Nanoga, the EIC Accelerator and the Promise of Writable TV Screens

Large interactive screens are what schools want and what most of them cannot afford. Nanoga, a small company in Lausanne, told the European Commission in 2019 that it could fix the price problem with chemistry instead of electronics: an invisible coating on the glass of an ordinary television that glows under a pen's light and tells the pen where it is. No touch sensors, no wiring, no power, and, the company said, a third of the cost.

The EU believed it enough to pay twice. A four-month feasibility study in 2019 was followed by a €1,671,250 grant from the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot of today's EIC Accelerator, under the 5 June 2019 cut-off. Seven years later the Swiss register still lists the company as existing, its patents are still being granted, and nothing else about it is visible. No screen was ever shown, and the project website has stopped loading.

What Nanoga Is Doing Now

On paper, Nanoga is alive. The federal register Zefix lists NANOGA SA as existing, with no deletion date, at Avenue Recordon 44 in Lausanne. Moneyhouse also shows it as active, with Nasser Hefiana still on the board with signing rights. The last two register entries both concern people leaving: board member Fabio Bettinelli's signature was struck off in July 2023, and in March 2024 the register recorded that Hefiana was no longer chairman. Swiss companies of this kind do not publish their accounts, so revenue, losses and staff numbers cannot be checked.

Its public face is gone. The company domain nanoga.ch redirects to nanodink.eu, the project website. The Internet Archive's last working copy, from October 2025, shows the same page that went up in 2020: a concept, a list of features and a contact form. No product, price, customer or news item was ever added. By August 2026 the archive recorded a server error, and on 8 October 2026 the address no longer loaded at all. The older DNAwatch site, which the EC winner list gives as the company's website, still loads but carries a 2013 to 2021 copyright line and no company news.

The only recent signs of activity come from patent offices. Japan granted Nanoga a patent on its tiled photonic screen, JP7837336B2, published on 30 March 2026, and a US continuation application filed in September 2024 is still pending. With a live register entry and live patent prosecution but no product, news or website, the company's operating status is unknown.

The Technology: Light Instead of Touch Sensors

Nanoga started in anti-counterfeiting, which its registered purpose still describes. In June 2016 EPFL announced that the start-up, working with Professor Nicolas Grandjean's Laboratory of Advanced Semiconductors for Photonics and Electronics, had developed a nanoscopic watermark for the sapphire glass of luxury watches. A layer of photonic crystals is deposited as vapour in a machine normally used to make LEDs, then activated by lithographic printing so that a pattern, invisible in daylight, glows in colour under ultraviolet light. IEEE Spectrum reported the same work and quoted Nasser Hefyene, as the chief executive's name was then registered; it changed to Hefiana in 2018, according to Zefix.

Nanodink takes the same idea to screens. The Phase 1 summary describes a fully transparent, passive "quantum nano-layer" on the screen glass and a UV-emitting stylus. The marks in the layer glow when the pen's light hits them, and each one is unique, so the pen can work out its exact position from the light that comes back. Nanoga's granted US patent US12124656B2 describes the 2020 version: tiles of glass carrying photoluminescent marks, each encoding its own location, mounted together into a large interactive surface.

The established alternatives are infrared frames, which sense a finger or pen breaking a grid of light beams, and capacitive layers, which need a conductive coating plus control electronics across the whole panel and, Nanoga's report notes, contain a high share of indium. Nanoga's case, set out in its CORDIS report, was that both become very expensive above 80 inches: it put the average price of an 85-inch interactive screen at EUR 8,500 and claimed its passive glass would cut production cost "at least by 50%", allow writing at natural hand speed and remove indium entirely. These are the company's own figures; no independent test of them has been published.

What the EU Paid For, and What CORDIS Shows

Nanoga is the only company named for Nanodink in the EC list of winners for the 5 June 2019 cut-off, which gives its title as "Quantum Photonic Digital-Ink Solution for Large Format Displays". The grant agreement was signed on 29 October 2019, and the project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 January 2023 with a total cost of €2,387,500, of which the EU paid €1,671,250. It came after NANODINK, a Phase 1 feasibility study from February to May 2019 that cost €71,429 and received €50,000. A CORDIS search for "Nanoga" returns no other EU projects.

The project objective promised industrialisation: a product that turns TVs into whiteboards, reduces product costs "by a factor of 3", cumulative revenue of "nearly €40.995-million", cumulative profit of about €24.341 million and 19.3 full-time jobs. The last periodic report on CORDIS covers 1 November 2020 to 31 December 2021, written a year before the project's end. No final report and no deliverables or publications are listed, and the results page shows "No results available".

1. Stylus and USB modulePartialA first stylus prototype reached "+90%" of targeted performance by December 2021, per the company's report; no final model shown.
2. Glass preparation and mountingPartialPilot plant designed on paper with a first cost model; mounting tested on 55-inch glass, not the 85-inch target.
3. Application softwareUnverifiedDelayed by the stylus; targeted for month 32. No later report says whether it was finished.
4. Display prototypes and trade showsNot achievedPlanned "after building 1st display prototypes"; no prototype screen or trade fair appearance has been found.
5. Industrialised product on the marketNot achievedNo launch, price, customer or OEM partner announced by Nanoga or any third party; the website never changed from its 2020 concept page.

The 2021 report blames the Covid-19 pandemic and the semiconductor shortage for "important changes" to the work plan, which is credible for a hardware project that started in November 2019. What cannot be found is any evidence of how the project ended. Under the plan's own measure, a commercial interactive display, the record shows no delivery. The verdict on this award is therefore not delivered.

What Nanoga Has Achieved Since the Award

The clearest output is intellectual property. The first patent family, for a "device for a digital writing instrument" with a 2017 priority date, produced US11630568B2, granted in April 2023, plus granted patents in Japan, Korea and China, while its European application was withdrawn. The second family, filed in December 2020 during the EIC project with David Slobodin as co-inventor, has produced the US patent granted in October 2024 and the Japanese one granted in 2026, with applications in Europe, China and the US still pending.

Nothing else could be verified. Searches for funding rounds, investors, customers, distribution agreements, display makers or school pilots found nothing after 2019. The only revenue figures ever published are the projections in the EU application. Nanoga may hold assets or contracts that it has never disclosed, but this article could not confirm any.

Where It Fits in EU Policy

The project sat at the meeting point of two EU agendas. The Commission's Digital Education Action Plan 2021 to 2027, adopted in September 2020, calls for better digital equipment and connectivity in schools, and price is the main obstacle to large interactive displays in classrooms.

The indium argument has aged less well. Indium was on the EU's 2020 list of critical raw materials, when Nanodink was under way, but the 2023 assessment dropped it from the list. An indium-free touch layer still has environmental and recycling arguments in its favour, but it no longer addresses a material the EU formally classifies as critical.

The Verdict

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