Where photonicSENS' EIC Accelerator 3D Camera Stands Today

photonicSENS, the trading name of Photonic Sensors and Algorithms SL, makes cameras that record a colour image and a depth map through one lens in one shot. In May 2020 the European Commission selected it, with blended finance, in the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot, according to the Commission's list of 19 May 2020 winners, which names it as the only company behind the AR_GREEN_CAM project. The grant agreement, signed on 4 November 2020, gave it €2,495,496.50 towards a €3,564,995 project that ran from December 2020 to November 2023, according to CORDIS. The plan was a low-power camera to replace a smartphone's main camera, a nearly automatic production line for millions of cameras a year in Europe, and biodegradable component packaging.

Six years on, photonicSENS sells single-lens 3D cameras for semiconductor, electronics and metrology inspection, not phones. On 7 October 2026 it won the VISION Award, a €3,000 prize presented at the VISION machine vision fair in Stuttgart, for turning plenoptic (light field) imaging into "a manufacturable industrial technology", according to Imaging and Machine Vision Europe, which sponsors the prize, and optics.org. The smartphone camera at the heart of the EIC project has not been announced by any phone maker.

Where photonicSENS Stands Now

The company is active. Its legal entity is listed as active by Empresia, with accounts filed for 2020 to 2023, and its address in Paterna is confirmed by DatosCIF and Infonif. At the VISION award ceremony the company was represented by Jorge Blasco, "CEO and founder", and Sergio Mantecón, its chief commercial officer, who named semiconductors and semiconductor packaging, such as wire bond and chip-on-board inspection, as its "core markets", according to IMVE. In March 2026 it also started work in MetaTune, an EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network on metasurfaces led by the Universitat Politècnica de València, with an EU contribution of €282,188.16, according to CORDIS and the network's partner page.

One filing stands out. The Official Gazette of the Commercial Register (BORME) of 25 August 2026 records, as entered on 18 August 2026, that all three directors left the board: Jorge Vicente Blasco Claret as president, chief executive director and director, David Jesús Blasco Claret as director and secretary, and Torsten Vahrenkamp as director. The notice lists no new appointments, and DatosCIF shows the two Blasco Claret brothers as current holders only of joint and several powers of attorney granted in May 2024. Who now runs the company formally, and why the board stepped down, is not public; no insolvency notice for the company appears in the BORME issues published between that date and 16 October 2026.

The board change follows the death of co-founder Ann Whyte, who had run the company as sole director from 2014 and as president and chief executive director from 2016. The company said in a tribute of 22 May 2025 that she had died "exactly 365 days ago", and the commercial register shows her leaving all board posts on 31 July 2024, when Jorge Blasco became president, according to Empresia.

The Technology: Depth From a Single Lens

Most 3D cameras need more than one component. Stereo systems compare two cameras, structured light cameras project a pattern, and time-of-flight cameras time a pulse of light. photonicSENS puts an array of micro-lenses between the lens and the image sensor, so each frame captures light arriving from several angles; a proprietary algorithm then computes depth for every pixel, according to IMVE. The award jury's spokesman, Martin Wäny, noted that the principle "was first mentioned in 1908".

The company traces the technology to a patent that Jorge Blasco filed in the United States in May 2013 in the names of his three children, who later donated it to the company, according to its own history page; this account could not be checked against patent records for this article. Its claimed advantages are a 1.4 megapixel depth map from one sensor, matched exactly to the colour image, at low power. The apiCAM PRO, launched in October 2022 for millimetre and sub-millimetre inspection, was specified at 1.4 megapixels, under 29 by 29 mm, 150 g and 250 mW, according to Vision Systems Design and the company's announcement. Its MICRO model, launched in August 2025, claims 2.6 µm depth precision over a 4.41 mm field of view, according to the company. These specifications are the company's own; no independent benchmark was found. Its product page lists eight camera families, from the ultra-compact VIVID to MICRO, and IMVE reports more than 50 off-the-shelf camera designs.

What the EIC Award Promised, and What the Record Shows

The AR_GREEN_CAM objective on CORDIS made three commitments. The grant would extend the company's camera to "replace the main camera of the smartphone", delivering 2D images at 13 and 48 megapixels and depth maps at 1.4 and 5.3 megapixels, avoiding 83,102 tonnes of CO2 a year. It would build "the capacity to manufacture millions of cameras per year with minimal human intervention" in Europe. And it would introduce biodegradable packaging that, if adopted by the semiconductor industry, would replace 37,362 tonnes of plastic a year. With the grant, the proposal said, the product would generate "$13M in 2023, and $390M by 2025"; with the equity, $1.98 billion by 2025.

The record is thin. The only published report, labelled "period 2" and covering December 2021 to November 2023, describes work done "during this first 8-month period ranging from December 2020 to July 2021": camera and production line requirements and the optical design, with dissemination, intellectual property, production line design and a clean room build still under way, according to the CORDIS reporting page. It mentions a patent filing for a "critical element" but names no result from the remaining 28 months.

1. Dual-purpose smartphone main camera (13 and 48 MP image, up to 5.3 MP depth)Not deliveredNo phone maker has announced it; current cameras list 1.4 MP depth, per the company.
2. Automated production line in EuropePartly deliveredOwn clean room in Valencia with automated alignment, per IMVE; no evidence of millions of units a year.
3. Biodegradable component packagingNot deliveredNot announced by the company or any third party.
4. $13M revenue in 2023, $390M by 2025MissedAnnual sales below €500,000, per Empresia.
5. Patent on a critical camera elementUnverifiedFiling reported on CORDIS; not identified in patent records for this article.

The company was offered blended finance, but the grant is the only money from the award that is on record. CORDIS lists only the €2,495,496.50 grant, and photonicSENS does not appear among the 319 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all pages on 18 October 2026. No announcement of an EIC equity investment was found.

A Decade of Grants for Phone Cameras

AR_GREEN_CAM was the company's fourth large EU grant for a mobile depth camera. The first two were Horizon 2020 SME Instrument projects called 3D-LEAP: a €50,000 feasibility study in 2014 and a €2,428,192.38 grant from July 2015 to March 2018, both for 3D cameras for phones, tablets and laptops, according to CORDIS (646984, 682804). Then came two Fast Track to Innovation consortia that photonicSENS led: FASTFACEREC, a face-recognition phone camera with the German assembly machine maker ficonTEC and the Danish wafer optics firm NIL Technology (€1,362,835 for photonicSENS, 2018 to 2021), and PERCOSDECAM, a depth camera for phones, tablets and laptops with Axetris and Polyoptics (€1,429,189.13 for photonicSENS, 2020 to 2023).

Their reports show where the phone strategy ended. FASTFACEREC reached "functional prototypes of a newly designed camera and a concept for mass production", according to its final report. The PERCOSDECAM final report, for the period to February 2023, says a camera derived from the project "is being sold to a manufacturer of ANDROID tablets and several industrial applications"; the tablet maker is not named. In June 2021 photonicSENS presented a smartphone reference design on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 platform at Mobile World Congress, according to its announcement, distributed by Kyodo News PR Wire. From October 2022 its launches were industrial.

The Money

Little of the company's finances is public without paid reports. Empresia puts its annual turnover below €500,000, without naming the year, and says the latest accounts on file are for 2023; this figure could not be confirmed from a second free source. Staff numbers, losses and equity could not be verified. The register shows only small increases in nominal share capital, the last in June 2023, and the notices do not state the share premiums paid, so the amount of private investment is unknown. No funding round or named investor was found in news coverage.

Spanish public money has continued since the EIC project. The company lists regional and national projects from 2021 to 2026, including PRO-VISION-PRO with the Barcelona RISC-V chip designer Semidynamics, funded by Spain's CDTI under its PERTE Chip semiconductor plan, which produced a prototype camera chiplet combining an image sensor, a RISC-V processor and diffractive nanolenses, according to its funded projects page and project announcement. The amounts are not given. Customers it names include the Valencian precision parts maker Factor Ingeniería y Decoletaje, quoted on its home page; the company said in December 2023 that "Sony Experia" had featured apiCAM at an internal technology fair. A Protolabs case study describes customers in medical imaging, industry and agriculture without naming them.

Why Europe Should Care

AR_GREEN_CAM was pitched as a way to give Europe high-volume, automated camera production "at an extremely competitive cost", according to CORDIS. That goal fits the European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, which aims to build Europe's capacity "to innovate in the design, manufacturing and packaging of advanced chips", according to the Commission. photonicSENS now sells inspection cameras to the semiconductor packaging industry, and its chiplet work ran under Spain's PERTE Chip programme. Its scale remains small against that ambition.

The Verdict

photonicSENS and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.