How OriginGPS Spent Its EIC Accelerator Grant on Cellular IoT

OriginGPS made GPS receiver modules small enough for wearables, drones and fish finders, and for a while called them the world's smallest. In the European Commission's 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot that became the EIC Accelerator, the Israeli company was selected for OriginIoT, a project to make cellular IoT devices quicker to build. It is on the Commission's list of winners as ORIGIN GPS LTD, the project's only beneficiary. The EU contributed €2,198,743.75 to a total cost of €3,141,062.50 between 1 October 2019 and 28 February 2022, according to CORDIS.

Two years after the project ended, the company was in court insolvency proceedings. On 19 March 2024 the court-appointed trustee of "Origin GPS Ltd (in stay of proceedings)", lawyer Eyal Eichel of the Jerusalem firm Arnon, Tadmor-Levy, invited bids for the company's assets and business, in a notice first published in Maariv. The Israeli Registrar of Companies now lists company no. 513880385 as being liquidated by the court, under an order opening proceedings, according to the registrar's open company data. North Data dates the court liquidation entry to 10 April 2024.

A Liquidation and a Hijacked Domain

The Israeli startup database startupim.com records OriginGPS as inactive, having "ceased to operate" in August 2024; Start-Up Nation Central's Finder shows the same date in search listings, but its page could not be opened for this article. The register gives 2023 as the last year for which the company filed an annual report, according to the registrar's data. Israeli private companies do not publish their accounts, so revenue, losses, debts and staff numbers could not be verified. Whether anyone bought the assets offered in March 2024 is not public either.

The company website stayed online after the insolvency without being updated. An archived copy from October 2024 still invites visitors to meet the company at Mobile World Congress and Embedded World in early 2023. In October 2026, origingps.com redirected through a chain of unrelated websites.

The Technology: A Tracker Configured From the Cloud

OriginGPS made its name with tiny satellite navigation receivers. Its Hornet modules have a built-in antenna and its Spider modules use an external one. Later came the ORG4600 modules, which receive two GNSS frequencies (L1 and L5) for higher accuracy. When Haim Goldberger, the founder and CEO, launched the ORG4600-MK01 at the electronica fair in Munich in November 2022, he said it had "sub-1m precision" and cost less than the first L1+L5 model, the Broadcom-based ORG4600-B01, according to GPS World and Embedded Computing Design.

OriginIoT combined such a GNSS receiver with a cellular modem in one small module. The usual way to build a tracker is to write firmware for its microcontroller. OriginIoT was designed so that developers set the device's behaviour on a remote cloud server instead, without writing embedded code. CORDIS describes three building blocks: the OriginIoT system-on-module, the OriginSmart cloud configuration, and OriginLabs, a web-based software service meant to offer "complete device development services from the web". The company said a location-aware cellular device could be developed "in only six weeks, with ~85% cost savings", according to the CORDIS summary of the 2018 Phase 1 study. The cost figure is the company's own claim, and no independent test of it was found.

The module itself existed before the EIC Accelerator-era grant. In February 2018, OriginGPS released the OriginIoT LTE-M system (ordering code ORG2101), built on Gemalto's Cinterion module, and said it cut development "to just 6 weeks", according to PR Newswire. The Phase 2 money therefore went into firmware, cloud tools, certification, pilots and the OriginLabs service, not into inventing the hardware.

What the EU Project Promised, and What the Report Shows

The stated goal of the project was "to deploy a certified solution and start to work with customers on IoT applications", according to the final periodic report on CORDIS, which covers October 2020 to February 2022. The project ran for 29 months, and the report describes the following results:

1. Firmware was extended with "all the basic firmware capabilities to enable commercialization". It also says several bugs were found during the first year.
2. Cloud tools let non-experts use the evaluation kit "without writing a single line of code". CE and RoHS compliance were achieved.
3. Three field pilots were completed: a smart city scenario with the City of Tel Aviv, a mobility scenario with Israel Railways, and cargo tracking with "a large shipping company in Australia". None of the three customers has announced these pilots, and the report does not name the shipping company.
4. For OriginLabs, the company "published an intuitive form" for customers to describe their product, with every request then handled by the OriginIoT team. That is an intake form, not the automated development service the objective described.
5. Five existing distributors were trained. Covid-19 cancelled trade fairs, so marketing moved online, including Google AdWords campaigns.

1. Certified OriginIoT moduleDeliveredCE and RoHS achieved, per the CORDIS report.
2. Set-up from the cloud, no embedded codeDeliveredCloud tools for the evaluation kit; still sold on the company site in 2024.
3. Customer pilotsPartly verifiedThree pilots reported by the company; no customer confirmation found.
4. OriginLabs web development serviceNot deliveredOnly an intake form, handled by staff.
5. Sales growth after the projectNot achievedCourt insolvency proceedings by March 2024.

After the Grant: New Modules, Then Insolvency

The company kept launching products after the project ended. At Embedded World in Nuremberg in June 2022 it showed the 7 x 7 mm ORG4572-MK05, a low-profile ORG1511-MK05 antenna module, the ORG4600 dual-frequency module and a waterproof mini tracker. Amir Benyamini, VP of research and development, explained the new modules this way: "When we realized that the component shortage was here to stay a while, we revisited our roadmap and added two GNSS modules." He was quoted in the company's press release and by the IoT M2M Council. The ORG4600-MK01 followed in November 2022. The archived company site lists no events after March 2023.

The record on private funding is thin and inconsistent. Startupim.com lists only a $900,000 round from VLX Ventures in December 2006. In September 2015, however, Globes and GPS Daily reported a $1.75 million round from Lab IX, the hardware accelerator of Flex, and existing shareholders, which Globes said included the Docor venture capital fund of the Van Leer Foundation. No round after the EU grant could be found, and OriginGPS is not on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which was checked across all 16 pages. This was expected, since the award was grant only. North Data's register extract shows director changes in March and August 2023 and a share transfer on 22 August 2023, seven months before the insolvency notice. It does not show who was involved.

Why It Mattered to Europe

OriginGPS's first EU grant came under the Horizon 2020 topic "Engaging SMEs in space research and development". Its Phase 1 proposal cited the European GNSS Agency's forecast that the number of GNSS devices in use would grow from 5.8 billion in 2017 to almost 8 billion in 2020, with IoT as one of the drivers, according to CORDIS. Positioning modules that are cheap and easy to build into trackers widen the market for satellite navigation services. The Phase 2 grant, however, funded an Israeli supplier whose module combined a third-party cellular modem with GNSS chipsets from Broadcom and MediaTek.

The Verdict

Neither OriginGPS's trustee nor the EIC was asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.