Sonicat and the EIC Accelerator: Honey Ultrasound Gave Way to AI

Most honey sold in supermarkets has been heated to about 80 °C so that it stays liquid on the shelf, and the heat destroys some of what makes raw honey valuable. Sonicat Systems, a small company from the Barcelona suburbs, set out to replace that step with sound. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 9 January 2019, the European Commission selected its LIQUAM project, a reactor that breaks up sugar crystals with high-power ultrasound, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names Sonicat Systems SL as the only beneficiary of the project. The grant was €1,380,662.50 towards a €1,972,375 project that ran from 1 September 2019 to 30 September 2022, according to CORDIS.

The machine was built and certified. It was never launched. In August 2023 the company changed its name to Microfy Systems SL, according to the Official Gazette of the Commercial Register (BORME), and its products today are AI-driven microscopes, led by a honey-testing device called Honey.AI. Ultrasound appears nowhere in its current product range on its website.

What the Company Does Now

Microfy Systems builds automated microscopes that scan a sample slide on their own and use neural networks to count and classify what they see. Honey.AI, the first and best-known of them, identifies and counts pollen grains among "more than 90 classes" to establish a honey's botanical origin, and also counts yeast, honeydew elements and starch and measures colour, conductivity and crystal size, according to the company's product page. The company lists two sister products, Fungi.AI for fungal growth and Ferment.AI for fermentation, and prices its microscopes between €4,800 and €8,600 before tax. The European agri-food testing network agrifoodTEF validated Honey.AI and Fungi.AI at the universities of Lleida and Córdoba with Digital Europe funding.

The company describes itself as having "started its activity by 2019", although the legal entity dates from 2014, and says its "past involvement in the honey industry" led it to Honey.AI. It is visibly operating: in November 2025 the World Food Forum named Microfy the winner of its Digital Innovation in Food Processing award, and the Barcelona register recorded board changes in January and September 2026. Because its lead product is no longer the funded ultrasound reactor, this article classes the company as pivoted.

The Technology: Breaking Crystals With Sound

Raw honey crystallises within weeks of extraction. Consumers tend to read cloudy, grainy honey as spoiled, so packers heat it to around 80 °C for two to three minutes and then flash-cool it, which keeps it liquid for up to a year. LIQUAM's case was that the heat costs quality: Iratxe Perales, a Sonicat co-founder, told CORDIS that pasteurisation degrades the antioxidant capacity of raw honey "by around one third".

LIQUAM uses acoustic cavitation instead. High-power ultrasound creates millions of tiny vacuum bubbles that grow and collapse violently, and the shock waves break the sugar crystals mechanically. The process never exceeds 55 °C. The company's final CORDIS report compares it with the two other options packers use: blending honeys of different sugar ratios, which does not work for single-flower honeys, and ultrafiltration, which removes the pollen that laboratories need to prove where a honey comes from. CORDIS lists a Spanish patent application for the ultrasound device dated 18 December 2014 and LIQUAM trade marks in the EU (2018) and New Zealand (2020), all in the company's name.

What LIQUAM Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The application on CORDIS says the team had spent more than five years on a functional prototype that processed up to 100 kg of honey an hour and had been tested "during months at clients' premises". It had already used a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 grant in 2015 for a feasibility study. Phase 2 was to scale the reactor up to industrial rates and improve its electronics and usability, with a forecast of "€17.7 million turnover by 2024".

The engineering work was largely done. The final report says the team completed the mechanical design for three sizes, LIQUAM450, LIQUAM600 and LIQUAM1000, plus the power supply, control system and transducer electronics, built LIQUAM450, tested it at a client's site for several months and obtained CE certification. CORDIS's own results summary, published in February 2023, adds that the machine ran for five months in an industrial food plant in Girona and cut crystallisation to 0.01%, comparable to pasteurisation, without significantly changing moisture, hydroxymethylfurfural or enzymes.

The same summary names the problems. Component shortages in the EU meant "a final assembly could not be completed on time". The price did not fall as hoped: the first prototype cost €70,000 for 100 kg an hour, LIQUAM450 €50,000, but rising material costs pushed the commercial price up. And "LIQUAM450 needs three times more energy than our previous MVP did", Perales said, while the final report claims the reactor uses 40% less energy than systems on the market. The two figures measure different things, and neither is backed by a published test.

1. Scale the reactor to industrial ratesPartialThree sizes designed; only LIQUAM450 built, per the final report.
2. New electronics and usabilityDeliveredPower supply, control system and transducer electronics designed and built.
3. Industrial validationDeliveredFive months in a Girona food plant; crystallisation cut to 0.01%.
4. CE-certified machineDeliveredLIQUAM450 CE certified, per CORDIS.
5. Lower cost and energy than pasteurisersDisputedCommercial price rose; energy use three times the first prototype.
6. Market launch, €17.7M turnover by 2024Not achievedNo LIQUAM sale announced; turnover below €500,000.

LIQUAM is therefore partly delivered: a certified machine that worked in an industrial test, but no product on the market. The company's old domain, sonicat-systems.com, which the Commission's list gave as its website and which CORDIS still links for LIQUAM, no longer resolves, and Microfy's product pages do not mention the reactor. Whether any LIQUAM450 was sold or leased after 2022 could not be verified.

How the Microscope Took Over

Honey.AI was a by-product of the honey work. In the CORDIS summary, project coordinator and co-founder Estela Pacheco described it as a digital microscope that authenticates floral sources from pollen "in under an hour" and said the company planned to offer it to the honey industry, "creating potential leads for LIQUAM". By then it was already on show: Microfy's news page records Honey.AI at the Food 4 Future fair in May 2022, an automated 24-slide loader in development with Catalan ACCIÓ vouchers, and work on its edge AI hardware under the EU's VEDLIoT project, which ended in September 2023.

Recognition followed. The news page lists the CERES award of EIT Food for the best commercialised innovation in November 2023, and a place among 20 consumer-goods innovations of 2023 named by Spain's Institut Cerdà. In November 2024 Honey.AI began a trial at the Spanish agriculture ministry's Agri-food Arbitration Laboratory, Spain's national reference laboratory for official agri-food controls, as one of four projects chosen across Europe for the InnoBuyer innovation-procurement programme. In March 2025 the company said it had added an AI count of Nosema spores, a bee parasite, tested against qPCR on 50 samples. The EU CAP Network lists Honey.AI as a practice abstract of a Horizon Europe food transparency project.

No customer list, unit sales figure or revenue number for Honey.AI is public. Two of the claims above, the reference-lab trial and the Nosema feature, rest on the company's own news page; the results of the lab trial, which Microfy said it hoped to publish "in a few months", had not been published by October 2026.

The Money and the Register

The register shows a small company that raised modest equity after the grant. Share capital stayed at €3,000 from 2014 until June 2022, then rose in three steps to €63,770 in January 2025, according to the BORME entries collected by Empresia and Infonif. The amounts paid in, including share premiums, are not published. On 3 September 2026 the company cut its capital by €30,762, or 48.24%, to €33,008, replaced its board of directors with two joint administrators, Iratxe Perales and Eduard López; Narcís Clavell, its sole administrator from 2014 to 2020, left the board, according to the BORME of 11 September 2026. The register does not give the reason for the reduction. Co-founder Estela Pacheco had left the board in October 2022.

Accounts have been filed for every year from 2020 to 2024, but their figures sit behind paywalls. Empresia puts annual turnover below €500,000, against the €17.7 million forecast for 2024. The research database Halo lists 1 to 10 employees, and the company's team page names eight people. Whether the company is growing cannot be established from public data.

Why Europe Should Care

The pivot moved the company from one EU honey problem to a bigger one. When the Commission tested 320 honey consignments at EU borders between November 2021 and February 2022, 147, or 46%, were suspected of being adulterated with sugar syrups, against 14% in a 2015 to 2017 control plan, according to the Commission's food fraud network and its Joint Research Centre. Since 14 June 2026, under the revised honey rules of Directive (EU) 2024/1438, labels must list every country of origin in a blend with its share by weight, according to Apimondia and the European Parliament's legislative observatory.

Origin claims are checked largely by pollen analysis, a skilled and slow microscope task, which is what Honey.AI automates. Cheap on-site testing would help European beekeepers defend the price premium of local honey against cheaper imports, the same aim LIQUAM set out with. The difference is that the EU paid €1.38 million for the ultrasound machine, while the microscope that grew out of it has been financed through smaller national and EU support schemes.

The Verdict

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