Novolyze Turned an EIC Accelerator Award Into Food Safety Software

Most food safety checks happen after the fact: a sample of finished product goes to a lab, and if it tests clean the batch ships. Pathogens such as Salmonella and Listeria are rare and patchy, so a clean sample proves little. Novolyze, founded near Dijon in 2012, bet that food plants would rather watch the steps that actually kill bacteria, the pasteuriser, the oven, the cleaning crew, as they happen. In the October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot it was selected for blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity, to finish that software, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, where it is the only row for the project.

The grant part was modest by EIC standards: an EU contribution of €747,005 towards a €1,067,150 project that ran from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2022, according to CORDIS. The equity part did arrive. In March 2022, the month the project ended, Novolyze announced a $15 million Series A led by the Boston firm WAVE Equity Partners with the European Innovation Council and Liberset taking part, as reported by Food Business MEA and published by WAVE Equity Partners. Novolyze is listed in the EIC Fund portfolio. How much the EIC Fund put in is not public.

What Novolyze Does Today

Novolyze is active and now presents itself as a "Preventive Food Safety Intelligence Platform". Its website sells modules for environmental monitoring, sanitation, process control, clean-in-place (CIP) systems and process validation, the last still under the SurroNov name it used for its first product. Its releases now carry a Cambridge, Massachusetts dateline, a US base the company already named in a February 2017 release.

The company has kept a steady flow of announcements in 2026. On 16 September it said that The Coca-Cola Company had chosen Novolyze for its preventive food safety programme, that 85% of Coca-Cola bottlers in the US already use the platform and that deployment is extending to syrup plants and global operations. That claim comes from Novolyze alone; no statement from Coca-Cola or independent report of it could be found. An earlier, smaller deal is better documented: in February 2024 Liberty Coca-Cola Beverages, a US bottler, began digitising its food safety programme in three plants with Novolyze, according to the company's release and Quality Assurance & Food Safety. On 6 October 2026 it announced a link-up with Charm Sciences that feeds ATP hygiene test results from Charm's novaLUMIIX instrument straight into the platform.

The Technology: Watching the Kill Step

Food plants are required to validate that each "kill step", heating, drying or another treatment, cuts pathogens to safe levels. Novolyze began in that niche. Its SurroNov products are dry, ready-to-use surrogate microorganisms that die off like Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, Cronobacter sakazakii or E. coli, so a plant can test its real production line without bringing pathogens inside, according to the 2017 release, which credits the US Food Safety Modernization Act for the demand.

FoodSafetyGuardian, the product the EIC funded, moves from one-off validation to continuous monitoring. The CORDIS objective describes cloud software that takes data from equipment already installed in a factory, such as temperature probes, and uses algorithms to decide whether a deviation is a real risk at that stage or can be ignored, plus a hygiene module for cleaning and sanitation. The established alternative is paper logs and finished-product testing. The method behind the software is protected: US patent 12,458,035 B2, "Remote monitoring of contaminant reduction in ingestible products", was filed on 30 December 2021, granted to Novolyze Inc on 4 November 2025 and has a European application, EP4445317. CORDIS lists the same application, US 17/566,273, and a US design filing for the Novolyze interface as results of the EIC project.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The plan was narrow: finish the software for FoodSafetyGuardian and the hygiene monitoring platform, test it with customers and bring both to technology readiness level 8, one step short of proven commercial operation. The company put its addressable market at €457 million by 2023. Novolyze's Serbian subsidiary, Novolyze DOO Beograd-Vračar, took part as a linked third party and received €268,108.75 of the EU contribution; the French company received €478,896.25, according to CORDIS.

The final periodic report, covering April 2021 to March 2022, says corrective-action tools, deviation detection and user notifications were built, the Environmental Monitoring module was released, and "an operational version of the platform including Process Control and Environmental Monitoring modules is available". The project closed on its scheduled end date. The report is short and gives no customer numbers, but the products it names are on sale today.

1. Process monitoring software (FoodSafetyGuardian)DeliveredProcess Control module operational per the CORDIS report; sold on the website.
2. Hygiene and sanitation add-onDeliveredEnvironmental Monitoring released during the project; Sanitation Complete used by Liberty Coca-Cola from 2024.
3. Customer tests and market entryDelivered20 of the top 100 food companies were customers by March 2022, per the Series A reports.
4. Protect the methodDeliveredUS patent granted November 2025.
5. €457M addressable marketNot checkableGroup revenue is not published.

What Followed the Award

The Series A is the clearest sign of growth. At the time Novolyze said 20 of the world's 100 largest food companies, including Nestlé, Mars, ADM, Cargill and Olam, used one of its products, and that it was hiring in the US, France and Serbia, according to Food Business MEA and WAVE. By 2026 its releases say "half" of the top 100 food and beverage companies trust it. Neither figure has been confirmed independently.

Novolyze has also worked in EU research consortia beyond the EIC project. CORDIS lists it as a partner in PROTEIN2FOOD, a plant-protein project that ran from 2015 to 2020, with €146,457.50 of EU money, and in MASTER, a food microbiome project from 2019 to 2023, with €51,779.25.

The Money and the Structure

The company reorganised as it raised money. NOVOLYZE HOLDING SAS was registered in Daix in September 2021 with share capital of €5,102,370 and preference shares, and in June 2022 it replaced the founder's company, Bastet Ventures, as president of the operating company, NOVOLYZE SAS, according to legal notices collected by societe.com. Arnaud Valembois, appointed managing director at the same time, was removed from that post with effect from 29 March 2024. The holding cut its capital to €4,989,740 in early 2023 by buying back and cancelling 11,263 shares, according to its register file. Whose shares were bought back is not public. The patent is held by the US company, Novolyze Inc, whose accounts are not public.

The French operating company keeps losing money. Its net result was -€1,842,300 in 2024 and -€2,307,800 in 2025, according to societe.com; the government's company directory gives the same 2025 loss, -€2,307,784. The two disagree on 2025 revenue: the directory shows €1,865,496, while societe.com shows zero. They also disagree on staff, 10 to 19 employees in INSEE's 2024 band against 20 to 49 on societe.com. No insolvency proceedings are recorded.

Why Europe Should Care

Food safety sits at the centre of the EU's food policy. The Farm to Fork Strategy, adopted on 20 May 2020, seven weeks after Novo started, sets out to make the EU food system safe, healthy and sustainable. Novolyze's project cited the World Health Organization's estimate of 420,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. A European supplier of preventive food safety software fits that agenda, but the record shows where the market pulled the company: its customer announcements are mostly American, its releases come from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and its patent is held by its US company. The EU-funded development work, partly done by its Serbian team, built a product whose commercial centre of gravity is now in the United States.

The Verdict

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