Inside Smartex's EIC Accelerator Project on Knitting Defects

Between 3% and 5% of knitted fabric carries a defect after the knitting stage, according to the figures Smartex gives on IRCAI and on CORDIS, and defects that are not caught early travel on through the supply chain. Smartex, founded in northern Portugal in 2018, mounts cameras on circular knitting machines and uses machine learning to stop the machine the moment a defect appears. The European Innovation Council selected the company in the October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, where it is listed as SMARTEX, Unipessoal Lda of Braga with blended finance, and the only company named for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,025,062.50 towards a total cost of €1,464,375 for a project that ran from 1 February 2020 to 30 September 2021.

The project promised to take the system from a TRL 6 prototype to the main tool for automated inspection in knitting, and to cut defective production "from 5%" to 0%. Five years after it ended, Smartex is an operating company with a commercial product, a $24.7 million Series A behind it and a new chief executive. Its environmental figures, however, come almost entirely from the company itself.

Where Smartex Stands Now

Smartex is active. The Portuguese register entry shown by eInforma records balance sheets for 2023, 2024 and 2025, the last one added on 15 July 2026, and lists the former name SMARTEX, Unipessoal Lda. Racius confirms the same tax number, the change of name, the registered office at Rua Manuel Pinto de Azevedo 567 in Porto and a share capital of €1,000,000. CORDIS still shows the earlier address in Barcelos. The free register data show no insolvency or dissolution notice, and the filed figures for revenue, result and headcount are behind a paywall, so they could not be checked for this article.

The leadership has changed. In October 2025 Textile Today reported that Max Easton, described as the newly appointed chief executive, and co-founder Gilberto Loureiro had been named "Entrepreneurs of the Year" by H&M Group in Stockholm. The same report says Smartex is rolling out fabric inspection and garment tracking with H&M's strategic suppliers in Bangladesh and India. No second source for the appointment could be opened, and the company's own news feed has not been updated since November 2024.

The Technology: Stopping the Machine, Not Grading the Roll

Detecting knitting defects early in the production chain is difficult, the CORDIS summary notes, and the project report describes defective fabric that goes "unnoticed through the supply chain" as a waste of resources and money. Smartex's system works on the machine itself: cameras and lighting inside the circular knitting machine film the fabric as it forms, software trained on images of defects classifies what it sees, and when a fault is found the machine is stopped. The CORDIS summary says more than 80% of textile defects originate at the knitting stage, which is why the company started there.

Around that hardware it has built software. Its 2023 review names three products launched that year: Smartex CORE for tubular knitting machines, Smartex LOOP for traceability and Smartex FACT, a factory dashboard, along with partnerships with knitting machine makers Terrot, Pilotelli, Unitex and Vahdet. The commercial case is payback, not sustainability: factory owners typically spend "a few hundreds of thousands of dollars" on the system and recover it in nine to 18 months on average, the company told CNBC in May 2025. Those figures are the company's own.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective set four markers. The devices were at TRL 6 after short real-world tests; the market fit was "validated by multiple LOIs and prices agreed with potential clients, including Decathlon group, PVH (Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, etc.), Kering (Gucci, YSL)"; the company wanted to become "the main solution" for automating inspection in knitting; and the overarching aim was cutting defective production from 5% to 0%. The grant agreement was signed on 17 March 2020, six weeks after the project's start date, and the project closed on its scheduled end date of 30 September 2021, with no extension recorded.

Only one periodic report, for February to September 2021, is published on the CORDIS reporting page. It is short. It says the grant paid for engineers, product development, pilots and production lines, that travel costs were hit by the pandemic, and that hardware work "extremely dependent on physical visits and installations on real textile factories" suffered. Its only numbers are impact claims: since October 2020 the pilot devices had saved more than €27,000 of raw material, 600,000 litres of water, 48,500 kWh of energy and 12,000 kg of CO2. It gives no defect rate, no customer count and no TRL at the end of the project.

1. Take the system from TRL 6 prototype to marketDeliveredSold commercially; customers Tintex, Familitex, Toraman Tekstil and Ekoten named by Knitting Industry in 2022; more than 800 systems installed, per HAX.
2. Software as a service for inspectionDeliveredFACT dashboard and LOOP traceability launched in 2023.
3. Cut defective production from 5% to 0%Company claimSmartex reports stops and kilograms saved, but no measured defect rate at any customer has been published or audited.
4. Convert PVH and Kering letters of intentPartlyHAX lists Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci and Balenciaga as customers; no contract has been announced by the brands.
5. Convert the Decathlon letter of intentNot announcedNo source names Decathlon as a customer.
6. On-time project completionDeliveredClosed 30 September 2021 as scheduled.

On the core question, the grant did what an innovation grant is meant to do: the prototype became a product that factories pay for. The headline target was never testable as written, and one of the three brand groups whose letters of intent backed the application has not appeared as a customer anywhere.

Blended Finance on Paper, No Equity on Record

The Commission's October 2019 list marks SMARTEX as a blended finance award, meaning a grant plus an EIC equity investment. CORDIS lists only the grant, and Smartex's own grants page shows the European Innovation Council entry with the same €1,025,062.50 incentive and nothing more. The EIC Fund portfolio, checked across all 17 pages and about 326 entries for this article, does not include Smartex, and no investor list from the 2022 Series A names the EIC Fund. Whether the equity component was declined, withdrawn or never finalised is not public.

What Smartex Has Achieved Since the Award

The private money came before and after the grant. A $2.9 million seed round in 2019 was co-led by DCVC and Spider Capital, according to both Knitting Industry and HAX. In November 2022 the company raised an oversubscribed $24.7 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tony Fadell's Build Collective, with H&M Group, DCVC, SOSV's HAX, Spider Capital, Momenta Ventures, Bombyx, Faber and Fashion for Good, as reported by tech.eu and SOSV. In May 2025 CNBC wrote that the company "has raised more than $40 million to date" and that Amazon had put money in through its AWS Compute for Climate Fellowship. No round that would close the gap of about $12 million between the announced rounds and that total has been announced.

Recognition followed. Smartex won the Web Summit Pitch competition on 4 November 2021 against 75 start-ups, reported Observador, which also said the company had contracts worth $3 million and operations in Porto, Shenzhen and San Francisco. Its entry on the IRCAI Global Top 100 site cites the EIC grant by its number. The company's sources disagree on its own early history: SOSV dates its HAX accelerator entry to 2018 in one passage and 2019 in another, and tech.eu gave 2021 as the founding year, three years after the register date.

Growth claims come from the company. Its 2023 review says the team grew from 100 to 150 people from 17 nationalities in three countries, that it opened a Tech Center in Istanbul and expanded its distributor network from 7 to 13 countries, and that its systems stopped machines 84,150 times since launch. In March 2024 it announced 1,000,000 kg of fabric prevented from waste, a figure built on an average of about 9 kg saved per stop, derived from client data. No independent audit of these numbers has been published.

The Money From Lisbon

Since the EIC project ended, Portugal has become the larger public funder. The government's transparency portal shows Smartex Europe with five projects under the national Recovery and Resilience Plan, financed with €2.77 million, of which €2.6 million had been paid. They include its shares in two large industry consortia, TEXP@CT for the digitalisation of textiles and clothing (€1.04 million contracted) and PRODUTECH R3 for production technologies (€956,110). The company's grants page also lists further national projects running to 2027, among them DefectFree, Texia, Smartexpand and TexQualis, with incentives between €296,507 and €589,703 each.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles, adopted on 30 March 2022, puts the EU's clothing waste at 5 million tonnes a year, about 12 kg per person, and says only 1% of clothing material is recycled into new clothing. In July 2023 the Commission proposed mandatory extended producer responsibility for textiles in every member state. Preventing defective fabric at the machine is a small but direct contribution to the waste the strategy targets, and the technology was developed and is still headquartered in Portugal.

The market, however, is increasingly in Asia. The H&M rollout reported in 2025 is with suppliers in Bangladesh and India, and CNBC reported that Loureiro visits factories mainly in Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam. Much of the fabric waste the system prevents is therefore produced outside the EU, even though the company that sells it is European.

The Verdict

Smartex has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.