cheap Pins for Whole Pages

A conventional refreshable braille display raises pins with one actuator per pin, which is why even a single line of 40 or 80 characters is expensive and why full-page graphic displays cost far more. Inventivio's idea is to separate the costly actuators from the number of touch points. The CORDIS objective says this makes the Tactonom "radically cheaper per tactile point than the industry standard". The Bavarian Research Alliance (BayFOR), which helped the company apply, describes a DIN A4 touchpad in which more than 10,000 metal balls are moved by electromagnets. A camera tracks the reader's fingers, and software turns what is on the screen into braille and tactile graphics.

The company's own figures for the pin count vary. Its 2018 Phase 1 project on CORDIS gives 10,591 tactile points, the 2020 project "more than 10,500", the Tactonom Pro page "more than 10,000" in 22 lines of 40 characters, and the company home page 10,400. The product page says the Pro will cost about as much as an 80-cell braille display, without naming a figure. The Phase 1 summary claimed the patented technology was "5 times cheaper per tactile than its cheapest competitor"; no independent test of that claim could be found.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Inventivio appears under its own name, with Tactonom marked grant only, in the European Commission's list of companies selected in the 7 October 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot cut-off; no other beneficiary is listed for the project. The grant agreement was signed on 2 February 2021 and the project ran from 1 April 2021 to 31 December 2023, according to CORDIS. BayFOR gives an end date of September 2023 and describes the €3.12 million as funding from the EIC; CORDIS shows €3.12 million as the total cost and €2.12 million as the EU share. The Lisbon subsidiary took part as a linked third party with €433,000 of the EU contribution.

The application said the system had reached technology readiness level 6 and promised to help cut unemployment among blind people in Europe by 10% within ten years, enabling 87,600 Europeans to access a job. BayFOR expected the device to launch in Europe at the end of 2022. The only public report on CORDIS, covering March 2022 to December 2023, describes work "in the first phase of the project": faster and more reliable page build-up, a lighter and sturdier device, productivity apps, and "hundreds of tactile graphics" tested with blind people. It names no launch, no certification and no customer, according to the CORDIS reporting page.

1. Improve hardware reliability, speed and weightReportedDescribed in the company's own CORDIS report; no independent test public.
2. Software apps and tactile contentDeliveredHundreds of graphics per CORDIS; a public graphics database is linked from tactonom.com.
3. Market launch of the pin displayNot achievedDue end 2022 per BayFOR; not yet generally available in 2026.
4. Affordable display in schools and workplacesNot achievedNo price published; selected customers only.
5. 87,600 blind Europeans into jobsNot achievedNo product on sale to deliver it; no impact data published.

The grant did produce something. The software work and the tactile graphics library feed the products Inventivio does sell, and the display exists as a device in long-term use with selected customers. But a project that started at TRL 6 with the aim of launching a product closed without one, and almost three years later the launch has still not happened.

Money, Investors and Other EU Projects

No equity round, outside investor or acquisition offer for Inventivio could be found. The company is not in the EIC Fund portfolio: a text search of all sixteen pages of the official list of invested companies, checked on 18 October 2026, found no entry, which is consistent with its grant-only award. Its registered share capital has been €30,750 since June 2016, according to North Data. The latest annual accounts shown for free there are for 2011, so equity, results and staff from filed accounts could not be verified.

Public money has been the company's main visible source of funding. Before the EIC award it received €50,000 for a six-month SME Instrument Phase 1 study in 2018 and 2019, whose results summary said the company would launch in Germany first, once the hardware was finalised and tested, without giving a date. It was also a partner in INTUITIVE, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie training network on haptics led by Lund University, with an EU contribution of €252,788.40 from 2019 to 2024. North Data lists further public grants of €286,080 (2023), €563,974 (2024) and €490,994 (2025) without naming the programmes; the company's home page shows the Erasmus+ logo next to the Reader Flex. Which programmes paid these sums could not be verified.

Why Europe Should Care

Assistive technology sits squarely in EU policy. The Commission's Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021-2030, reinforced on 6 May 2026, calls for "accessible and affordable assistive technologies and AI" and for "equal access to quality jobs", according to the Commission. The European Accessibility Act, which member states had to transpose by June 2022, covers computers, e-books and e-commerce. Rules can make content accessible in principle; blind readers still need hardware that renders graphics. A cheap European full-page tactile display would fill a real gap, which is why its absence from the market five years after the grant matters.

The Verdict

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