EIC Accelerator Check: OMTLAB and Its Factory Indoor Positioning

OMTLAB, a Budapest engineering firm founded in 2014 by three electrical engineers, built a real-time location system (RTLS) that tracks tools, pallets and forklifts inside factories to within half a metre. In the European Commission's 5 June 2019 cut-off it was one of the winners of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, according to the Commission's list of selected companies. The project, SUNSTONE, received an EU grant of €961,100 towards a total cost of €1,373,000, from 1 October 2019 to 30 June 2022, according to CORDIS. OMTLAB was the only company named for the project.

Two months into the project the company renamed itself after its product. Since 19 December 2019 its registered name has been Sunstone-RTLS Ipari Szolgáltató Kft., under the same company number, 01-09-187657, according to Cégcontrol and OPTEN, which lists OMTLAB Kft. as its former name. It is still trading: its 2025 accounts show total income of HUF 200.7 million and an after-tax profit of HUF 120,000, with five employees, according to CompanyWall.

Where the Company Stands Now

The company is active and has no open insolvency, liquidation or strike-off proceedings, according to the Nemzeti Cégtár register summary, which records 2025 net sales of HUF 200,054 thousand and a headcount band of five to nine. CompanyWall, drawing on the accounts filed with the Ministry of Justice, gives total income (sales plus other income) of HUF 200.69 million for 2025, up from HUF 145.62 million in 2024 and HUF 129.88 million in 2023. Its registered main activity is engineering and technical consultancy. The two figures differ slightly because Nemzeti Cégtár reports net sales and CompanyWall total income.

Growth came at the cost of margin. After profits of HUF 17.46 million in 2023 and HUF 20.63 million in 2024, the company's costs rose to HUF 200.49 million in 2025 and the after-tax result shrank to HUF 120,000. Equity stood at HUF 61.73 million at the end of 2025, and receivables more than doubled to HUF 46.14 million, a rise OPTEN flags as a moderately negative change.

The public face of the business has thinned. The product website, sunstone-rtls.com, and the old company site, omt.hu, did not respond when checked for this article in October 2026; the last capture of the Sunstone home page in the Internet Archive dates from June 2023. The company's LinkedIn page still describes it as a provider of indoor location data for manufacturing. No news, customer announcement or funding round from 2024 to 2026 could be found.

The Technology: Ultra-Wideband Instead of Bluetooth

Satellite positioning does not work inside a steel factory hall. OMTLAB's system uses ultra-wideband (UWB) radio: small tags on tools, carts, forklifts or workers send short pulses, fixed "anchors" mounted above the shop floor receive them, and a central server calculates each tag's position, according to a CORDIS results article. The positions are fed into the factory's manufacturing execution (MES) and ERP software, so planners can see where parts wait and where work stalls.

The established alternative in many plants is Bluetooth beacons, which reach 3 to 5 metres of accuracy in industrial conditions, against the half-metre that one of OMTLAB's first customers required, Forbes Hungary reported in March 2018. UWB itself is not unique; several larger vendors sell UWB tracking. OMTLAB's claim, in its final CORDIS report, is a custom design with a fully synchronised anchor network that keeps accuracy among metal and obstructed lines of sight, supports more tags over a longer range and keeps the tags simple. No independent benchmark of that claim could be found. A trade article from October 2019 by newtechnology.hu describes the same sub-half-metre accuracy and a method of tracking thousands of pallets indirectly by tagging the vehicles that move them.

Before the EIC: A Lab With No Investors

The company's history page, preserved by the Internet Archive, dates its start to 2014 as a provider of custom wireless hardware, with a first 80 m2 proof of concept in 2015 and a first pilot at a Fortune 500 automotive supplier in 2017. By 2018, it said, Sunstone covered more than 15,000 m2 and tracked more than 1,000 tags in real time for clients in the automotive, electronics and metal industries. The archived omt.hu site says that from 2019 the company provided only services connected with Sunstone RTLS.

Forbes Hungary profiled the three founders, László Jakab, Gábor Fehér and Péter Kállai, in March 2018. At that point the company had ten people, had brought in no investor, and had won a HUF 40 million grant to develop its system plus HUF 1.2 million to prepare a larger application. At one unnamed electronics and cable-harness plant its 43 anchors covered 10,000 m2 in two halls and tracked 280 tools and 320 products at once. The omt.hu grants page lists a Hungarian GINOP grant for a "UWB Indoor Positioning System Upgrade" and two national grants for preparing Horizon 2020 applications.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The SUNSTONE proposal promised to turn the piloted system into a product the company could sell and support worldwide: easier installation, preparation for mass production, business logic in software, interfaces to third-party MES and ERP packages, and cyber security. It named pilots at LEAR Corp., FLEX and Foxconn and contracts for further pilots at Arconic and Siemens. It projected a 15% efficiency gain for users, profitability in the first year, break-even on the investment in two years, and "doubling our company size in 3 years".

The final report, covering April 2021 to June 2022, says the product specification was finished in month 3 and the hardware by month 12, with small delays from late component deliveries. COVID-19 then halted production at the automotive plants that hosted its pilots, which held back the software and analytics work. The company obtained a six-month extension and later another three months, so the project ended nine months later than first planned. The report adds Haldex to the list of pilot hosts. By the end, it says, pilots had run at four locations for different use cases, and more than 500 leads had produced 20 commercial agreements. The November 2022 CORDIS article counts 10 commercial installations in Hungary and a plan to expand "across the region" through a pan-European partner network.

1. Market-ready UWB hardware and softwareDeliveredHardware done in month 12, software optimisation in period 2, per the CORDIS report.
2. Commercial customersDelivered20 commercial agreements reported; 10 installations in Hungary by November 2022.
3. ProfitabilityPartlyProfitable in 2023 to 2025; 2019 to 2022 accounts not checked.
4. International roll-out via partnersNot shownNo installation outside Hungary publicly named.
5. Double company size in 3 yearsNot achievedFour to five employees in 2023 to 2025, against ten in 2018.
6. On timeLateTwo extensions totalling nine months, attributed to COVID-19 and parts delays.

The Money and the Team

The EU paid 70% of the project budget. The company has not reported any equity round before or after the grant, and it does not appear among the roughly 315 organisations on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies. CompanyWall lists two private individuals, one of them László Jakab, as its current owners; whether the other two co-founders named by Forbes still hold stakes could not be verified from free sources. Annual accounts before 2023 are not shown free of charge by the register services consulted, so revenue and staff in the years of the EIC project could not be checked.

Why It Matters for Europe

The European Commission's Industry 5.0 agenda sets three priorities for industrial research: human-centricity, sustainability and resilience. Indoor location data of the kind Sunstone produces touches two of them: it shows where parts wait and where work stalls, and it can track forklifts and people for safety. Hungary's car-parts and electronics plants, where OMTLAB ran its pilots, are part of European automotive supply chains. A Hungarian supplier gives those plants a local source of the technology, but at five employees its weight in that market is small.

The Verdict

Sunstone-RTLS was not asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.