EIC Accelerator Winner Siléane and the Nuclear Waste Sorting Race

Siléane, a robotics company founded in Saint-Etienne in 2002, builds robots that use cameras and artificial intelligence to pick up objects whose shape and position are never the same twice. In the European Commission's list of winners of the 7 October 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot cut-off, it appears alone, with no partner companies, for RED LINE, "Innovative robotic sorting technology to reduce hazardous wastes", with blended finance. The EU grant was €2,312,231.25 towards a total cost of €3,303,187.50, for a project that ran from 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2024, according to CORDIS. The aim was a full-scale demonstrator of a robot that pulls nuclear waste items out of a pile one by one, scans each for radioactivity and chemical make-up, and sorts it into the right container.

Six years after selection, Siléane is a bigger company than the one that applied. It says its group revenue rose from €10 million in 2020 to €42 million in 2025 and its staff to 260, in a July 2026 company post summarising a Bref Eco portrait of its founder. The equity half of its EIC award came in at the end of 2022 and was sold in March 2025. The nuclear robot itself is a different story: the last public project report names a test site, but no completed full-scale demonstrator has been announced.

Where Siléane Stands Now

Siléane is active. The French company register lists SILEANE SAS as an active simplified joint-stock company at its Saint-Etienne address, with 100 to 199 employees in 2024 and SILÉANE GROUP as its president, according to the national company directory. Its accounts for 2025 were filed and announced in the official gazette BODACC on 24 September 2026, and the register shows no insolvency notice, according to BODACC. The holding SILÉANE GROUP and a second vehicle, SILEANE INVESTCO, were both registered on 20 March 2025, the day of the buyout described below.

The group opened its first site outside France, in Switzerland, in September 2025, according to a company announcement, and says it is creating a sales and technical subsidiary in the United States. It forecasts €60 million of revenue for 2026 and targets €200 million by 2031, 70% of it abroad, according to the July 2026 post. These are the company's own targets.

The Technology: Robots for Piles Nobody Can Predict

Most industrial robots repeat a fixed movement on parts that arrive in a known position. Siléane's Kamido range works the other way round: 2D and 3D vision and AI recognise unknown objects in a heap or a moving stream, and the robot chooses a gripper and a grip in real time. The company says on its recycling sector page that it has worked on AI since 2013 and that its Kamido and Flowpick machines sort mixed materials on continuous lines. Kamido accounts for between 25% and 30% of Siléane's revenue depending on the year, according to a December 2025 company post, which says the first Kamido, recognised in 2014, was built to sort nuclear waste automatically for the research centre of Areva, now Orano.

In nuclear sites, waste is still sorted mostly by teleoperators handling remote arms, the RED LINE report says. Legacy waste is often undocumented and changed by decades of corrosion, which is why full automation was considered "a dream". The CORDIS objective claimed the robotic process was 2.5 times faster than teleoperation and three times cheaper, and that it had shown 99.5% accuracy on 540 tons of waste during a feasibility phase. These are the company's figures from its proposal; no independent test result has been published.

Siléane already runs one robotic nuclear cell in daily use. At Orano's La Hague reprocessing plant, a cell with two Stäubli RX90 robots, operational since 2020, sorts and analyses nuclear waste against a safety threshold, with cameras in sealed housings and remote maintenance, according to a company case study. Its investor Garibaldi Participations said the EU grant was for deploying a radioactive waste sorting machine whose prototype Siléane had built for Orano between 2014 and 2019, in its January 2023 announcement. The La Hague cell predates the RED LINE project, so it is not evidence of what the grant delivered.

What RED LINE Promised, and What the Record Shows

RED LINE had two tracks. For nuclear waste, it promised a full-scale integrated demonstrator that would sort and segregate waste "automatically and error-free", send 80% of waste to reconditioning and recycling against 30% then, and give Siléane 30% of the global nuclear waste sorting market by 2030, according to CORDIS. For civil waste, it promised better AI recognition, a spectrometer for material detection and a cheaper "design to cost" machine. The report says the system would reach TRL 8 within 24 months and TRL 9 shortly after the project.

The only published periodic report covers July 2022 to June 2024 but describes progress "after completion of the second project year". It says alpha, beta and gamma sensors, storage optimisation and radiation-proofing were developed for the nuclear robot; that the civil prototype was moved from a first industrial site to a second to prove its performance; and that sales of a "catalog" waste sorting machine had started, according to the CORDIS report. On the nuclear side, it says Siléane signed a cooperation contract with the CEA and chose CEA Saclay as the site for the nuclear prototype, and that patent protection had been "initiated". It does not say the demonstrator was built or tested there. The project's CORDIS results page shows no deliverables or publications.

No announcement by Siléane, the CEA or a nuclear operator of a working RED LINE demonstrator at Saclay could be found. The company's nuclear pages describe the La Hague cell and dismantling work with Framatome on the Superphénix reactor vessel internals, but not RED LINE, and no customer for the civil "catalog" sorting machine has been named publicly. Siparex said in March 2025 that the nuclear industry had adopted Siléane's vision and AI technologies "notamment sur des opérations de tri" (notably for sorting operations), without naming a site, in its exit press release.

1. Nuclear sorting functions (radiation sensors, storage optimisation, radiation-proofing)DevelopedReported in the CORDIS report; no independent test.
2. Civil waste robot upgrade and catalog machinePartlyPrototype moved to a second site, sales started; no customer named.
3. Full-scale nuclear demonstratorNot shownCEA Saclay chosen as site; no completed demonstrator announced.
4. TRL 9 shortly after the projectNot announcedNo commercial nuclear unit from RED LINE announced.
5. 80% of waste to recycling, 30% world market share by 2030No evidenceNo figures published.
6. Scale up the organisationDeliveredThree new French sites, acquisitions, staff up to 200 by March 2025 (Siparex).

The Money: Grant, Equity and a Buyout

The equity part of the blended award did arrive. At the end of 2022 the Fonds France Nucléaire, which is funded equally by EDF and the French state and managed by Siparex, led Siléane's first ever opening of its capital, with Garibaldi Participations and the EIC Fund as minority co-investors, according to Garibaldi Participations and the Siparex release. The law firm Linklaters advised the EIC Fund on that investment, Le Monde du Droit reported on 1 February 2023. The amount the EIC Fund invested has not been published. Garibaldi's announcement is posted on 20 January 2023 but dated "19 janvier 2022" in its text; Siparex dates the entry to the end of 2022.

On 20 March 2025 the three investors sold their stakes as Motion Equity Partners took a majority of Siléane Group alongside Hervé Henry and his management team, according to Motion Equity Partners and Siparex. Siléane describes the deal as a leveraged buyout that also brought several managers into the capital, in a June 2025 post. The EIC Fund's current list of invested companies, fetched page by page on 18 October 2026 (231 organisations on pages 0 to 15), does not include Siléane, although the EIC still hosts a Siléane portfolio page. The invested companies list is consistent with the 2025 exit. The return on the EIC Fund's stake is not public.

The operating company has been profitable in every year from 2016 to 2024, according to the INPI financial ratios. Its revenue fell from €11.51 million in 2019 to €7.47 million in 2020, the year it applied to the EIC, then rose to €14.12 million in 2021. Growth since then also comes from acquisitions: Siparex lists Robapps, Ascodero and a majority stake in Robsys during its holding period, and Garibaldi lists Robsys, RSM, Visionic and Robaut Conception as the four acquisitions of the three years before 2023.

Why It Matters for Europe

Every EU member state is responsible for the radioactive waste it produces and must run a national programme with an inventory, milestones and technical solutions for that waste, under Council Directive 2011/70/Euratom. RED LINE's own report puts the stock of solid low and intermediate level waste at 4.7 million cubic metres worldwide, with 11.7 million cubic metres still to come from decommissioning by 2050. Sorting that waste safely, with fewer workers exposed, is a task the directive leaves to each member state, and Siléane already has an automated nuclear sorting cell in service at La Hague. The Fonds France Nucléaire invests in small and mid-sized firms of the French nuclear supply chain, and the state's share in it is part of the France Relance plan, according to Siparex; Siléane was its fifth investment, according to Garibaldi Participations.

The Verdict

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