Nanomakers' Nano-Silicon: What the EIC Accelerator Paid For

Lithium-ion battery anodes are mostly graphite, and silicon can in theory hold about ten times as much lithium. The catch is that silicon cracks as lithium enters it. Nanomakers, a spin-off of France's atomic energy commission CEA based in Rambouillet, makes silicon in particles of 40 to 75 nanometres, coated in carbon, that are meant to cope with that strain and can be blended into graphite anodes, according to its product pages.

In the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected Nanomakers' project DEBIMAX, according to the Commission's list of winners. Nanomakers is the only beneficiary named for the project. The grant was €1,756,953.63 towards a total cost of €2,509,933.75, and the goal was to make the material "cheap and available at large scale" for electric cars by quadrupling output per reactor, says the CORDIS fact sheet. Seven years later the company is still trading and still exhibiting its anode material. What the public record does not show is the car-battery business the grant was meant to open.

Where Nanomakers Stands Now

Nanomakers is an active company. The French business register lists it as active, with 10 to 19 employees in 2024 and its seat in Rambouillet, according to Annuaire des Entreprises and Societe.com. No insolvency proceedings appear in the BODACC legal notices, whose most recent entry for the company is a change in its administration in May 2025.

The company's own news shows it is still selling into batteries. It exhibited its "nano-silicon anode active material solutions" at The Battery Show Europe in Stuttgart in June 2026, as it did in 2025 and 2024, according to its announcement. It also sits in two EU battery research consortia that run until the end of 2026, and in June 2026 joined MaterialsCommons, an EU materials data project, as an associated partner without EU funding, according to CORDIS.

A second line of business has grown more visible. In September 2024 Nanomakers exhibited at ICSCRM, an international conference on silicon carbide materials held that year in Raleigh, North Carolina, to present nano silicon carbide "as source material for SiC boules monocrystals production", the crystals that are sliced into wafers for power chips, according to its news page. In April 2025 it filed a patent application for a silicon carbide part used as a source for growing such crystals, according to the IPqwery patent database. Its semiconductor page also lists seals and wafer carriers made with its silicon carbide. Whether this business now outweighs batteries cannot be checked, because no revenue split is public.

The Technology: Silicon Made by Laser

Nanomakers makes its powders by laser pyrolysis, a process developed at CEA in which a laser beam breaks down gaseous reactants into radicals that "recombine together to form particles immediately", with a controlled quench to stop them growing too large, according to its technology page. CORDIS and the company's account of its appearance at the 2018 World Nuclear Exhibition both describe it as a CEA spin-off. The carbon shell is added in the same step, leaving an oxygen-free interface between silicon and carbon, which the company says protects the silicon from the electrolyte and from oxidation during cycling.

The physics are not in dispute: silicon's theoretical capacity is 3,576 mAh/g against 372 mAh/g for graphite, the figures Nanomakers gives on its battery page. The company's commercial claims are larger. CORDIS records its claim that the material "triples the anodes capacity", and at the time of the award it said the material could raise electric-car range by about 30% compared with graphite anodes, according to its grant announcement. Neither figure has been independently tested in a published vehicle or cell programme that could be found.

What DEBIMAX Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 8 October 2019, and the project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 January 2023, according to CORDIS. Its objective was to increase "nanomakers' production capacity fourfold per reactor" so that carbon-coated silicon could serve the automotive mass market and partly replace natural graphite.

The final periodic report describes engineering work: a new production line designed by computer-aided design, pilot-line tests to raise reaction yield and production rate and cut laser consumption, a switch from batch to continuous operation with redesigned automation and powder filtration, a redesigned powder pipeline, longer-life valves and a clean-in-place system. Its headline result is that Nanomakers "has demonstrated the feasibility of multiplying by 5 times its annual nanoparticles production i.e. 50 tons/year/line". The company's own announcement of 26 February 2021 uses the same sentence but gives 40 tonnes a year per line. The two sources disagree, and neither says whether a line of that size is in commercial operation.

1. Design a higher-capacity production lineDeliveredLine designed and process redesigned for continuous operation, per the CORDIS report.
2. Four times the output per reactorPartlyFive-fold output shown "feasible" (40 or 50 tonnes a year per line); no announcement that such a line runs commercially.
3. Lower cost for the automotive mass marketNot achievedNo car maker, cell maker supply deal or price figure has been announced by the company or a third party.
4. Published resultsThinCORDIS results list a communication toolkit, a data management plan and a 2013 patent.

For a three-year engineering grant, a redesigned and tested continuous process is a real output, and it is credited here. But the grant was justified by the car market, and the measurable promise, a larger line producing cheaper material at scale, is documented only as a feasibility result. The award is therefore rated partly delivered.

What Nanomakers Has Achieved Since the Award

The clearest signal of continued work is EU research money. Besides DEBIMAX, CORDIS lists Nanomakers as a funded partner in five other projects, most of them on batteries: SPIDER (silicon and sulphur-based high-energy cells, €306,737.50 to Nanomakers), ASTRABAT (solid-state batteries, €426,250), GIGAGREEN (greener cell manufacturing, €282,871.25), NEXTCELL (next-generation lithium-ion cells, €440,625) and the earlier nanomaterial safety project NanoREG II (€262,375). Together with DEBIMAX, that is €3,475,812.38 of EU funding to the company.

In June 2022 the company said it had extended its research facilities to make silicon-based anode electrodes in house, according to its news page, and it presented ASTRABAT results on silicon in solid-state anodes in 2023. It has also kept filing patents, including a sintered silicon carbide process filed in 2020 and the 2025 crystal-growth application, per IPqwery.

On the commercial side, the record stops early. When Omnes Capital invested €1.7 million in June 2018 and became the largest shareholder, Nanomakers said it was working with "80% of the global Li-ion battery market" and made 99% of its sales outside Europe, in the United States, Japan and South Korea, according to Omnes Capital and Private Equity Wire. No customer has been named publicly since, and no later funding round could be found.

The Money

The last revenue figures in the public register data are for 2018: revenue of €2,349,064 and a net profit of €177,303, according to Annuaire des Entreprises, with the same rounded figures on Societe.com. The BODACC lists account filings up to the 2018 financial year and none after it. Share capital stands at €614,670, according to Societe.com. In January 2022 the company's administration changed several times in the BODACC; the register now shows Renaud Poulard, a director at Omnes Capital, as chairman and Nicolas Bécret as managing director, both since that month. In 2018 the chief executive was Jean-François Perrin, Omnes said.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act names both battery-grade natural graphite and silicon metal as strategic raw materials, according to the Commission's Raw Materials Information System and Fastmarkets. A European maker of silicon anode material that "will partly replace natural graphite", in the words of the CORDIS objective, fits that policy directly, as does a European source of high-purity silicon carbide feedstock for power chips. The EU has backed the company in six funded projects over a decade. The open question is whether that support built a European supplier at volume or a specialist research partner.

The Verdict

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