Separative's EIC Accelerator Chromatography Columns, Six Years On

Almost every new drug passes through a chromatography column on its way to purity, and most of those columns are packed with silica powder that only lets liquid through at high pressure. Separative, a start-up in the chemical cluster south of Lyon, replaced the powder with a silica block crossed by thousands of straight capillaries a few microns wide, a design it said needed a fraction of the pressure. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2020 cut-off the European Commission selected its SEP43 project with blended finance, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names Separative alone, with no partner companies, for the project. The company announced €7.4 million of "mixed funding", a grant plus equity.

The grant part, €2,390,718.75 towards a €3,415,312.50 project, ran from May 2021 to April 2024, according to CORDIS. On 27 May 2025 the commercial court in Lyon opened judicial liquidation proceedings against Separative SAS, setting the date on which it stopped paying its debts at 30 March 2025, according to the official BODACC notice. The company is insolvent and its liquidation was still running in July 2026.

Where Separative Stands Now

Separative is in judicial liquidation. The court appointed Selarl Marie Dubois of Lyon as liquidator, according to the BODACC notice, and on 10 July 2026 the statement of creditors' claims was filed with the court registry, according to a second notice. Societe.com lists the company as "Active Liquidation judiciaire" with one collective proceeding open. Whether any buyer took over its patents or its pilot line is not public.

The company's website, separative.net, returned a "404 Not Found" error when checked for this article; the last archived copy with content dates from November 2025 and still promoted the columns and three engineering services, SEPPOC, SEPSIM and SEPPURIF.

The timing of the collapse is striking. On 30 April 2025, a month after the date the court later fixed for the halt of payments, the French Ministry of Economy named Separative's SEP 30 project one of nine winners of the "Première Usine" first-factory programme. On 9 May 2025 the founder told Mesinfos that the 12-person company would receive €1 million of state aid, needed about €3 million more for a first production unit of "more than one tonne per year", and was looking for investors.

Eighteen days later the court opened the liquidation. Whether the €1 million of Première Usine aid was ever paid is not public.

The Technology: Straight Channels Instead of Powder

In conventional liquid chromatography, a mixture is pumped through a column packed with porous silica particles, and molecules separate according to how strongly they stick to the silica. The packing forces the liquid along winding paths, so pressure rises steeply as particles get smaller and separation gets sharper. Parmentier compared it to "an espresso machine, but at 300 bar instead of 15", in a Les Echos interview reprinted on the company's website.

Separative casts a bundle of parallel, straight capillaries a few microns wide in a block of semi-porous silica, so that liquid flows freely down the channels while molecules diffuse sideways into the silica, an effect the company calls "diffusional bridging". It claimed the design cuts the required pressure "by a factor of 30" and makes purification "10 times faster", in its 2021 award announcement. In 2020 Fabrice Gritti, a scientist at the US chromatography company Waters, and two researchers from the University of Marburg published a modelling study of such multiple-open-tubular columns, which Separative presented as independent recognition. Its later claims of 86% less energy and 36% less carbon, credited to the consultancy Carbone 4 on its website and repeated in the ministry's laureate list, could not be checked against a published study.

What SEP43 Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

SEP43 was Separative's second Horizon 2020 grant. In 2018 it received €50,000 of a €71,429 SME Instrument Phase 1 study on automation, the supply chain and marketing, when it was a team of five hosted at the IFP Energies nouvelles site in Solaize, according to CORDIS and its report. The SEP43 objective was to scale up and automate the production line, enter the market with columns for drug discovery, and then follow molecules towards process-scale production. It said prototypes had been tested at TRL6 by independent laboratories but that the company had been "unable to attract sufficient funding to scale-up and automate our production line".

The project's final periodic report, covering May 2022 to April 2024, records real technical progress. The company reduced the capillary diameter from 60 to 43 μm, made and tested 10 mm diameter columns, sped up its existing pilot process "by a factor of 20" and said "the pilot is today operational". It designed industrial equipment for 3,000 columns in its first year, rising to 10,000 a year after two years, and ran beta tests of C18 reversed-phase columns on six sites, which showed them "operational" for flash chromatography. The project ran to its planned end date of 30 April 2024; CORDIS shows no extension.

1. 43 μm capillary columnsDeliveredReduced from 60 μm; 10 mm columns made and tested, per the CORDIS report.
2. Improved pilot processDeliveredProcess 20 times faster; "the pilot is today operational".
3. Beta testing with usersDeliveredSix sites tested C18 columns for flash chromatography; the sites are not named.
4. Automated industrial line, 3,000 columns in year oneNot deliveredDesigned only; in May 2025 the company still needed about €3M for a first production unit.
5. Market entry in drug discoveryNot deliveredNo sale or named customer announced; in 2025 it cited only letters of intent from peptide makers.

The record is the familiar one for a deep-tech grant: the engineering moved forward and was reported honestly, but the commercial step the project was designed to reach did not follow. In 2024 the company's website said "in 2024, Separative will produce and market" its columns. In May 2025 the founder told Mesinfos that several peptide producers had written letters of intent; no customer contract was reported.

The Money

Separative's funding came in small steps. Agilent Technologies, the US laboratory instrument maker, and Sodipro joined business angels in a €780,000 seed round in 2019, according to CFNEWS; the Les Echos interview put Agilent's stake at 11% and the money raised since 2014, at the time of the EIC award, at €2 million, half of it from the national i-Lab and i-Nov competitions. By May 2025 the company said it had raised €10 million since its creation, including the EIC award, according to Mesinfos.

The EIC equity is harder to pin down. Separative's 2021 announcement gave only the €7.4 million total; with the grant at €2.39 million on CORDIS, the equity share would be about €5 million if the total is the full package, but neither the EIC nor the company published the split. The EIC Fund has a portfolio page for Separative, first archived in September 2023, which places it among companies that received EIC Fund investment. Yet Separative does not appear on any of the 16 pages of the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, which showed 319 organisations on 18 October 2026. The amount and date of the investment are not public. The share capital rose from €156,957 to €286,699 in a change published in March 2024; who subscribed to it is not stated.

The accounts were filed with a confidentiality declaration, so revenue is not public. The net loss was €525,872 in 2022 and €1,175,558 in 2023, according to the INPI ratio data and Societe.com. Societe.com also shows cash falling from €618,500 to €160,400 and total debt rising from €2.37 million to €4.07 million over the same year. BODACC records no filing of 2024 accounts, and the national company directory shows figures only up to 2023.

Why Europe Should Care

Purification is one of the most solvent- and energy-hungry steps in making medicines and fine chemicals. The EU's Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, adopted on 14 October 2020, a week after Separative's cut-off, calls for investment in chemicals that are "safe and sustainable by design", and the Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe of 25 November 2020 aims at "diversified and secure supply chains" and "greener medicines". A European maker of low-pressure purification columns, with Agilent already a shareholder, fitted both. Its SEP43 objective on CORDIS claimed the product could save up to 20,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent from solvent incineration and €9.6 million a year in solvent costs, figures the company did not show how it calculated.

The Verdict

Separative, its liquidator 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.