Schrott24: Digitising Scrap With EIC Accelerator Money

Scrap metal is one of the few raw materials Europe has in abundance, and for decades it has been traded the old way: by phone, by local dealer and by price lists few outsiders could see. Schrott24, founded in Graz in 2016 by Jan Pannenbäcker and Alexander Schlick, set out to move that trade online. In the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected Schrott24 GmbH as the sole beneficiary of a project to scale its marketplace across the EU. The grant was €1,180,482.63 towards a total cost of €1,686,403.75, according to CORDIS.

The platform was built. The company renamed its business-to-business arm Metaloop, reported €27.3 million in revenue for 2021 and raised a €16 million Series A in 2023. But Schrott24 GmbH no longer exists: it was deleted from the Austrian company register on 14 November 2025 after a merger, and the company that took over its business, Metaloop Europe GmbH, is insolvent. Restructuring proceedings opened at the Graz regional court in June 2026, and by the end of August the rescue plan had been withdrawn and the case had become a bankruptcy.

Where the Company Stands Now

The legal path is short but tangled. The Austrian register shows that Schrott24 GmbH was deleted on 14 November 2025 by merger. On the same day ROMSH GmbH, a company registered in November 2024 and wholly owned by the US holding Metaloop Group Inc., took the name Metaloop Europe GmbH, according to its register entry. North Data's record of the Schrott24 shareholdings shows that Metaloop Group Inc. had replaced the earlier investors as sole shareholder of Schrott24 GmbH on 3 October 2025, six weeks before the merger.

On 17 June 2026 restructuring proceedings without self-administration were opened at the Graz regional court over Metaloop Europe GmbH, with 153 creditors, 10 employees and claims of about €11.08 million, Leadersnet and Trending Topics reported, citing the creditor associations KSV1870 and AKV. The company offered creditors 20% of their claims within two years. The register lists Helmut Klementschitz as insolvency administrator from 18 June 2026 and records a further insolvency entry on 1 September 2026.

That entry marks the end of the rescue attempt. The insolvency notice summarised by wirtschaft.at names the proceedings a Konkursverfahren, dated 30 August 2026, and orders the closure of the trading business; the Styrian insolvency list on steiermark.biz records the case as "now bankruptcy, restructuring plan withdrawn". The schrott24.at website was still taking orders in October 2026, with an imprint naming Metaloop Europe GmbH at Puchstraße 17 in Graz; the register has listed Herrengasse 13 since an address change in April 2026. Neither site mentions the insolvency.

The Technology: A Marketplace That Became a Trader

The idea in the 2019 proposal was a matching engine. The CORDIS objective describes "an intelligent online marketplace that digitises and automates large parts of the industry for scrap metal", pairing, for example, "a small electrician with 500kg of copper cable waste" with a local yard, or a scrap dealer's specific alloy with an aluminium smelter that needs it. Pricing algorithms were to predict scrap prices and prevent "unfavourable last-minute changes", and integrated hauliers were to handle transport. The established alternative is the regional scrap yard, which sets its own price for what is brought to it.

In practice the company did more than match. In the project's CORDIS results summary of September 2022, Pannenbäcker described the model: "We purchase materials from a seller, namely from an industrial manufacturing company, or derive them from a demolition project, organise the logistics process, oversee the quality control process and process the payment. We act like contractual partners of the sellers." Metaloop also offered trade financing. That makes it a metal trader using software, not a neutral platform, and it ties up money in stock and unpaid invoices. At the insolvency, €2.66 million of the assets were inventory and €6.44 million were receivables, according to 5 Minuten and Trending Topics.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 14 August 2019 and the project ran from 1 September 2019 to 28 February 2022, according to the CORDIS reporting page. It followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility grant that ran from June to September 2018. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company. The plan was to add "end-to-end usage and predictive analytics capability to the already functioning first-generation system" and to scale "beyond regional transactions" to large buyers and cross-border trade.

The published report covers the work at a general level: new platform functions, new mobile and mobile web apps, infrastructure upgrades and validation. The results summary is more specific. "Even with small delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we achieved all our primary objectives and have right now a functional end-to-end platform with a large number of users that exceeds 10 000," Pannenbäcker said there. He also reported a machine learning model that predicts whether buyers want a given material, separate interfaces for sellers, buyers, hauliers and traders, and expansion across Europe, "particularly Spain". These are the company's own statements; no independent audit of the user numbers or the claimed saving of 216,000 tonnes of CO2 from 2018 to 2022 is public.

1. End-to-end online platformDeliveredLive at schrott24.at and metaloop.com; over 10,000 users reported in CORDIS.
2. Mobile appsDeliveredLaunched in the first reporting period, per the periodic report.
3. Predictive analyticsDeliveredBuyer-interest model described by the company; no technical publication.
4. Large buyers and cross-border tradeDeliveredMetaloop B2B arm with 600 clients in 2023, per TechCrunch.
5. Fully open marketplaceNot shownDescribed as a future step in 2022; the business ran as a managed trader.

On the EIC's own terms the project worked: it closed in February 2022 with a functioning commercial platform, after delays the company attributed to the pandemic. Whether the end date was extended is not shown on CORDIS. The grant funded development, not the later financing of the trading business, and the insolvency four years after the project ended does not undo what was built.

What Happened After the Award

Private money followed. In October 2020 Statkraft Ventures, the venture arm of the Norwegian state energy company, led a €2.8 million round with FJ Labs, Klöckner and Co chief executive Gisbert Rühl and startup300, according to Trending Topics; North Data records Statkraft Ventures and Pioneers Ventures as new shareholders on 6 October 2020 and a capital increase to €60,004. The same article reported that Schrott24 had handled 1,500 tonnes of scrap from decommissioned German nuclear power plants. North Data also records a €500,000 COVID-19 state guarantee in June 2020.

In September 2023 Metaloop raised €16 million in a Series A led by New York's FirstMark Capital, with Silence VC, Statkraft Ventures and FJ Labs, reported by TechCrunch and Tech.eu. TechCrunch put earlier seed funding at €4.2 million, the client base at 600 and the team at about 50, half of them in Graz, and reported that the original Schrott24 business with private sellers and craftsmen made up a "small single-digit percentage" of revenue. Revenue reached €27.3 million in 2021 after compound annual growth of 72.4% from 2018, according to the FT1000 ranking of fast-growing European companies as reported by Trending Topics. In June 2025 Metaloop won the sustainability category of the EY Scale-up Award, which its website lists as the third in a row.

Revenue figures after 2021 are not public. The register shows that Schrott24 GmbH filed accounts for every year to 2024, but the figures are behind paywalls at North Data and wirtschaft.at and could not be checked for this article.

Why the Money Ran Out

The explanation given to creditors is liquidity, not a failed product. After a loss-making start financed with equity from the US parent, the company reached operating break-even in early 2026 and was recently slightly profitable, Leadersnet and Trending Topics reported from the filing. Some owners then refused further liquidity support, and the weak industrial economy, the crisis in the car industry, volatile commodity markets and stricter regulation left it unable to meet upcoming loan repayments. The proposed 20% quota was to be paid by selling stock, collecting receivables and from ongoing trading. With the plan withdrawn and the trading business ordered closed, that route is gone.

Why Europe Should Care

Scrap is a strategic material in EU policy. The Critical Raw Materials Act, in force since 23 May 2024, sets a benchmark that recycling should cover 25% of the EU's annual consumption of strategic raw materials by 2030. In July 2025, under its Steel and Metals Action Plan, the Commission began customs surveillance of steel, aluminium and copper scrap trade to keep more of it in Europe. A transparent, cross-border market that routes scrap to the European smelter that can use it fits both aims. The Schrott24 case shows the other side: trading physical metal demands working capital, and a software start-up that becomes a trader inherits the industry's exposure to prices and credit.

The Verdict

Metaloop, its founders and the insolvency administrator have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.