KWO After the EIC Accelerator: Insolvent, No Legionella Monitor

KWO Kunststoffteile, an injection moulder and toolmaker in Offenau near Heilbronn, is an unusual home for a water microbiology project. Yet in December 2020 the European Commission listed it among the winners of the 7 October 2020 cut-off of the Horizon 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot, grant only, for LegioDetect: an automated system to detect and count Legionella bacteria in a building's water pipes and warn before contamination reaches critical levels. The technology came from BlueLab Wasseranalysesysteme GmbH, a Tübingen start-up founded in 2018 by KWO's managing director, Michael Jauss.

The EU contribution was €2,289,218.75 towards a total cost of €3,270,312.50, from 1 May 2021 to 30 April 2024, according to CORDIS. The project's closing report says the prototype was developed further "to market readiness", but that pilot customers were being lined up for pilot projects "following in the further course of the project". No launch of an in-pipe Legionella monitor has been announced since. On 1 June 2025 the Heilbronn local court opened insolvency proceedings in self-administration over KWO, according to KunststoffWeb.

Where KWO Stands Now

KWO is a contract manufacturer. Its website says it was founded in 1971 as a pure toolmaking shop, runs 62 injection moulding machines, produces more than 250 million plastic parts a year and holds IATF 16949, ISO 13485 and ISO 14001 certificates. Its customers are in automotive, industry and medical technology, and it also makes medical face masks in a clean room. The website still names Michael Jauss and Christian Preininger as managing directors and still carries the Horizon 2020 funding notice for grant agreement 969104.

The insolvency proceedings opened on 1 June 2025 under self-administration, which leaves management in charge under a court-appointed monitor. The court appointed Steffen Zerkaulen of the law firm Buchalik Brömmekamp as monitor (Sachwalter), according to KunststoffWeb. The register service North Data lists an "Insolvenz in Eigenverwaltung" publication dated 18 June 2025, and the Heilbronner Stimme reported on 3 June 2025 that the company was struggling with the after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, filing the story under its coverage of car suppliers in crisis. The rest of that article is behind a paywall. Whether creditors have since approved an insolvency plan, or whether the proceedings have ended, could not be verified: no report of either was found. The company has kept filing with the register, including a shareholder list on 31 October 2025 and its 2024 annual accounts on 11 March 2026, according to North Data.

It is KWO's second insolvency. The first began in July 2012, when the company had 168 staff in Offenau, according to Insolvenz-Portal. Creditors confirmed an insolvency plan in October 2013 and the proceedings ended at the start of 2014, with about 140 employees and trainees kept on and Michael Jauss as one of two managing directors, according to KunststoffWeb. The register entries reproduced by online-handelsregister.de record the dissolution entry of 17 September 2012 after the proceedings opened, and the company's continuation, with Jauss reappointed as sole representative, on 30 September 2014.

The Technology: A Lab Test Moved Into the Pipe

Legionella bacteria thrive in warm water systems such as showers, taps and cooling towers and cause Legionnaires' disease, a severe pneumonia. The standard test, described in the LegioDetect report, follows ISO 11731: a certified sampler draws water from a sterilised tap, the sealed sample goes to a laboratory, and the bacteria are grown on culture plates for about 14 days before the colonies are counted. The report argues that this misses "viable but non-culturable" Legionella, which are still infectious but do not grow on the plates.

BlueLab's idea was to do the test inside the building. The device described in 2019 by the regional biotech network BioRegio STERN and by analytica-world was a small unit installed permanently in the pipework. It filters water, marks Legionella with fluorescent antibodies, photographs the filtrate to count the marked cells and sends the result by radio to a server, while also tracking temperature and flow as risk factors. Jauss won the BioRegions Innovation Prize for it in April 2019. Both articles cite his estimate of about 12 million test points in Germany alone. CORDIS lists six patent applications filed by BlueLab on 27 August 2019 for the measuring method, a sampling device and a replaceable cartridge.

What LegioDetect Promised, and What the Record Shows

The Commission's December 2020 list names KWO alone for LegioDetect, with no separate row for BlueLab. CORDIS shows KWO as the only signatory and BlueLab as a linked third party, a company that does project work under its partner's grant without signing it. Of the EU money, €1,652,831.25 was KWO's net share and €636,387.50 went to BlueLab. The project objective promised a market-ready system that is "easy to use also for non-experts", gives warnings before critical values are reached and serves landlords, hospitals, hotels, swimming pools, private households and cooling-tower operators.

The final periodic report, covering May 2022 to April 2024, is short on results. It says the team worked with stakeholders, decided to build different product versions for different market segments instead of one all-in-one device, came up with "follow-on-innovations", focused on detecting other Legionella types and "started to prepare market entry". It names no pilot customer, no installed unit and no validation result. The CORDIS results page lists the six 2019 patent applications and no publications.

1. Prototype developed furtherDeliveredReported in the final CORDIS report; BlueLab now shows an automated desktop analyser, BlueLab PRO.
2. Market-ready in-pipe Legionella monitorNot deliveredNo product for permanent installation is offered or announced.
3. Pilot projects with customersNot deliveredStill "following" at project end; none announced since.
4. Legionella test chemistryIn developmentBlueLab says its Legionella pneumophila kits are in a "late development phase".
5. Launch for landlords, hospitals and householdsNot deliveredNo sales of an automated Legionella system reported.

What Became of the Technology

BlueLab is still operating, but its main business today is the method LegioDetect set out to replace. Its website leads with "ISO-zertifizierte Wasseranalyse", laboratory testing of drinking water, cooling towers, pools, dental units and water meters. The laboratory holds two ISO/IEC 17025 accreditations from the German accreditation body DAkkS, D-PL-22789-01-00 and D-PL-22789-01-01, covering 13 standards including DIN EN ISO 11731 for Legionella culture, according to FindTestingLabs. BlueLab's LinkedIn page describes a "DAkkS-accredited lab" and lists 8 employees; its posts over the past year are about lab services, a new team member for laboratory work and a move to a new site in Tübingen.

The automation side has changed shape. BlueLab's innovation page presents three products: BlueLab PRO, a fully automated system for microbial water analysis with results in under four hours; BlueLab GO, a rapid test; and BlueLab Count, an automated colony counter for existing laboratories. PRO is described on its product page as a desktop device with an autosampler for up to 10 sample bottles, not a unit fixed in the pipework, and the same page says the detection kits for Legionella pneumophila serogroup 1 are in a "late development phase". The rapid test page says its lateral-flow technology is "still in the development phase". No price, customer or sales figure is given for any of the three. This matches the report's decision to split the product into versions for different segments, but none of them is the continuous in-pipe monitor the EU funded.

The Money

KWO's filed accounts are public in the German company register, but their figures could not be read for free. Implisense gives a balance sheet total of €9,892,855 and 131 employees for 2023, according to its company profile. Revenue, results and equity are not shown there. The business ranking Die Deutsche Wirtschaft puts the staff at 150 and estimates revenue at about €22.5 million, a figure it labels as an estimate. The company's own website says it has more than 170 employees. Staff numbers therefore disagree by source, and none of them is dated after the June 2025 insolvency filing.

KWO's 2024 accounts, published on 11 March 2026, list a holding in BlueLab, according to North Data. North Data also shows that BlueLab was registered in March 2018 with €25,000 of share capital, raised it to €33,378 in April 2021, a month before the EIC project began, and to €48,000 in July 2022, and has five known shareholders whose names are behind a paywall. The size of KWO's stake is therefore not public. BlueLab's latest published accounts are for 2022. North Data records no insolvency for BlueLab. KWO is not among the 319 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which fits a grant-only award, and no outside funding round for KWO or BlueLab could be found. CORDIS lists no other EU project for either company.

Why Europe Should Care

The timing of the award was apt. On 16 December 2020, two months after the cut-off, the EU adopted its recast Drinking Water Directive (EU) 2020/2184, which for the first time sets a Legionella parametric value of below 1,000 colony-forming units per litre for domestic distribution systems. It requires a risk-based approach in buildings, with Legionella monitoring that can focus on priority premises such as hospitals, and member states had to transpose it by 12 January 2023. More testing means a larger market for faster tests, and an automated, on-site method would cut the delays and sampling errors of the culture test.

The reference method the project set out to beat is still the ISO 11731 culture test, the method in BlueLab's own accreditation scope. In LegioDetect's case the grant paid for development, but no evidence that the new method can stand in for that reference in regulated testing, such as a published validation or a field pilot, was public when the project ended, and none has appeared since.

The Verdict

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