MET Srl: The EIC Accelerator Ozone Crop Sprayer That Stayed Small

Ozone kills fungi, bacteria and viruses on contact and then breaks down into oxygen, leaving nothing behind on the plant. MET, a small company in San Lazzaro di Savena near Bologna that builds ozone generators, wanted to turn that property into a replacement for chemical crop sprays. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 3 April 2019 it won, together with the Bologna-area sprayer manufacturer G.R. Gamberini, an EU grant for OXIR, a machine that dissolves ozone in water and sprays it on crops in greenhouses and open fields. The European Commission's list of selected companies gives the project two rows, one for "MET s.r.l." and one for G.R. Gamberini, its partner; this article covers MET, and a separate deep dive covers G.R. Gamberini.

The EU contribution was €1,720,080.25 towards a total cost of €2,457,257.50, for a project that ran from 1 November 2019 to 30 April 2022, according to CORDIS. MET, the coordinator, was to receive €755,403.25, and TEBO SpA, a company registered on the same street that CORDIS lists as MET's linked third party, €437,500. G.R. Gamberini was to receive €527,177. MET's own revenue in 2019 was €762,267, according to its filed accounts as published by ReportAziende.

Where MET Stands Now

MET is active. It filed accounts for 2025, showing revenue of €390,899 and a net profit of €5,432, according to ReportAziende, which also lists the company as operating. On 23 February 2026 Federico Ponti, introduced as director of the company, spoke at a conference on ozone in agriculture held at the headquarters of the Emilia-Romagna region, presenting urban uses such as street sanitation and weed control, according to a release on the event, which names the company "MET O3 Srl". The company's events page lists stands at Macfrut in May 2025 and Ecomondo in November 2025.

The OXIR sprayer is still on MET's website next to more than ten other ozone products, from cold store generators to a swimming pool unit. The company sells into food processing, wine cellars, transport and water treatment, and in 2024 it showed a weed control system using high-pressure ozonated water with G.R. Gamberini at the EIMA farm machinery fair in Bologna, according to Meccagri. Its address differs between sources: CORDIS and the company's LinkedIn page give Via Palazzetti 26, while Company Reports gives Via Palazzetti 5/A.

From a Hospital Infection to Farm Fields

MET's ozone work started in medicine. Its founder Federico Ponti told Il Resto del Carlino in October 2023 that the company grew out of a 2006 case in which a colleague picked up a drug-resistant bacterial infection after heart surgery. A SMAU case study dates the same episode to 2007 and places it inside TEBO, a Bologna electronics company, where Ponti and colleagues treated the wound with ozone; it says MET later developed registered medical devices based on ozonated oil. Il Resto del Carlino, AgroNotizie and the company's LinkedIn page give 2008 as the year MET was founded. The company's own history page says ozone was "initially conceived for a medical application" before MET moved into other industries.

Agriculture came next. In 2015 the EU paid MET €50,000 for a four-month feasibility study, O3MET, under the SME Instrument Phase 1, according to CORDIS. That plan said the technology would reach 10,000 hectares of greenhouses and "a €60 million turnover accumulated in 5 years" once brought to industrial scale. The OXIR project site says MET and G.R. Gamberini then joined forces to apply MET's medical experience to crops.

The Technology: Ozonated Water Instead of Fungicide

OXIR generates ozone on the spot from air, dissolves it in water and sprays the water on leaves. Ozone attacks microbes by oxidation, so it acts on fungi, bacteria and viruses alike. The CORDIS summary argues that biological pesticides each target only a narrow range of pests, and the project site says resistant strains of microorganisms "will never be formed", a claim it does not support with data. The project claimed removal rates of 85 to 99% for fungi and bacteria and 90 to 99% for viruses, a one-minute treatment with a 20-minute safety interval, and savings of €6,000 per hectare per year in chemicals and labour. These are the applicants' figures; CORDIS publishes no trial data that would allow them to be checked.

The mobile version is described in a European patent application filed by G.R. Gamberini and MET, with Federico Ponti, Fabiano Senese and Luca Gamberini as inventors: a wheeled unit that makes ozone from atmospheric air, mixes it into water in two stages and sprays it through adjustable panels, according to Google Patents. The application claims priority from October 2020 and was published in August 2023; Google Patents shows examination requested and no grant.

What Independent Research Shows

Independent field studies of ozonated water in vineyards, none of which names MET's equipment, point in different directions. A 2026 study by the University of Haifa and an Israeli winery in Plant Pathology found that preventive sprays every 7 or 14 days gave 85% to 100% efficacy against grape powdery mildew compared with untreated vines. A 2026 study from Galicia in Ciência e Técnica Vitivinícola found the opposite for downy mildew under high disease pressure: conventional treatments controlled it, ozonated water "failed, resulting in significant yield losses", and the authors do not recommend it for that use.

What OXIR Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The goal, in the words of the CORDIS fact sheet, was "to upgrade OXIR from its current preproduction state to market readiness and develop the first commercial product", in a fixed configuration for greenhouses and a mobile one. The project's work plan lists an upgraded mobile prototype, performance testing and validation, preparation of industrial production including "certification, homologation and technical documentation", and a commercialisation plan.

The final report on CORDIS says the mobile sprayer was improved throughout the project to a final version, that field trials were run under the supervision of the Agri2000 test centre near Bologna in Italian growing areas and partly in Morocco, Spain and the United States, and that a patentability study, a patent filing and a freedom-to-operate review were done. It says the pandemic prevented the planned presentation of OXIR to US investors. It concludes that OXIR is "tested, certified, prepared for industrial production and ready for market expansion", without saying which certification was obtained. CORDIS lists a promotional video, the project website, two trade magazine articles and an EU trade mark for OXIR, filed on 28 October 2020, as results; the trial data are not published there.

1. Upgraded mobile sprayerDeliveredFinal version reported on CORDIS; patent application EP4231825 published in 2023.
2. Field validationPartialTen trial sites listed on oxir.eu; results summarised by the company, raw data not published.
3. Certification and homologationUnverifiedReport says "certified" but names no certificate; ozone has no EU approval for crop protection.
4. Commercial productPartialOn sale on MET's website; no named OXIR customer or sales figure.
5. US market entryNot achievedInvestor pitch in the US cancelled because of the pandemic; no US sales reported.
6. 5% of the EU and Mediterranean greenhouse market in 5 yearsNot achievedNo adoption figures published; company revenue fell after 2020.

The project closed on 30 April 2022, and the hardware it promised exists. What is missing is the market. In February 2023 the US trade magazine Good Fruit Grower headlined that the Italian ozone approach "gets results with commercial clients in vineyards"; the article is behind a paywall and the clients are not named in any public source found for this article. Ponti and the agronomist Renzo Bucchi, who supervised the OXIR trials, later presented the sprayer at field days and a conference for growers in Vittoria, Sicily, within a regional training programme, according to the company's press page, which does not date the event.

The Regulatory Gap

Ozone sits in two different EU rulebooks. As a disinfectant it is regulated as a biocide: Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/1078 approved ozone generated from oxygen for four biocidal product types, and from 1 July 2025 only companies that had applied for authorisation may sell ozone generators for those uses, according to AgroNotizie. Ponti told the magazine that MET was the only Italian company enabled to sell ozone generators for biocidal uses, and that German authorities had confirmed its compliance. But spraying ozone to protect a plant falls under the separate rules for plant protection products, where ozone "has not yet received official status", the same article says. That is the use OXIR was built for.

The Money

MET's revenue rose from €636,613 in 2018 to €762,267 in 2019 and €1,230,646 in 2020, the first full year of OXIR, before falling to €644,209 in 2021. It stayed between €590,000 and €660,000 until 2024 and fell to €390,899 in 2025, according to the accounts published by ReportAziende; Company Reports gives the same 2023 revenue of €658,821 and net profit of €2,013, and staff costs of €223,070. Neither source breaks revenue down by product, and whether the 2020 peak came from OXIR, from pandemic demand for sanitisation equipment or from something else cannot be determined from public data.

Across the eight years from 2018 to 2025 MET's revenue from all its products added up to €5,571,010. The 2015 O3MET plan had projected €60 million of turnover in five years from the crop technology alone. MET has stayed profitable in most years, with a loss of €14,534 in 2024, and no outside investor, funding round or EIC Fund investment has been reported; the 2019 award was grant only.

The company keeps winning small research projects. MET's OZOVIVER page describes a project from January to November 2025, funded under a call run by Italy's National Research Council (CNR), to test whether ozonated water sprays in vineyards protect soil biodiversity, with G.R. Gamberini, an autonomous vehicle developer, a cooperative and two professors from Pisa, and gives a public contribution of €277,002.40. A separate trial with the salad grower OrtoRomi and the University of Bologna's CIRI Agro centre tests ozone in cold stores for leafy vegetables, according to the company's press page.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Farm to Fork targets call for a 50% reduction in the use and risk of chemical pesticides and a 50% reduction in the use of the most hazardous pesticides, against a 2015 to 2017 baseline. A residue-free treatment made on the farm from air, water and electricity would fit that goal. The OXIR case shows the obstacle: the EU paid to make the machine market-ready while its own rules have not yet approved ozone as a plant protection substance.

The Verdict

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