From EIC Accelerator to Pilots: ONiO's Batteryless Chip

Most small wireless sensors run on a coin cell that someone eventually has to replace. ONiO, an Oslo chip design company, set out to remove the battery altogether with ONiO.zero, a RISC-V microcontroller that powers itself from ambient light, radio waves, heat or vibration. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal cut-off of 19 May 2020, the European Commission selected ONiO for blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity, for a project called WISE. ONiO is the only company listed for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,495,500 towards a total cost of €3,565,000, for a project that ran from 1 November 2020 to 31 October 2022.

The equity followed. In September 2021 ONiO announced a $2.3 million equity investment from the EIC Fund and MP Pensjon, the TINE pension fund, as part of its EIC Accelerator award, according to the company's release on EIN Presswire. ONiO appears in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which describes it with the WISE project title. How the $2.3 million was split between the two investors has not been published.

Where ONiO Stands in 2026

ONiO is an active company. The Brønnøysund Register Centre lists it as a private limited company with 17 employees, registered on 11 August 2026, a new share capital entry of 17 December 2025, and filed accounts for 2025; it is not in bankruptcy or liquidation. The register also shows that it was founded on 8 September 2016 as CURA8 AS and took the name ONiO on 3 January 2019. Its board is chaired by Mårten Skogö, the node.vc partner who led its 2025 round, according to the register's list of roles.

Its most recent news is a partnership announced on 25 November 2025 with BeFC, a French maker of paper-based biofuel cells, to co-develop reference designs such as glucose monitors, temperature patches and cold-chain trackers, according to ONiO's announcement. North Data lists a patent publication titled "Energy savings in an embedded system" dated 28 January 2026. No customer launch of a product built on ONiO.zero has been announced.

The Technology: A Microcontroller That Harvests Its Own Power

A typical battery-free sensor today needs several chips: a microcontroller, a radio, memory and a separate power management chip that collects energy from a solar cell or antenna. ONiO puts all of these on one die. Its product page lists a RISC-V core rated at 22µW per MHz that starts itself from less than 1µW, a 2.4GHz radio, 64KB of flash, an internal rectifier that harvests radio energy in the 800 to 2400MHz bands, and an input for solar, piezoelectric and thermal sources from 0.25V. The company claims this saves 60 to 80% on the bill of materials compared with designs that add an off-the-shelf energy harvesting chip.

The chip has changed since it was first shown. When ONiO unveiled it in January 2020, CNX Software reported 2KB of RAM, up to 32KB of flash and a top speed of 24MHz, and said the chip was "not released yet". The current page lists 8KB of SRAM, 64KB of flash and up to 32MHz. ONiO says the chip scores 181 CoreMark per millijoule on the EEMBC ULPMark-CoreMark benchmark, a figure also reported by eeNews Europe; the EEMBC score table itself could not be checked for this article. The process node and foundry are not disclosed beyond a "mainstream process".

That article marks a shift in how ONiO sells the chip. It describes "batteryless" as a story the company chose so as not to become "just another piece of silicon", and says it "may have oversimplified" its own reality. The home page now calls ONiO.zero a chip "designed for total power flexibility", from energy harvesting to battery operation. The technology funded by the EIC is unchanged; the market pitch has widened to battery-assisted designs. Partnerships with supercapacitor makers point the same way: ONiO said in June 2025 that for some uses the chip "still needs a way to buffer and deliver energy reliably", and added VINATech's capacitors to its design stack, as reported by Passive Components Blog and in ONiO's own release.

What WISE Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The WISE objective on CORDIS sets out a three-part plan for "the next 3-5 years": direct sales, distribution or licensing of ONiO.zero to all types of customers; turnkey solutions for segments such as smart buildings, automotive and industry; and "full development and roll-out of customer tailored sensors". The company said the EIC money would "fast-track the industrialization and market launch" of its products.

The final periodic report, covering November 2021 to October 2022, says ONiO "matured ONiO.zero to TRL 8 and made it ready for full industrialization", that the project "started the development of turnkey solutions (sensor units, tags, interfaces, etc.)", and that the company engaged potential lead customers. It names no customer, order or sales figure. The project ended on schedule. TRL 8 is the company's own assessment and has not been independently confirmed.

1. Mature ONiO.zero for industrialisationDeliveredTRL 8 reported on CORDIS; specifications and benchmark published.
2. Turnkey solutions for market segmentsPartly deliveredReference designs for a remote control and a shelf label; no turnkey product sold.
3. Direct sales, distribution or licensing of the chipPartly deliveredBy June 2025 customers had "working prototypes and pilot products"; volume production was still to be ramped.
4. Roll-out of customer tailored sensorsNot deliveredNo customer sensor roll-out announced by ONiO or anyone else.

The chip was finished as a technology during the grant, which is what an EIC grant mainly funds. The market launch it was meant to speed up has not been shown: almost three years after WISE ended, the company was still raising money to "ramp production".

What ONiO Has Achieved Since the Award

In June 2025 ONiO announced a €5 million Series A led by Stockholm's node.vc with Helsinki's Maki.vc as co-lead, while "existing investors EIC Fund and MP Pension matched the investment". node.vc and BeBeez report the same terms. The release says the chip "has been tested in solar keyboards, electronic shelf labels, air quality sensors, asset trackers, and soil sensors monitoring crops", and that "customers have working prototypes and pilot products". None of the reports names a customer. ONiO's investor page lists four completed rounds: pre-seed in 2017, seed in 2018, a bridge in 2021 and the 2025 Series A.

Public research money kept coming. CORDIS lists ONiO in two other EU projects: ASSET, a Horizon 2020 SME innovation associate project from January 2021 to March 2022 with €116,698.75 of EU funding, on antennas for energy harvesting in medical chips; and ENLIGHTENED, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by the Swedish solar cell maker Epishine, running from September 2024 to August 2027, in which ONiO's net EU contribution is €126,000. In September 2024 ONiO said it had joined SELECT, a €3.1 million Eurostars project with Epishine, Ligna Energy, Jiva Materials, 4MOD Technology and the shelf-label maker Pricer, aimed at batteryless shelf labels and remote controls; Ligna Energy and ONiO both describe the consortium. In April 2024 ONiO said the Research Council of Norway had granted NOK 11.9 million for batteryless soil sensors, with Sensonomic and Mære Agricultural School; this grant could not be confirmed in a second source.

The Money

ONiO's filed accounts, published by the Brønnøysund Register Centre, show sales income falling from NOK 18.76 million in 2023 to NOK 9.08 million in 2024 and NOK 6.51 million in 2025. What the 2023 sales consisted of is not shown in the register's key figures. The net loss was NOK 16.43 million in 2023, NOK 13.80 million in 2024 and NOK 13.38 million in 2025. Payroll costs fell from NOK 16.85 million in 2023 to NOK 10.16 million in 2024 and were NOK 10.89 million in 2025.

The balance sheet changed more than the business. At the end of 2023 equity was negative at NOK 11.49 million, with NOK 25.57 million of long-term debt. At the end of 2024 equity was positive at NOK 8.55 million despite that year's loss, and short-term debt had risen to NOK 47.87 million; the key figures do not show what moved into equity. At the end of 2025, after the Series A, equity stood at NOK 86.29 million, cash at NOK 37.48 million and total debt at NOK 15.70 million. Non-current assets rose from NOK 3.16 million in 2023 to NOK 58.44 million in 2025; the register's figures do not break them down. Earlier accounts, from the grant years, could not be retrieved for this article.

Why Europe Should Care

ONiO fits two strands of EU policy. The European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to build Europe's capacity to design and make chips; ONiO is a fabless European company that designs its own RISC-V microcontroller. The EU's new batteries rules, agreed by the European Parliament in June 2023, require portable batteries that consumers can "easily remove and replace" and collection targets for portable batteries of 63% by 2027 and 73% by 2030. The regulation has applied since 18 February 2024. Devices without a battery sidestep those duties, and ONiO itself notes that supercapacitors are not classified as batteries under EU rules.

The Verdict

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