EIC Accelerator Winner NapiFeryn and the Rapeseed Protein Race

NapiFeryn BioTech, a Łódź company founded in 2014, wanted to do for rapeseed what the soy industry did for soybeans: turn the protein-rich cake left after oil pressing, today sold as animal feed, into food ingredients. In the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the pilot that became the EIC Accelerator, the EU selected its ALSEOS project, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names NapiFeryn as the project's only beneficiary. The grant of €2,005,463.25 covered 70% of a €2,864,947.50 project that ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 April 2022, according to CORDIS. Its stated aim was a full-scale demonstrator of the technology "at the commercial level (market launch)".

Seven years later, the regulatory work has paid off and the business has not. The US Food and Drug Administration raised no questions about NapiFeryn's rapeseed protein isolate and concentrate in 2023 and 2024, and the European Commission authorised the concentrate as a novel food in February 2026. But the Polish court register shows that a Łódź court opened remedial proceedings (postępowanie sanacyjne), a court-supervised restructuring for insolvent or nearly insolvent debtors, and handed control of the company to an administrator, according to the KRS register.

A Court Administrator Instead of a Demo Plant

The register entries tell the story in stages. In a case filed with the Łódź-Śródmieście district court's insolvency and restructuring division (file LD1M/GR/2/2025), the court first appointed a temporary court supervisor to secure the company's assets; that order was declared enforceable on 23 May 2025. A second order, enforceable from 10 December 2025, opened remedial proceedings, named Paweł Jan Kuśmirek as administrator and took away the company's right to manage its own affairs. Both were entered in the register on 6 July 2026. Five days earlier, on 1 July 2026, an entry had deleted co-founder Magdalena Kozłowska as president of the management board, leaving co-founder Piotr Wnukowski as vice-president, a change also recorded by North Data. Under Poland's Restructuring Law, remedial proceedings let a debtor restructure under court control while an administrator runs the business, according to the statute's provisions on the procedure. The company has not been declared bankrupt.

The 2024 financial statements, filed on 10 April 2026, show revenue of PLN 356,700, costs of PLN 2.9 million and a loss of PLN 2.6 million, on total assets of PLN 24.8 million, according to rejestr.io, which reproduces the register's filings. The same site's summary of that filing says that in April 2025 the company lost the right to its rented laboratory space and ended the employment of most of its staff, that the Polish research agency NCBR halted funding of a national project and asked for the grant back, and that fixed assets were pledged as security for a loan of up to €2.5 million. The site generates those summaries automatically from the documents, and the original statements could not be opened for this article, so these points rest on that one source.

The company's own channels have gone quiet. The latest news item on its website is from January 2023. No statement on the restructuring has been published.

Getting Food Protein Out of Rapeseed Cake

Rapeseed holds about 20% protein, the company says on its website, but after pressing, that protein ends up in a cake fed to livestock; no commercial process could recover it in fully functional form, the company told the EU in 2019. NapiFeryn's process, ALSEOS (Aqueous Low-Shear Extraction of Oil Seeds), uses water-based, mild fractionation to recover the native proteins and splits them into two products: Raptein 90, an isolate with more than 90% protein, and Raptein 30, a protein-fibre concentrate, according to the project's final CORDIS report. In a 2019 interview, co-founder and CTO Piotr Wnukowski said the process removes bitter phenolics with patented purification steps and, unlike conventional soy processing, needs no hexane, according to FoodNavigator. The EU's safety assessment describes the concentrate as obtained by "aqueous and organic solvent extraction" of cold-pressed rapeseed cake, according to the authorising regulation's text on LawPlayer.

The business model was licensing, not production: oilseed crushers would build plants under licence and pay fees scaled to the rapeseed they process, with one global distributor taking the ingredients to market. NapiFeryn told the EU that its technology would double the value of a tonne of rapeseed, from €450 to €900, and that a first licence agreement had been signed in 2016, according to CORDIS. The licensee was never named, and no plant built under that agreement has been announced.

What ALSEOS Promised and What It Delivered

The project's final report on CORDIS, for the period to 30 April 2022, lists real output. A 150-litre ALSEOS line was built to food standards at Bionanopark in Łódź, with GMP and HACCP systems, and produced samples for regulators. A 2,000-litre pilot line in Żórawina, in Lower Silesia, was "prepared and approved as planned". With the engineering firm PM Group, the company drew up a biorefinery engineering design package with mass and energy balances and capital and operating cost estimates, meant for licensees. Novel food and GRAS dossiers for both products were filed with EFSA and the FDA, and a patent application covering further IP was filed (PCT/EP2019/069113). The company ran application tests in plant-based drinks, yoghurt alternatives and gluten-free bread.

The headline goal was not met. The project was to deliver a full-scale demonstrator at technology readiness level 9 and bring NapiFeryn's partners to an investment decision on a "first-in-kind biorefinery plant (Demo Plant)". The final report speaks of the 2,000-litre line and of talks with rapeseed processors in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia, but names no investment decision. None has been announced since. A demonstration plant in Żórawina had already been promised once: in 2017, Krzysztof Wilczyński of Grupa Wilmar said a pilot biorefinery would stand there "in two years", according to Antyweb, and in 2019 the company expected commercial quantities of Raptein by 2022, according to FoodNavigator.

1. Full-scale TRL9 demonstrator and market launchNot achievedPilot lines of 150 and 2,000 litres only; no commercial plant announced. CORDIS
2. Biorefinery engineering designDeliveredDesign package with PM Group, per the final report. CORDIS
3. US and EU food approvalsDeliveredFDA no-questions letters 2023 and 2024; EU authorisation of the concentrate in 2026.
4. EU approval of the Raptein 90 isolateUnverifiedDossier filed with EFSA per CORDIS; no EU decision found.
5. Licensees and a go-to-market partnerNot achievedNo licensee or distributor named publicly.

The Approvals Came Late

The regulatory file is the clearest result of the EU money. On 22 November 2023 the FDA answered NapiFeryn's notice on canola protein isolate, GRN 1103, with no questions, and revised the letter on 21 August 2024, according to the FDA response letter. On 25 July 2024 it did the same for the concentrate, sold as Raptein 30, under GRN 1122, according to a second FDA letter; the notice itself names Raptein 30 as the trade name.

In Europe, NapiFeryn applied on 19 August 2022 for authorisation of the concentrate as a novel food. EFSA's panel adopted a positive opinion on 27 August 2025, with one condition: people over 10 should not eat foods and food supplements containing it on the same day, because of combined manganese intake, according to NutraIngredients and Vitafoods Insights. EFSA also found that the concentrate cannot be called a good protein source under its amino acid scoring. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/386 of 20 February 2026 authorised it as "defatted rapeseed powder" and reserved the market to NapiFeryn for five years, from 15 March 2026 to 15 March 2031, according to the text on LawPlayer and EUR-Lex. By then, the company had been under remedial proceedings for more than two months.

The Money Around the Grant

In January 2023 NapiFeryn announced a €2.5 million investment led by the Dutch climate tech fund Icos Capital and joined by a Polish family office, according to the company's announcement, Icos Capital and AIN. The release said the money would bring the company to "the deployment and demonstration of the technology of NFB on an industrial scale". The register does not show a new shareholder: the share capital has stood at PLN 78,400 since 2017, and the only registered shareholders are the two founders and Grupa Wilmar Marek Wilczyński S.K.A., which holds 768 of 1,568 shares, according to the KRS extract and rejestr.io. How the Icos money was structured is not public; the reference in the 2024 filing to a loan of up to €2.5 million matches the round's size, but whether the two are the same could not be verified.

Public money did more of the work. Besides ALSEOS, CORDIS lists a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 grant for the predecessor project FIDOs in 2015 and €60,000 for NapiFeryn in the Horizon Europe project Giant Leaps on alternative proteins, where its participation is marked as ended. In September 2023 NapiFeryn signed a grant agreement with the NCBR's NUTRITECH programme for a rapeseed isolate for dairy alternatives, a PLN 6,053,475.70 project with PLN 4,578,177.59 of public money, according to the company's project page. The EIC award was grant only, and no EIC Fund investment in the company has been announced.

Why Europe Should Care

Poland imports almost all the soy it uses and ranks fourth in the EU for rapeseed, harvesting 2.2 to 3.2 million tonnes a year, Antyweb reported in 2017. The ALSEOS report tied the project to the Commission's 2018 report on the development of plant proteins, which it quotes as expecting "double-digit annual growth" in plant protein for food and calling for research to make such crops competitive, and to the EU's circular economy goals. Upgrading rapeseed cake from feed to food fits both. That case still holds, but it is being made by large groups with their own plants. NapiFeryn holds US clearances and an exclusive EU authorisation until 2031 that it has no production capacity to use, and its future now depends on what the restructuring makes of its patents and approvals.

The Verdict

NapiFeryn, its administrator and Icos Capital were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.