Specshell, the EIC Accelerator and the Promise of Smarter Brewing

Brewers and bioethanol producers both turn grain starch into sugar and then into alcohol, and for most of them the chemistry inside the tank is visible only through samples sent to a laboratory hours later. Specshell, a start-up from Ballerup near Copenhagen, built an instrument that read it live: a diamond sensor in the process stream, mid-infrared light and software that turned the absorption pattern into sugar, ethanol and acid concentrations every few minutes.

In June 2019 the European Commission selected the company in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, for a project called OptiSpec. The CORDIS fact sheet records an EU contribution of €1,613,659.25 towards a total cost of €2,305,227.50, for 18 months from 1 October 2019. The project ended on 31 March 2021. On 15 November 2022 the Danish company register recorded Specshell as bankrupt, and on 8 July 2024 the company was dissolved, according to DanskCVRAPI and FirmaAPI, which both reproduce the official CVR record.

Where Specshell Stands Now

Specshell no longer exists. The CVR record shows a bankruptcy decree registered on 15 November 2022, a summons to creditors to prove their claims on 12 March 2024, the closing accounts of the bankruptcy estate on 19 June 2024 and the company's dissolution on 8 July 2024, according to DanskCVRAPI. North Data lists the company as terminated, with the termination published on 23 July 2024, and shows its long-time director Erik Hoffmann-Petersen leaving the post on 15 November 2022, the day the bankruptcy was registered. How much the creditors recovered, and who bought the analysers, patents or software from the estate, if anyone, is not public.

The company's website, specshell.com, now leads to a domain sale page. The last archived version, from September 2023, still advertised both products ten months after the bankruptcy. Specshell does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies; all 16 pages of the list were checked. OptiSpec was a grant-only award, so no EIC equity was ever part of it.

The Technology: Reading the Mash Tun in Infrared

When grain is mashed, enzymes break starch into sugars of different chain lengths; yeast then ferments the sugars into ethanol. Breweries normally check this with iodine tests and laboratory chromatography (HPLC), and bioethanol plants sample fermenters every few hours. Specshell's approach, described in the ENZEYE and OptiSpec fact sheets, was to adapt mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopy to the factory floor. Liquid flows past a diamond crystal, each dissolved molecule absorbs infrared light in its own pattern, and the company's chemometric models convert that spectrum into concentrations.

The brewery product, SIBA, sat on a closed sample loop on the mash tun. The bioethanol version, ZYMON, was fitted to fermenters; an archived product page from May 2021 says it measured ethanol, glucose, glycerol, lactic acid and other compounds every 5 minutes against every 5 to 8 hours for HPLC, needed no calibration by the user and raised automatic infection alarms. CORDIS lists two patent filings by the company: one from 2015 on monitoring mashing with infrared spectroscopy and one from 2019 on keeping the sensor surface free of fouling during operation, according to the project results page. Whether these patents are still in force, and who owns them now, could not be verified.

What OptiSpec Promised, and What the Record Shows

The company's name appears once in the Commission's list of EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 winners of the 5 June 2019 cut-off, with no partner company, and CORDIS names Specshell as the only participant. The award followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study, ENZEYE, which ran from January to March 2019. Its report picked bioethanol as "the most challenging and promising sector", planned production capacity of 100 units by the end of 2021 and said the first version of the analyser had been tested in European, African and Mexican breweries, with reported savings of €1 million a year per plant. That figure is the company's own and was not independently checked.

OptiSpec's stated goals were large. The fact sheet promised that brewers could raise productivity by 5 to 15% a year and bioethanol producers their yield by 1 to 2%, and it set targets for the company itself: 770 OptiSpec units installed worldwide, more than €65 million in revenue, four offices and up to 150 staff by 2025.

The final periodic report describes a first prototype readied for industrial trials in spring 2020, trials at host sites in the second period and learnings "included in the final, market ready, design". It also records a change of plan: instead of an instrument for brewery fermenters, Specshell built algorithms to predict fermentation performance, because "the current technology is too expensive for equipping all fermenters in a brewery". In a CORDIS results article published on 13 September 2021, co-founder Christian Nybo Petersen said the project "was successfully executed according to plan", that the ethanol fermentation model had been "repeatedly demonstrated" in industrial conditions and that COVID-19 had forced the company to move its trials closer to home, to Europe.

1. Industrial trials in breweries and bioethanol plantsDeliveredReported in the CORDIS report and the 2021 results article; host sites not named.
2. Market-ready bioethanol analyserPartlyZYMON launched in 2021 with "first purchases", per the company website; no customer named.
3. Brewery fermentation monitoringChangedReplaced by prediction algorithms instead of an instrument, per the CORDIS report.
4. Two new patentsUnverifiedCORDIS lists one new filing, from 2019.
5. 770 units, €65M revenue, 150 staff by 2025MissedBankrupt in November 2022 with 21 average staff in its last accounts.

The technical work was largely done on time: the project ran the 18 months that the ENZEYE study had planned for it, from October 2019 to March 2021. The commercial plan behind the grant did not survive the company.

What Specshell Achieved After the Award

For two years the company grew. Its history page lists a 2020 Innobooster grant from the Innovation Fund Denmark for an "Intelligent Brewing" software project, which the company also announced in 2020; the commercial launch of ZYMON in 2021 "with the first purchases and the installations in several bioethanol plant around the world"; and a US subsidiary, Specshell Inc., with an office on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. No US company register entry, customer announcement or trade press report confirming these sales or the US subsidiary could be found. An archived 2019 cases page lists SIBA installations and test sites in Mexico, Russia, the Netherlands, England, Poland, Denmark, Portugal, Bulgaria and Burundi, without naming the breweries.

Average headcount rose from 5 in 2018 and 8 in 2019, according to the 2019 annual report, to 21 in both 2020 and 2021, according to the 2021 annual report. The 2019 report says the development work was financed partly by the Horizon 2020 project, "with a total grant framework of €1.6 million", and partly by the company's own funds and loans. No private funding round was announced. Early backers named on the company's fifth-anniversary page were the Danish Market Development Fund, Otto Bruun and the Alex Foss Industrifond.

The Money

The last accounts Specshell filed, for 2021, show a net loss of DKK 5,561,815, total liabilities of DKK 20.44 million against assets of DKK 12.0 million, and equity of DKK -8,441,650. Revenue was last disclosed for 2018, at DKK 3.52 million, according to the figures compiled by DanskCVRAPI from the filed reports. The accounts book grants and development support of DKK 9,219,701 in 2020 and DKK 2,447,593 in 2021, and a DKK 9.08 million write-down of intangible assets in 2020.

The auditor, Advisor-Revision, drew attention to a material uncertainty about the company's ability to continue, saying it depended on shareholders and long-term lenders providing liquidity. Management wrote that it expected new share capital and possibly loans in the first half of 2022 and budgeted for a profit from 2023. Ownership did change in mid-2022, when the CVR register shows new stakes for several holding companies, among them Kunov-Kruse Holding, Piltoft Innovation and Nybo Innovation, according to North Data. Four months after the 2021 report was filed, the company was bankrupt.

Why Europe Should Care

OptiSpec was pitched as a climate measure as much as a factory tool: the fact sheet argued that more efficient bioethanol plants would help the EU meet its transport decarbonisation goals. The EU's revised Renewable Energy Directive sets a target of at least 42.5% renewable energy by 2030, with sector targets for transport and stricter sustainability rules for bioenergy. A 1 to 2% yield gain in grain ethanol, the figure the project promised, would mean more fuel from the same crop. Inline process analytics for food and fuel plants is also a niche in which a European supplier could compete, and Specshell's case shows how hard it is for a small instrument maker to get there on grants and short-term debt.

The Verdict

Specshell's former managers and its bankruptcy trustee have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, archived company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.