MyWo's EIC Accelerator Project: Touchscreen Chips Against Losses

The touchscreen in a car is usually run by a controller chip first designed for phones and tablets. MyWo AS, a Trondheim company founded in 2016, set out to build one designed for cars from the start: a chip that can sense a finger hovering above the glass, measure how hard it presses and trigger haptic feedback, so that drivers look at the screen less. In the European Commission's list of companies selected at the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, MyWo AS of Trondheim appears as the only beneficiary of HMI4auto, "aXiom, a first of its kind Human-Machine Interface Chip designed for the automotive industry". It received an EU contribution of €2,463,127.45 towards a total cost of €3,518,753.50, according to CORDIS.

MyWo no longer exists under that name. The Norwegian register shows that the same legal entity, organisation number 917596816, was renamed TouchNetix AS on 26 April 2021, according to the Brønnøysund Register Centre. The name came from its British partner, TouchNetix Limited of Fareham, which became a subsidiary when the two companies combined in March 2021, according to eeNews Europe and CB Insights. CORDIS now lists the HMI4auto coordinator as TouchNetix AS under the same VAT number.

Where the Company Stands Now

TouchNetix AS is active. It filed its 2025 accounts, is not in bankruptcy or liquidation and registered a new share capital of NOK 279,713 in July 2026, according to the Brønnøysund register. In September 2026 it exhibited at SID Vehicle Displays & Interfaces in Detroit, citing "proven deployments in vehicles including the Kia EV9, Genesis GV80, and Genesis G80", according to a company release. In January 2026 it launched the AX24A, a smaller controller for up to 22 touch and force buttons. The company says it has offices in Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany, the USA, Korea and Taiwan.

The founder is no longer in charge. Vegard Wollan, who led MyWo and then TouchNetix, became chief executive of Nordic Semiconductor on 1 January 2024. Nordic's announcement says he had built a "USD 1 billion revenue business" as head of Atmel's touch and microcontroller unit, founded MyWo after Microchip bought Atmel in 2016, and saw MyWo "merged into TouchNetix" in 2021. By March 2024 Gaute Myklebust was signing releases as chief executive, and the register lists him as general manager, with Wollan still on the board.

The Technology: Touch, Hover and Force on One Chip

A capacitive touch controller measures tiny changes in electric charge when a finger approaches a grid of electrodes behind the glass. The HMI4auto final report says aXiom achieves "up to 30 times higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio", which lets it detect a hand 10 to 15 cm from the screen, track a finger hovering 5 to 6 cm above it, and work through finger-guiding overlays and curved displays. It adds force sensing, so a control only fires after a deliberate press, and closed-loop haptic feedback. These performance figures come from the company; no independent test of them has been published.

The argument for cars is safety. The CORDIS summary says driver distraction causes 10 to 20% of accidents and that the industry relied on HMI chips "developed for the consumer market". Requiring a firm press on a hidden touch button, as in the Genesis climate controls, is meant to stop accidental inputs. Wollan argued in 2021 that demand for touch, touchless, force sensing, haptics and 3D sensing in one device "isn't addressed by the incumbent providers", according to eeNews Europe. Atmel, where Wollan ran the touch and microcontroller unit, was bought by Microchip Technology in 2016.

What HMI4auto Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran for 30 months, from 1 October 2019 to 31 March 2022, under the Horizon 2020 call H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-2. Its objective, as published on CORDIS, was to take aXiom from TRL7 to TRL9 by industrialising and qualifying a family of chips and piloting it "in a real automotive OEM programme". It also set commercial targets: accumulated sales of €93.5 million in the five years after the project, accumulated operating profit of €35.5 million and 38 new full-time jobs at MyWo.

The final report states that the company completed a portfolio of four aXiom chips covering displays from 5 to more than 35 inches, demonstrated that they can be qualified to the Automotive Electronics Council's AEC-Q100 Grade 2 standard, ran pilots with partners and delivered "fully qualified products to an end user". It names no customer. The technical detail is withheld: the report says it is "only provided to our customers under a confidentiality agreement".

1. Industrialise a family of aXiom chipsDeliveredFour chips completed per the CORDIS report; AX54A, AX80A, AX112A and AX198A are listed on the company website.
2. Automotive qualificationDeliveredAEC-Q100 Grade 2 demonstrated per CORDIS; the company now states its chips are AEC-Q100 qualified and "ASIL B Ready Certified".
3. Pilot in a real OEM programme (TRL9)DeliveredAX54A in the Kia EV9 (2023) and the Genesis GV80 (2023) and G80 (2024), via tier-one suppliers.
4. €93.5M accumulated sales in five years after the projectOff trackGroup sales of NOK 296.8M over 2023 to 2025, with falling revenue each year.
5. 38 new jobs at MyWoNot verifiableGroup headcount is not public; 14 staff are registered for the Norwegian company.

On the technical goals, the record supports the report. The production car wins came after the project closed, but they are the kind of OEM validation HMI4auto promised. On 7 September 2023 TouchNetix announced that Alps Electric Korea had used the AX54A for hidden, backlit touch buttons on the dashboard of the Kia EV9. In November 2023 it announced that Woory Industrial had chosen the same chip for the touch and force climate controls of the Genesis GV80, also reported by Electronic Specifier, followed in March 2024 by the Genesis G80 sedan. A Woory research director is quoted saying the chip went "from design through to mass production". In October 2025 the German supplier GE-T announced a steering-wheel hands-off detection feature built on aXiom; no vehicle using it has been named.

The Money Since the Award

Private investors followed the grant. In June 2021, after the combination, TouchNetix closed a NOK 95 million Series A managed by Sparebank1 Markets, with Alliance Venture, Firda, Investinor, Investitude and Salvesen & Thams, according to eeNews Europe, which put the workforce at around 40 people in six countries. In November 2022 it raised NOK 120 million from Alliance Venture, Investinor, Investitude, LER Invest, Reitan Kapital, Wiski Capital and others, according to Nordic9. The 2023 group balance sheet shows NOK 314.4 million of paid-in equity; how much of that came from the 2021 combination itself is not public.

The company is not in the EIC Fund's portfolio: neither MyWo nor TouchNetix appears on any of the 16 pages of the official list of EIC Fund invested companies, which is consistent with a 2019 grant-only award. Apart from HMI4auto, CORDIS lists one earlier EU project involving the brand: TouchNetix Limited, the British company before the combination, was a partner in INSPIRED, a 2015 to 2018 project on printed nanomaterial devices.

The consolidated accounts from 2023 onwards, published in the Brønnøysund register of annual accounts, show a business that sells real products but is moving the wrong way. Group sales fell from NOK 113.6 million in 2023 to NOK 103.8 million in 2024 and NOK 79.5 million in 2025. The net loss grew from NOK 25.7 million to NOK 42.5 million and NOK 51.3 million. Wage costs rose from NOK 49.1 million to NOK 60.8 million over the same period. Earlier years are not in the register's open data and could not be verified.

The cash pile shrank with the losses: from NOK 136.5 million at the end of 2023 to NOK 100.2 million a year later and NOK 49.6 million at the end of 2025. Equity fell from NOK 257.5 million to NOK 166.8 million, still far above total debt of NOK 16.3 million. Inventory stood at NOK 56.0 million at the end of 2025, more than the cash. No new funding round has been announced since November 2022.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to "reinforce the semiconductor ecosystem in the EU, ensure the resilience of supply chains and reduce external dependencies". Chip design houses that sell into the car industry are one of the few parts of that chain where small European firms compete directly with American and Asian suppliers. TouchNetix is Norwegian, outside the EU, but its funding came from Horizon 2020 and its record shows both sides of the bet: a European-designed automotive chip did reach mass-produced cars, yet its first named design wins are Korean vehicles built through Korean tier-one suppliers, and no European carmaker has been named as a customer.

The Verdict

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