EIC Accelerator Winner Sonovia and the Ultrasonic Textile Race

In April 2019 the European Union picked a small Israeli company called Nano-Textile to fix a hospital problem: bacteria that travel on sheets, gowns and curtains. Its process, licensed from Bar-Ilan University, uses ultrasound to shoot zinc oxide nanoparticles into fabric so that the fabric itself kills germs. The EU paid €2,352,875 towards a €3,361,250 project, Healthy Textile, to take the coating to hospitals. The company, renamed Sonovia, never got there. A pandemic arrived halfway through the project, hospitals closed their doors to clinical trials, and Sonovia sold face masks instead. Today its website offers only one thing: ultrasonic dyeing for denim.

The company is still listed in Tel Aviv. On 7 October 2026 its shares were worth NIS 6.32 million in total, and its equity at the end of June 2026 was NIS 2.2 million, according to Bizportal's TASE data. Three months earlier, Brazilian denim maker Vicunha Têxtil agreed to pay NIS 2.4 million for 20% of it, according to the companies' announcement and Ynet.

What Sonovia Does Now

Sonovia now sells a process, not a fabric. Its D(y)ENIM technology uses ultrasound to drive indigo dye into cotton yarn. The company says the process cuts water use by up to 85% and needs no hydrosulfite, the reducing agent that conventional indigo dyeing depends on, according to a May 2023 press release. That release announced an agreement, with the Italian denim developer PureDenim, to develop and install the technology in denim production lines of the French luxury group Kering. Israel21c later wrote that Kering and PureDenim had "already integrated" the technology into their lines; the press release itself describes an agreement to develop and install it, and neither Kering nor PureDenim has published production figures. Israel21c also reported, in January 2024, a scale-up deal with the Israeli chemicals company Avco whose first phase depended on producing at least one ton of dye a week and confirming the sale of 80 tons. Whether those conditions were met has not been announced.

The Vicunha deal, announced on 6 July 2026, is the most concrete commercial step so far. Vicunha, which says it holds about 8% of the world denim fabric market, gets 20% of Sonovia for NIS 2.4 million, at a post-money valuation of NIS 12 million. "This marks a crucial turning point, transitioning our technology from the lab straight to commercial production lines," Hershcovich said in the announcement. The trade title Ecotextile described the agreement as a memorandum of understanding. Ynet noted that Sonovia's mask business had ended after the pandemic and taken the share price with it.

The Technology: Cavitation Instead of Binders

The science comes from Aharon Gedanken, a chemist at Bar-Ilan University, who coordinated SONO, a €12 million FP7 research project with 17 participants and €8.3 million of EU funding between 2008 and 2013, according to the company's earlier SME Instrument Phase 1 project on CORDIS. Bar-Ilan licensed the resulting technology exclusively to Nano-Textile. When ultrasound passes through a liquid it creates bubbles that collapse violently, a process called cavitation. The collapse sends jets of liquid at the fabric fast enough to embed nanoparticles in the fibres. The Healthy Textile summary on CORDIS puts the jets at "over 500 meters/second".

Conventional antimicrobial finishes are applied in a bath and held on the fibre with chemical binders, and they tend to wash out. Nano-Textile's pitch was durability: in 2016 the company told the Times of Israel that treated fabrics kept their antibacterial effect through 65 washes at 92°C, more than hospital laundries need. Zinc oxide is colourless, so the fabric does not change appearance. The same cavitation principle is what Sonovia now uses to push indigo into yarn.

What Healthy Textile Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Nano-Textile Ltd of Ramat Gan appears on the European Commission's list of EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 winners for the 3 April 2019 cut-off, as the only beneficiary of Healthy Textile. The grant was signed on 10 July 2019 and the project ran from 1 August 2019 to 31 January 2022. CORDIS lists the beneficiary as Sonovia LTD. The name change itself is dated differently: Calcalist already called the company "Sonovia Ltd. (formerly Nano-Textile Ltd.)" when it reported the €2.4 million grant in August 2019, while StockAnalysis dates the rebranding to 2020.

The final periodic report is unusually frank. It says the project set out to scale up and commercialise a laundry-durable antimicrobial finish "primarily focused" on hospital-acquired infections, and that, "as a result of the covid pandemic, and the inability to perform clinical trials in the hospitals", business development was redirected to sportswear, underwear, outdoor wear, automotive and filtration. The first chemistry route, making the particles in the fabric during treatment, proved hard to commercialise, so the team switched to ready-made nanoparticle formulations. Industrial trials then showed the machine was not efficient enough, and a new industrial ultrasonic finishing machine was designed for installation in the fourth quarter of 2021.

The report also gives the project's best result: on a nylon and elastane fabric treated with 1.2% zinc oxide, a test requested by an unnamed garment manufacturer measured 99.642% efficacy against MRSA, 99.534% against Klebsiella pneumoniae and 98.697% against E. coli after 75 home launderings at 60°C. The zinc oxide finish was to be launched first as an "anti-odor" agent, which avoids the regulatory approval a biocidal antibacterial claim requires. The results page lists three deliverables, a trial validation report, a report on regulatory activities and a "CE Marking certificate", but the documents could not be opened for this article.

1. Wash-durable antimicrobial finishDeliveredOver 98.6% efficacy against three bacteria after 75 washes, per the CORDIS report.
2. Industrial finishing linePartialTwo machines built with Brückner by January 2022, per Globes; the redesigned machine's installation was not reported.
3. Hospital textiles and clinical trialsNot achievedTrials not performed; no hospital customer announced.
4. Commercial anti-odour finishNot achievedNo launch or machine sale announced; Sonovia moved to denim dyeing.
5. CE marking and regulatory workUnverifiedListed as deliverables on CORDIS; contents not public.

Measured against the plan, the project delivered the chemistry and part of the machinery, but not the market it was funded for. The pandemic explains the missing hospital trials. It does not explain why no antimicrobial or anti-odour textile line was announced once the trials became possible again.

The Mask Years

The detour paid at first. Sonovia started producing coated masks in early 2020, and its SonoMask was tested at 99.34% efficacy against the coronavirus in a laboratory in Shanghai, according to the Jerusalem Post, which reported more than a million masks sold in a year, mostly to the United States, and a staff of about 60 plus 200 contractors. The Jerusalem Report put 2020 sales above $9.5 million and the Ramat Gan headcount at 30, with 70 people at third-party manufacturers; the two figures for staff do not match. In December 2020 Sonovia raised NIS 55.9 million ($18.5 million) in its Tel Aviv IPO plus $3.7 million in a private placement, at a post-money valuation of $43.4 million, according to Global Venturing.

In January 2022 Globes reported 2020 revenue of about $10 million with a profit of about $1 million, revenue of about $6 million in the first half of 2021, and a market value of about NIS 200 million. Sonovia had built two finishing machines with the German machine maker Brückner, one at the Karmiel plant of clothing maker Delta, and expected to sell its first commercial machine, priced at about $150,000, by the end of 2022, with consumables worth $1 million to $1.5 million a year per machine. No such sale has been announced since.

The Money

The losses followed the mask boom. Sonovia lost $9.48 million in 2022 and has lost between $2.55 million and $3.84 million in each year since, according to StockAnalysis and Investing.com; MarketScreener confirms the 2025 loss of $2.55 million and the 2024 loss of $2.86 million. The 2025 figures distinguish a loss from continuing operations, a sign that part of the old business was booked as discontinued. Revenue for these years is not shown by the data providers. Bizportal gives a 2025 net loss of NIS 8.14 million and a further NIS 2.98 million in its latest report, for the second quarter of 2026.

The balance sheet is close to empty. Equity was NIS 19.88 million in June 2024, NIS 5.48 million at the end of 2025 and NIS 2.2 million in June 2026, with total assets of NIS 3.56 million, Bizportal's data show. StockAnalysis lists six employees. Against that, Vicunha's NIS 2.4 million is less than the NIS 2.98 million loss in Sonovia's latest report alone. The market valued the whole company at NIS 6.32 million on 7 October 2026, about half the NIS 12 million post-money valuation in the Vicunha deal.

Why Europe Should Care

Both of Sonovia's markets sit on EU priorities. Healthcare-associated infections hit an estimated 4.3 million patients in EU and EEA hospitals each year, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and 32% of the documented microorganisms in its latest survey were resistant to antimicrobials. Textile dyeing falls under the Commission's 2022 strategy for sustainable and circular textiles, which wants textiles sold in the EU by 2030 to be free of hazardous substances and produced in an environmentally friendly way. A water-saving, hydrosulfite-free indigo process fits that goal.

The European link is thinner than the policy fit. Sonovia is an Israeli company, a Horizon 2020 associated country, and its machine partner Brückner is German, but its new strategic investor is Brazilian. The EU funded a hospital product; the technology that survives serves the global jeans supply chain.

The Verdict

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