Martin and Co's EIC Accelerator Poultry Test, Left in a Shell

Martin and Co Kft., a Budapest company founded in August 2012, owns the patent filings behind RAID, a method that identifies bacteria in poultry samples by mass spectrometry in about two hours instead of the one to three days a laboratory culture takes. In the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, part of the Horizon 2020 EIC pilot, the European Commission selected the RAID project; its list of winners names two Hungarian beneficiaries for it, Martin and Co and EL-CO TECH Elektromos Kommunikacios Technologiak Kft. of Gödöllő. The grant was signed on 10 May 2019 and paid an EU contribution of €1,764,437.50 towards a total cost of €2,520,625, of which €572,250 went to Martin and Co and €1,192,187.50 to EL-CO TECH as coordinator, according to CORDIS.

Seven years later, Martin and Co is still registered as an operating company, but its filed accounts show revenue of HUF 798,000 for 2025, a net loss of HUF 29.2 million and no employees, according to CompanyWall, which republishes Ministry of Justice filings; the business database OPTEN gives the same 2025 revenue figure. Its sole owner, M-Mind Holding Zrt., and its project partner EL-CO TECH are both "felszámolás alatt", in liquidation, according to OPTEN's entries for M-Mind Holding and EL-CO TECH, and CompanyWall.

A Patent Holder Inside a Failing Group

Martin and Co is one company in a small group run by the same person. The register data on CompanyWall names Márton Muhari as managing director of Martin and Co, chief executive of M-Mind Holding and managing director of EL-CO TECH; CORDIS describes him as the RAID project coordinator and chief executive of EL-CO TECH. M-Mind Holding, founded in February 2017 and registered at EL-CO TECH's address in Gödöllő, is listed by its register code as a group-financing company. EL-CO TECH, a utility and telecoms construction contractor that traded as EL-MŰ SZOLG Kft before, according to OPTEN, was the operating heavyweight: HUF 1.74 billion in total revenue and an average of 52 staff in 2023, down from 86 in 2021, according to the accounts on CompanyWall. OPTEN gives its net sales for 2023 as HUF 1.55 billion; the two figures measure different lines of the income statement. The two sources also disagree on EL-CO TECH's founding: CompanyWall gives 6 December 1993, OPTEN the year 1992.

When the liquidation proceedings against M-Mind Holding and EL-CO TECH were opened, and on whose petition, is not shown in the free register extracts consulted for this article. Martin and Co itself is not in liquidation. CompanyWall reports a debt enforcement procedure against it and lists both of its bank accounts as blocked; OPTEN flags negative information in the past two years without giving detail in its free entry. Neither the RAID website, raidproject.eu, nor EL-CO TECH's site elcotech.hu, which now shows a hosting placeholder, carries any current information; the RAID domain no longer resolves.

How RAID Works

Since 2013, the project summary says, EU rules have allowed antibiotics in farm animals only for treatment after a vet's diagnosis, not for prevention, and the 2019 Veterinary Medicinal Products Regulation, cited by the CORDIS Results in Brief on RAID, bans routine antimicrobial use to make up for poor hygiene or husbandry. Proving a bacterial infection by culture takes 24 to 72 hours and costs €10 to €50 per measurement, the project summary on CORDIS says, so broiler farmers face a delay before a vet can justify treatment.

RAID skips the culture step. It uses mass spectrometry to read phospholipids, fat molecules found in high concentrations on the outer surface of bacterial cells, which give each species a distinctive "molecular fingerprint". The company says the core of the system is software: "the intelligent algorithm that can separate the complicated mixed spectral signal of 'bacterial fingerprints'", according to the project's final report summary. CORDIS reports that RAID was validated on a large number of chicken samples against standard culture and "other MS-based solutions". Its claims over rival methods, as reported by CORDIS, are speed, detection of anaerobic species, several species in one run, and a cost "significantly lower" than PCR. No independent peer-reviewed comparison of RAID with these methods was found.

The patents predate the EIC grant. CORDIS lists six patent applications held by Martin and Co for a "method and device for the identification of cell objects and test compounds effective against them", a Hungarian application from 17 October 2017 and international filings from 17 October 2018, including Japanese- and Portuguese-language ones, together with a Hungarian trademark application for "RAID Rapid Infection Detection" filed by EL-CO TECH on 5 August 2019, according to the project's results page. Whether any of these applications was granted could not be verified: the patent databases consulted were not reachable for this article. Martin and Co is the applicant on all six patent filings, and its balance sheet shows HUF 49.99 million of intangible assets at the end of 2025.

The idea is older than the 2019 award. A Phase 1 feasibility study with the same acronym and title, then promising detection "within 3 hours", received €50,000 from November 2016 to February 2017; its sole beneficiary was another Hungarian company, Tonosoft Orvostechnikai es Kutatas-Fejlesztesi Kft, according to CORDIS. How Tonosoft is connected to Martin and Co or EL-CO TECH is not stated in any source found.

What the Grant Promised, and What Came Back

The project objective listed concrete targets for the two years from April 2019: raise the number of detectable bacteria "to at least 50", raise reliability "to at least 98%", improve and automate sample processing, build a mobile RAID laboratory for small farmers and vets, validate and certify the method, and end the project with "signed service contracts and purchase orders". The consortium said it had already demonstrated the method under real conditions with an independent vet and that potential buyers had "expressed their interest".

The final report, covering April 2020 to March 2021, says the mobile laboratory in a vehicle was finished and the method validated against standard culture, reaching "99% accuracy, which is above the targeted 98% minimum level", and "99% accuracy, 99% sensitivity and 100% specificity" for farm samples in the mobile set-up. CORDIS later reported that the team automated the spectrum evaluation and used the vehicle to collect and analyse samples "from different European countries", quoting László Lengyel, head of the RAID laboratory. These figures come from the consortium itself; no independent validation study was found. The report does not say how many bacterial species RAID can identify, and it names no customer, service contract or purchase order. Due to COVID-19, it says, marketing moved online, to a commercial website and social media pages. Only the final period's summary is public, and the two deliverables listed on CORDIS, the "certified RAID measurement" and the permits for the mobile laboratory, could not be downloaded from the Commission's document service for this article.

1. Reliability of at least 98%Delivered99% accuracy reported in the final report; self-reported.
2. Mobile RAID laboratoryDeliveredVehicle laboratory built and used on farms, per CORDIS.
3. Automated processingPartlySpectrum evaluation automated; sample handling improved, no product specification public.
4. At least 50 detectable bacteriaNot reportedNo species count published.
5. Validation and certificationNot verifiableCertificate deliverable listed, document not retrievable.
6. Signed contracts and purchase ordersNot achievedNo customer announced by the companies or anyone else.

The project ran on schedule, from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2021, and CORDIS lists it as closed. The grant paid for a working prototype and the field data the consortium wanted. It did not produce the commercial result it was supposed to end with, and the RAID name has not appeared in any announcement since the CORDIS article of October 2022, which said the team hoped to take the method to dairy farms, where mastitis drives antibiotic use.

The Money Since the Project

Free register data for Martin and Co covers 2023 to 2025. In 2023 the company had total revenue of HUF 38.3 million and a profit of HUF 6.6 million. In 2024 revenue was HUF 39.5 million, but costs of HUF 75.2 million produced a loss of HUF 35.8 million. In 2025 revenue fell to HUF 798,000 and the loss was HUF 29.2 million, according to CompanyWall. What the revenue in 2023 and 2024 came from is not stated in the summary data.

The balance sheet is dominated by short-term items: HUF 304.8 million in short-term liabilities and HUF 290.6 million in receivables at the end of 2025, against equity of HUF 38.6 million. Equity has fallen by HUF 65 million in two years. Who the creditors and debtors are cannot be seen in the free filings; with the owner and the sister company in liquidation, whether the receivables can be collected is an open question.

The coordinator's decline was steeper in scale. EL-CO TECH remained profitable through 2023, with a net result of HUF 47.5 million, but its average headcount fell from 86 to 52 between 2021 and 2023, and by August 2026 it was in liquidation. Its 2024 and 2025 accounts were not available in the sources consulted. No equity investment, venture round or EIC Fund stake has been reported for any company in the group; the 2019 award was grant only.

Why Europe Should Care

Faster diagnosis is one of the levers for cutting antibiotic use on farms, which the EU has made a policy target: the Farm to Fork strategy aims to halve overall EU sales of antimicrobials for farmed animals and aquaculture by 2030, the Commission's agriculture department says, a goal also reported by Food Safety News when the strategy was published in May 2020. A test that tells a vet within two hours whether a flock's illness is bacterial fits that policy directly, and RAID is one of the livestock projects the Commission chose for a CORDIS results pack on animal health in 2022.

The RAID case shows the gap between a validated prototype and a product. The consortium was a utility contractor and a one-employee patent holder, and the grant ended in the middle of the pandemic with marketing moved online. Whatever the EU paid for, the know-how now sits in a group whose holding company and largest member are in liquidation.

The Verdict

This article is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.