EIC Accelerator Winner Millor Battery and the E-Bus Battery Race

Millor Battery, a small manufacturer near Barcelona, builds lithium-ion battery packs in short series for buses, trucks, motorbikes and racing prototypes. Its website pitches it as the partner for companies that need tailored batteries "despite not having very big volume productions".

In June 2019 the European Commission selected the company, registered as Millor Energy Solutions SL, in the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator. The list names Millor, then based in Terrassa, as the only company behind the project. Its BATTERY PLUS project received a grant of €1,198,225 towards a total cost of €1,737,500 to bring two modular battery lines to market. Three years later both lines were certified and in production. The commercial plan attached to the grant has not come true.

Where Millor Battery Stands Now

Millor is active. Its annual accounts for 2020 to 2024 are on file at the Barcelona commercial register, according to Empresia, and Infonif also gives 2024 as the latest year filed; both list the company as active. On 27 February 2026 the Barcelona register recorded two changes, published in the Official Gazette of the Commercial Register (BORME) on 5 March 2026: the registered seat moved from Calle Portugal 25 in Cerdanyola del Vallès to Avinguda de Cerdanyola 97 in Sant Cugat del Vallès, and the company declared a single shareholder, Baltasar Engineering Group SL.

That shareholder was previously called Baltasar Motors SL. On the same day it changed its name, became a holding company and raised its share capital by €135,000, the same amount as Millor's share capital, according to the same BORME issue. Its sole director is Millor's founder, and since March 2026 he has also been its sole shareholder, according to Empresia. The register therefore shows Millor now held through a holding company controlled by its founder. Who held the shares before, including who paid for the 2021 capital increase, is not public.

The company's own news page stops in July 2022, but its website is maintained: its projects page, updated in July 2026, now lists newer research projects called REVIA, BATECHAIN and IntelLiGent and a "PERTE VE" project, a reference to Spain's state aid programme for electric and connected vehicles. Only IntelLiGent could be confirmed in an independent source; Millor's role in the other three could not be verified.

The Technology: Modular Packs for Small Series

Millor does not make battery cells. It buys lithium-ion cells and designs the packs around them: the electronics that monitor and balance each cell (the battery management system, or BMS), the cooling, the housing and the software. Its pitch is modularity. A flexiEBUST pack for a bus or truck is assembled from standard modules into capacities from 27 kWh to 500 kWh, according to Motorpasión and Híbridos y Eléctricos, both in October 2020. The first version ran at 350 V, with a 650 V version announced for the first quarter of 2021. flexiFIVEL is a 50 V portable modular pack for scooters, motorbikes and other light electric vehicles.

The claims that set it apart are the company's own: a more accurate state-of-charge reading to reduce range anxiety, a lighter build, a "Fast Maintenance Safety Box" that groups the parts most likely to fail (the CORDIS report says part of the BMS causes 85% of battery failures) so they can be swapped quickly, and a remote monitoring app. Both news reports also quote the company's claim of a ten-year life "without losing performance" in intensive professional use. No independent test of these figures has been published.

The strongest outside evidence is a field trial. Barcelona's public transport operator TMB ran an electric minibus prototype with a Millor pack for two years, ending in October 2020, and the reports say it completed a 16-hour working day on one charge across the city's hilly routes. Both articles report the trial as the company presented it; a results report from TMB itself was not found.

What BATTERY PLUS Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

BATTERY PLUS was Millor's second step through the SME Instrument. In 2018 it completed a five-month Phase 1 feasibility study with €50,000 from the EU. The Phase 2 project ran from 1 December 2019 to 31 May 2022. Its objective on CORDIS promised certified fast-charging batteries for light and heavy-duty electric vehicles, a monitoring app, a full launch in 2022, "129M€ in accum. revenues in 3 years", growth "from 17 to 84 employees after 3 years of the project end" and entry into other EU markets, then the USA, Canada and Latin America.

The final periodic report says Millor built flexiEBUST and flexiFIVEL prototypes that customers tested in real conditions, certified both lines, industrialised them in its own Barcelona factory and ran more than 20 demonstrations. It calls flexiEBUST "the first high voltage battery pack" developed and manufactured in Spain with UN/ECE-R100 rev. 2 certification, the UN regulation for the safety of electric vehicle traction batteries. The company's closing announcement of 31 July 2022 said all project objectives had been met. The certificates themselves are not published.

1. Two certified battery linesDeliveredflexiEBUST and flexiFIVEL certified to UN/ECE-R100 rev. 2, per CORDIS and the company; certificates not public.
2. Industrial productionDeliveredSeries production of flexiEBUST announced in October 2020; factory industrialisation reported to CORDIS.
3. Project on timeDeliveredClosed on its planned end date, 31 May 2022.
4. Remote monitoring appUnverifiedDescribed in the report; no public app or customer use found.
5. €129M revenue in 3 yearsNot achievedLatest filed sales band €1M to €2.5M a year, per Empresia.
6. 84 staff and markets in the AmericasNot achievedNo hiring on that scale or sales in the USA, Canada or Latin America announced.

On the technical side, the record is good for a project of this size: certified products, on time, in a regulated field where certification is the expensive part. The commercial targets were a different matter. Three years of €129 million would average €43 million a year; the register band puts Millor's latest sales at no more than €2.5 million. That is still growth from the €200,000 of sales the founder gave for 2017, in a January 2018 interview with Emprendedores, when the team had eight engineers. Exact revenue, profit and staff figures in the filed accounts are behind paywalls and could not be checked.

What Millor Has Achieved Since the Award

The most visible results since the award have come through European research consortia rather than vehicle makers. In February 2021 the Horizon 2020 project COBRA, coordinated by the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC), chose Millor to manufacture prototypes of its cobalt-free lithium-ion batteries, which the company also announced. Millor is not among the project's funded partners on CORDIS, and CIDETEC's December 2023 release on the finished COBRA battery prototype does not name it, so what Millor built for COBRA is not documented.

The firmer case is IntelLiGent, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by SINTEF that developed high-voltage, cobalt-free cells. Millor was a funded partner with an EU contribution of €239,233.75 from September 2022 to May 2026. In June 2026 SINTEF reported that Millor had "developed and manufactured a battery module" from the project's cells, showing that the new chemistry could be built into packs. Earlier, Millor was a partner in GreenCharge, a Horizon 2020 project on charging and stationary storage for cities, with €73,675 of EU funding.

On the commercial side, the company's customers page shows logos including TMB, Piaggio, BAIC, FCC, Ferrovial, Clear Channel, Indcar and Campos Racing. The images date from 2020 and the page gives no detail of what each bought or when; none of these companies has announced a supply deal with Millor that could be found. Private funding is equally thin on the public record. Share capital rose from €3,000 to €135,000 in July 2021, according to the BORME and Empresia, and the company told Híbridos y Eléctricos in 2020 that it had invested €2.5 million in development with private and public money, including support from the Catalan agency ACCIÓ. No venture round has been announced. Millor is not in the EIC Fund portfolio, which is consistent with a grant-only award.

Why Europe Should Care

Batteries are one of the EU's declared strategic industries. The Commission launched the European Battery Alliance in 2017 to make Europe "a global leader in sustainable battery production and use", and the EU Batteries Regulation of 2023 adds rules on carbon footprint, recycled content and battery passports for electric vehicle and industrial batteries. Makers of buses, trucks and light vehicles still need someone to design and certify packs for their models. That is Millor's niche, and its pitch of design and production kept in Barcelona speaks directly to the supply-chain concern.

Its research work points the same way: building modules from new European cobalt-free cells, as it did in IntelLiGent, is a small but concrete link between EU cell research and vehicles. The open question is scale: Millor's sales band shows it has stayed a specialist supplier rather than the regional champion its EIC plan described.

The Verdict

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