How SAN Hitech Spent Its EIC Accelerator Grant on Heating Fabric

SAN Hitech is an Israeli engineering company that was not, before 2019, in the business of growing vegetables. Its old website describes a Haifa contractor founded in 1995 that designs, builds and services hydraulic, mechanical and electrical equipment for customers such as the Israel Electric Corporation, Haifa Refineries and Israel Railways, according to san.co.il. In January 2019 it was selected in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, for AgrowFab: a fabric of carbon-coated nylon yarn that is heated by an electric current and radiates far-infrared heat into the root zone of greenhouse crops. The European Commission's list of the 9 January 2019 winners names two beneficiaries for AgrowFab, SAN HITECH LTD. of Haifa and THERMO SIV LTD of Or Yehuda, the textile start-up that makes the fabric.

The grant was €1,349,290.25 towards a total cost of €1,927,557.50, for a project that ran from 1 May 2019 to 31 March 2022, according to CORDIS. SAN, as coordinator, received €737,177; ThermoSiv received €612,113.25. The final report describes a finished control unit, pilots in Israel and Japan, and first agreements with an Israeli manufacturer and a Japanese distributor. What it does not describe is a sale, and none has been announced since.

What SAN Hitech Does Now

SAN Hitech is active. The Israeli Corporations Authority lists the company as active, with an annual report filed for 2026 and a registered address in Akko, according to the register data published on data.gov.il. OpenCorporates also shows it as active but still gives the old Haifa address at 21 Halutzei HaTa'asiya, the address in the CORDIS file. Israeli private companies do not publish their accounts, so revenue, profit and headcount over time cannot be checked.

Its public face today is a defence product. Under the name SAN Tactical Breaching, the company sells a battery-powered electro-hydraulic kit that lets one soldier or police officer force doors, bars and cables, and says it is the main supplier of such gear to the Israel Defense Forces and is used in more than 40 countries, according to its website, which gives an address in Qiryat Shemona and lists trade shows up to SOF Week in Tampa in May 2026. The Israel Innovation Authority's grantee entry for SAN HITECH links company number 512096108 to the same breaching business, with Ran Nakash as CEO and 15 employees. The breaching kit predates AgrowFab: in September 2019 Joint Forces News reported it in use in "over 25 countries", and EDR Magazine wrote that the IDF had used it for more than a decade. Neither website mentions AgrowFab, and the project domain listed on CORDIS, agrowfab.com, no longer resolves.

The Technology: Heating Roots, Not Air

Greenhouses are usually heated with hot-water pipes, warm-air blowers or radiant heaters that warm the whole building. The AgrowFab partners argued that up to 40% of that energy is wasted because it never reaches the crop, according to the CORDIS objective. Their alternative was ThermoSiv's fabric: nylon yarn coated with a carbon compound so that it conducts electricity, woven into sheets that warm up when current flows and radiate far-infrared heat. Laid under or around plant beds, the sheets heat the root zone directly. SAN's part was the engineering around it: a control unit that switches heating zones by local temperature and humidity and ties heating to irrigation and fertigation.

ThermoSiv, founded in 2003 by retired general David Agmon, sells the same yarn as SmartYarn for car seats, clothing and other uses, according to its website, which also says SmartYarn passed General Motors testing and was "slated to be installed in GM EVs as of 2024". No General Motors source confirming that could be found. The Israeli register lists ThermoSiv as active but flags it as a "violating company" (מפרה), with its last annual report filed for 2021, according to the same data.gov.il register.

The incumbents AgrowFab set out to replace, air convection heating, hot water pipes and radiant heaters, are named in the CORDIS results article. What AgrowFab offered against them was a thin, flexible heating sheet and a smarter controller. How well it worked rests on the partners' own numbers, and those numbers move. The Phase 1 report of 2018 cites "up to 30%" higher yields in prototype trials; the Phase 2 proposal promises 35%; ThermoSiv's website says pilots raised yields by "20-39 %"; and a promoted article in Haaretz, paid for by ThermoSiv, cites a 250% gain in one cherry tomato pilot. No independent trial or peer-reviewed paper on AgrowFab could be found; CORDIS lists no publications.

What the EIC Grant Paid For

AgrowFab came through both stages of the old SME Instrument. A four-month Phase 1 feasibility study, from May to August 2018, received €50,000 and concluded that sales would start in Israel and northern Europe, according to its CORDIS report. A CORDIS results article published in February 2019, before Phase 2 began, already called the system "market ready".

Phase 2 aimed to put that system on the market and promised cumulative revenues of €47 million after five years of sales and 35 new jobs. The final periodic report, covering May 2021 to March 2022, lists what was done: fabric weaves for tomato and squash beds tested between 300 and 1,600 W/m², a new local controller that pushes demand to a central unit, winter pilots at two sites in Israel (a nursery and a strawberry greenhouse) and two in Japan (tomato and broccoli nurseries), and later installations in further strawberry and pineapple greenhouses in Israel. It says early adopters in both countries "are aiming to enlarge their pilot installations", that "initial agreements have been signed with an OEM manufacturer in Israel and a national distributer in Japan", and that the partners prepared two plants for production. Neither partner nor customer is named. With the business market slowed by COVID-19, the partners also designed a heated home planter kit and "prepared an online launch plan". No launch of that kit could be found.

1. Heating fabric for crop bedsDeliveredWeaves for tomato and squash, per CORDIS.
2. Root environment control unitDeliveredLocal and central controllers described in the final report.
3. Field validationPartlyPilots in Israel and Japan; results only from the partners.
4. Commercial launchNot achievedNo customer, sale or distributor named since 2022.
5. Home planter kitNot achievedLaunch plan only; no product found.
6. €47M revenue, 35 jobsUnverifiedNo accounts public; no sign of AgrowFab revenue.

The project ran its planned course and closed on schedule, as far as CORDIS shows. It built and tested what it set out to build. The part the EU grant was explicitly for, getting the product sold, has left no public trace.

A Serial Horizon 2020 Coordinator

AgrowFab was not SAN's only EU project in heated materials. From November 2018 to August 2022 it coordinated Snowless, a €3,296,963.75 Fast Track to Innovation project to melt snow and ice with amorphous alloy ribbons laid in asphalt, which received an EU contribution of €2,423,537.38, of which €846,055 went to SAN, according to CORDIS. Its partners were HSI BV of the Netherlands, the Technical University of Denmark and two German road equipment companies, Volkmann & Rossbach and Volkmann Strassen und Verkehrstechnik. The final report describes test sections at the DTU campus, in the Netherlands, at a logistics centre in Edenkoben and at the duraBASt facility of Germany's Federal Highway Research Institute. A Snowless website lists those installations, but its last news post dates from June 2023.

Across the three projects SAN received €1,633,232 in net EU contributions. Whether any of that money produced lasting revenue cannot be checked from public records. No EIC Fund investment in SAN could be found, and the 2019 SME Instrument Phase 2 round offered grants only.

Why It Mattered to Europe

The European Green Deal aims to cut fossil fuel use in food production. A heating method that targets roots rather than air, and can run on renewable electricity, fits that goal, and the AgrowFab plan named Europe as its second market after Israel. But the pilots the grant paid for were in Israel and Japan, not in the EU, and no European grower is known to have used the system.

The Verdict

SAN Hitech and ThermoSiv have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.