EIC Accelerator Winner MyCol Still Waits for Cold-Chain Sales

MyCol, a Ljubljana company spun out of Slovenia's National Institute of Chemistry in 2017, makes printing inks that change colour permanently once a set temperature is crossed. In the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with the cut-off of 19 May 2020, it was selected for an EU grant of €1,101,800 towards T-Sense Cold, a €1,574,000 project to turn that ink into labels for chilled goods: white while the product stays cold, deeply coloured for good once it has been too warm, according to CORDIS. The European Commission's list of selected companies names MyCol alone for the project, with "grant" as the type of finance and the line "Advanced chemical engineering techniques for package-labelling in cold supply chains".

The project ran from February 2021 to November 2023. Cold-chain labels with four standard trigger points between 9 °C and 27 °C are now on the company's product page. But that page, and the company's home page, now lead with indicators for 40 °C to 200 °C aimed at rubber, plastics and metal plants, and the filed accounts show little income from either line: total revenue of €1,182.58 in 2024 and €10,977.77 in 2025, with a loss of €229,050.36 in 2025, according to register data compiled by CompanyWall from AJPES annual reports.

Where MyCol Stands Now

MyCol is operating. Its register entry is active, its accounts show no blocked bank account and no insolvency or court proceedings, and it moved its registered office within Ljubljana in March 2026, according to CompanyWall and the change history kept by Stop Neplačniki. Both draw on the official AJPES register. Bizi.si gives the same registration date and numbers.

The business has moved its emphasis. The current profile on the Start:up Slovenia portal presents MyCol as a maker of "Thermochromic Indicators for Permanent Overheating Detection", a way for manufacturers to prove that a product or device got too hot, and mentions cold-chain labels only further down. The company's own home page lists rubber, plastics and metal processing first among its industries, and its about page names rubber, plastics, pharmaceuticals and food as its main segments. The high-temperature inks come from T-Heat, a separate Eurostars project with the Bern University of Applied Sciences that started in October 2020, according to a company post. The cold-chain labels the EIC funded are still sold, but they are no longer the lead product, which is why this article classes MyCol as pivoted rather than simply active.

The Technology: Ink That Remembers Heat

Ordinary thermochromic inks, based on leuco dyes, change colour when warmed and change back when cooled, so they leave no trace of a past temperature breach. MyCol's inks, the CORDIS objective explains, recombine similar substances so that the colour change becomes permanent: below the activation temperature the print stays white, above it it turns black, blue, magenta or red and stays that way. The labels need no battery, no reader and no network; the colour can be checked by eye or by camera. The company's 2019 feasibility study claimed prices "4 to 50 times lower" than competing indicators, according to its CORDIS report; no independent price comparison was found.

The claimed temperature range varies by source. A 2022 company profile on Packaging Europe says the colouring temperature "can be selected in the range from -70°C to 200°C". A Podim conference profile of Marta Klanjšek Gunde gives -45 to 200 °C, the Start:up Slovenia profile gives -40 to 180 °C, and the company's services page offers custom work from -40 to +250 °C. The standard products on the product page cover 9 to 30 °C for cold-chain labels and 40 to 200 °C for high-temperature ones, and the cold-chain labels "must be cooled and activated" after they are applied.

What T-Sense Cold Promised, and What the Record Shows

T-Sense Cold followed a six-month SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study, T-Sense, which received €50,000 of a €71,429 budget in 2019, according to CORDIS. The grant agreement for the main project was signed on 17 September 2020. Its objective promised a white-to-colour irreversible label with two activation modes, contact activation for small runs and non-contact activation for large runs, and a target of "a 1% share of the European single market".

The only published CORDIS report is labelled as the second period, from February 2022 to November 2023, but its text describes first-period work: eight inks formulated for four temperature ranges, tests on a printing line, "important and promising negotiations" with a maker of packaging for overseas transport of large fish, and a fifth target, protection of vaccines at -70 °C, added because of the pandemic. It says five deliverables were postponed and that €463,004.31, 76.40% of the advance payment, had been spent. Results for the end of the project are not published. The results page lists one public deliverable, a communication plan, and three 2021 conference papers.

1. Irreversible white-to-colour cold-chain labelDeliveredLow-temperature labels at 9, 14, 20 and 27 °C on the product page.
2. Deep-frozen range, including -70 °C for vaccinesNot achievedNo product below 9 °C is offered; only custom work is mentioned.
3. Non-contact activation for large runsNot achievedNot announced; labels must be cooled and activated after application.
4. Printing in large seriesPartlyPrinting-line tests reported; larger production was still a plan in September 2024.
5. Recyclable with the packagingPartlyInterzero certification in 2023, per Start:up Slovenia; no second source.
6. Fish-packaging customer dealNot achievedNo agreement announced.
7. 1% of the European marketNot achievedTotal revenue of €10,977.77 in 2025.

The Money

Before the grant, MyCol was a tiny but profitable company. Its net sales were €500 in 2017, €15,202 in 2018, €16,900 in 2019, €35,164.40 in 2020 and €19,191 in 2021, with small profits from 2018 to 2021, according to AJPES figures shown by Stop Neplačniki. In 2023, the last year of the project, total revenue was €300,204.23 and the loss €71,251.38; in 2024, after the grant ended, total revenue fell to €1,182.58 and the loss was €106,044.14, according to CompanyWall. No 2022 figures were found in the free summaries.

On 18 September 2024 MyCol signed a seed investment contract with Vesna, a deep tech venture fund set up by the Slovenian Export and Development Bank, the Croatian Development Bank and the European Investment Fund; it was the fund's first investment in a Slovenian company, and the amount was not disclosed, according to The Slovenia Times, which cited the Slovenian Press Agency. SeeNews reported the deal the same day. Klanjšek Gunde said the money would go into marketing, sales, trade fairs and larger production with more staff.

The 2025 accounts show the effect on the balance sheet but not yet on sales. Equity rose from minus €64,663.46 to €109,356.53 in a year with a €229,050.36 loss, and a long-term liability of €200,000 recorded at the end of 2024 was gone, according to CompanyWall. That implies about €403,000 added to equity from outside the result. Whether this was the Vesna money, a converted loan or both is not stated in the free register data. Neither ownership list found names Vesna: CompanyWall shows five private owners, with Klanjšek Gunde at 72.38%, while Stop Neplačniki lists seven founders' stakes without names, and the two lists do not match.

MyCol is not in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which was checked across all 16 pages; its award was grant only. CORDIS lists no other EU project of the company besides the two T-Sense grants.

Why Europe Should Care

The project's case rests on food waste. Under the 2025 amendment of the Waste Framework Directive, member states must cut food waste by 10% in processing and manufacturing and by 30% per capita in retail and consumption by 2030, according to the European Commission. A cheap, recyclable, battery-free indicator on each package would show where in the chain goods were left too warm, which is the gap MyCol's project report describes. The technology is also a European research product: it grew out of thermochromic research at the National Institute of Chemistry since 2008, according to the Podim profile, and Klanjšek Gunde received the WIPO Medal for Inventors in 2021, according to the company and the CORDIS report.

What Cannot Be Checked

The Verdict

MyCol and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.