R3 Communications After the EIC Accelerator: Radio Firm Liquidated

An Airbus A380 carries about 550 kilometres of wiring weighing 7.5 tonnes, and R3 - Reliable Realtime Radio Communications GmbH told the European Commission it could replace part of it with radio. The Berlin start-up, which traded as R3 Communications, was one of the winners of the October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, listed by the Commission with Project Racoon, "Ultra-Fast Reliable Radio Control Systems for Avionics", as a grant-only award, according to the official list of selected companies. R3 is the only company named for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,144,100 towards a total cost of €3,063,000, for a project that ran from 1 February 2020 to 31 January 2022.

The grant-holder did not reach that end date as a going concern. The Berlin-Charlottenburg commercial register shows R3 - Reliable Realtime Radio Communications GmbH in liquidation from 8 November 2021, according to North Data. In the same month its two managing directors took charge of a renamed shell company, R3 Solutions GmbH, in which the industrial group Peppermint took a stake, according to WISTA and GIT Sicherheit. R3 Solutions still sells the company's EchoRing wireless technology, to factories and intralogistics, not to aviation.

Where R3 Stands Now

The original company is dissolved but not yet deleted. North Data lists it as "(liq)" with a liquidation entry dated 8 November 2021; the last company documents it shows are shareholder lists from August 2021 and the annual accounts for 2019. No insolvency notice appears among the register events North Data shows, and no public statement explains why the company was wound down rather than continued. Whether part of the EU grant was recovered could not be verified.

The business carried on next door. R3 Solutions GmbH was registered in September 2016 as REN Roasted Energy Food GmbH; on 24 November 2021 it took its new name, a capital of €100,000, a corporate purpose matching the old company's and Bohge and Bonanati as managing directors, according to North Data, which lists Peppermint Holding GmbH as a shareholder. Peppermint's managing partner Marcus Baumbach called the move "a new chapter at Peppermint", the start of a business line for "Wireless Technologies & Sensorics", WISTA reported. The successor's legal notice gives the new register number, and the old domain r3coms.com now forwards to its website.

R3 Solutions is active. It has filed annual accounts up to 2024, which are behind North Data's paywall, and it won German federal research funding in 2022 for the 6G-CAMPUS (€764,409) and MERCI (€191,685) projects. Its website describes a team of "more than 30 people from 9 countries", a patent portfolio of eight EchoRing patent families and products manufactured in Germany. In January 2024 it named the United States its focus market, and in March 2026 it launched an online talk series. Nordic Semiconductor lists it as a partner for DECT NR+, a licence-free 5G standard for industrial devices.

The Technology: Radios That Repeat for Each Other

Ordinary wireless networks such as Wi-Fi let a device send whenever the channel seems free, which causes collisions and unpredictable delays. EchoRing works like the old token ring networks: only the station holding a small control packet, the token, may transmit, so the worst-case delay can be calculated in advance. When a packet fails, another station that heard it, the "echo station", forwards it at once instead of the sender trying again over the same bad link. R3 Solutions specifies latency under 2 milliseconds and 99.999999% packet availability in the 5.8 GHz band, on standard Wi-Fi chips from Texas Instruments running its own firmware. Those figures are the company's own; no independent test was found.

Racoon was meant to go further. The CORDIS report says EchoRing "has limits: when large numbers of transmitters are involved, its efficiency drops", and describes Racoon, "RAdio-COntrolled ONboard Systems for Avionics", as a "fundamentally new" architecture to be taken from technology readiness level 6 to 8. It was to run in the band reserved for wireless avionics intra-communications (WAIC). The 4.2 to 4.4 GHz band was the only one below 15.7 GHz found suitable for such links inside aircraft, and it is shared with the aircraft's own radio altimeters, so aviation regulators still had to settle how the two would coexist, Avionics International reported in 2017.

What Project Racoon Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The application promised a lot. The company wrote that it had cut data loss to fewer than 3 packets in 10 million, that its method was "1,000x more reliable" than competitors', and that it had contracts or letters of intent from aircraft manufacturers, airlines, cabin fitters and avionics makers, according to the CORDIS fact sheet. Its "strategic focus" was a software solution for "a European aircraft manufacturing giant", which it said had commissioned a proof of concept for the wireless control of cabin lighting. The customer is not named, and no such contract has been announced by either side. The figures in the file also shift: the objective puts the avionics market at €78 billion, the periodic report at €61 billion.

Only the first of two reporting periods, February 2020 to January 2021, is on CORDIS. It reports that the new time-division (TDMA) architecture was designed and running on R3's hardware, that work on cooperation algorithms had begun, and that a first transceiver prototype had communicated in the WAIC band at 4.3 GHz. It also says the kick-off for ISO 9001 and EN 9100 certification, the quality standard for aerospace suppliers, had taken place. No report for the second year, no deliverables and no publications are listed on the results page.

1. New TDMA radio architectureDeliveredImplemented and running on R3 hardware by January 2021, per the CORDIS report.
2. WAIC-band transceiverPrototypeFirst prototype at 4.3 GHz demonstrated; no later version reported.
3. TRL 8 avionics control systemNot achievedNo final report; the grant-holder entered liquidation in November 2021.
4. Cabin lighting solution for an aircraft makerNot achievedNo contract, flight test or product announced by R3 or any aircraft maker.
5. EN 9100 aerospace certificationUnverifiedProcess kicked off in 2020; no certificate found.

Aviation is absent from what R3 Solutions sells today. Its website lists three markets, intralogistics, factory automation and passenger transport, and twelve customer stories, from a historic funicular in Porto to automotive robot lines; none involves an aircraft. The architecture work may have fed into later products, but no public source links any R3 Solutions product to Racoon.

The Money

R3 started with €25,000 of capital in July 2015 and raised a seven-figure pre-series A round from Creathor Venture and VC Fonds Technologie Berlin in January 2017, according to EU-Startups and Adlershof; neither gives the amount. The last capital increase on record, to €47,840, was registered in February 2019, eight months before the EIC cut-off. No later equity round was announced.

Public money kept flowing until shortly before the end. North Data, citing EU state aid records, lists €270,744 of Covid aid in May 2021 and €1,555,200 under the federal and state programme for regional economic structure (GRW) in July 2021, four months before the liquidation. Whether the GRW grant was paid out could not be verified. Neither the EIC nor the company has said how much of the €2,144,100 EU contribution was paid before the liquidation.

Why Europe Should Care

Lighter aircraft burn less fuel, and the EU's main aviation research partnership, the Clean Aviation Joint Undertaking, aims for aircraft with no less than 30% lower net greenhouse gas emissions than 2020 technology, entering service by 2035. Replacing cabin wiring with certified wireless links is one of the weight savings that goal could use, and R3 pitched Racoon as a European source of such radios. Racoon produced a prototype for that market and then stopped.

The successor's work fits a different EU priority: deterministic wireless for factories, including the 6G-CAMPUS research project and the DECT NR+ standard it helps develop at ETSI, according to the company and Nordic Semiconductor. That is useful European industrial technology. It is not what the EIC Accelerator paid for.

The Verdict

R3 Solutions, the liquidator of the original company and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.