Svelte Sought Insolvency After EIC Accelerator Curved-Mould Grant

Curved concrete is expensive because its moulds are. Svelte, a start-up from Brașov in Romania, built a machine that cuts double-curved moulds out of foam in one pass with a heated wire that bends as it moves, instead of milling them slowly on a CNC machine. In 2020 the European Commission picked the company, legally Sveltedca Partners SRL, as the only Romanian winner of the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal round, and the EU signed a grant of €1,669,648.75 towards a €2,385,213 project to industrialise the machine, according to CORDIS. The project closed in June 2023 with a prototype, four pilots and a European prize behind it. Twelve months later the company asked the Brașov Tribunal to open insolvency proceedings against itself.

The court first refused, the company appealed and won, and on 6 February 2025 the tribunal opened a simplified insolvency procedure and appointed a judicial liquidator, according to the case file 2777/62/2024 in the Romanian courts' public case database. The company register aggregators Totalfirme and Termene list the company as insolvent. In October 2026 the liquidator was still waiting for a valuation of its assets.

Where Svelte Stands Now

Svelte is in insolvency and not trading. The Brașov Tribunal opened the procedure at the company's own request on 6 February 2025 and named Eurosmart Filiala Brașov SPRL as provisional liquidator. On 2 April 2025 IDEVO SPRL, which had absorbed Eurosmart's Brașov branch, was confirmed in its place, and the creditors' meeting of 7 April 2025 set its fee at €2,500 a month plus 5% of anything recovered, the court record shows. An appeal that the company, represented by its administrator Octavian Ilie Richea, lodged against the opening judgment was thrown out as filed too late on 6 June 2025. Since then the judge has postponed the case twice, in November 2025 and March 2026, to let an appointed valuer assess the company's assets; the next control date is 22 October 2026.

The tax authority declared the company inactive on 18 February 2025 and cancelled its VAT registration from 31 January 2025, according to Totalfirme, while firme.info, which mirrors Ministry of Finance data, records its last filing with the tax office on 3 February 2025. No annual accounts for 2024 or 2025 are on file. The company website, svelte.eu, showed a hosting "suspended" page in archived captures from 2025, and on 16 October 2026 its domain no longer resolved. The last archived copy with content, from November 2024, still described the machine and carried the EU funding notice.

The Technology: A Wire That Bends While It Cuts

Freeform facades and topology-optimised concrete beams need moulds with double-curved surfaces, which are usually milled out of foam blocks on CNC machines, a slow, subtractive process. Hot-wire cutting is fast but, with a straight wire, can only produce ruled surfaces. Svelte's answer was a "heated SmartWire that changes its shape while moving through foam or wax-based materials", the CORDIS objective says. The company's final report claims an accuracy of plus or minus 0.6 mm and a cutting time of 8 minutes for a one-square-metre surface that takes 5 to 10 hours to mill, according to the CORDIS periodic report.

The commercial argument went beyond facades. Concrete floors, walls and beams shaped by load analysis need less material, and Svelte said its moulds would let builders cast such elements with far less concrete. None of the speed or savings figures has been tested independently in any source found for this article, and the company's own numbers shift from document to document.

That 2019 post, headlined "Double-curved Molds Created 14 Times Faster. Svelte Secures The Patent", promised molds "at least 24 times faster" in its body and said the patent "is registered with …………… in ……………", according to the archived page. CORDIS describes the method as patented, but no patent number appears in any source opened for this article, and the two further patent applications the EIC report mentions could not be traced.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Svelte appears in the European Commission's list of companies selected at the 19 May 2020 Green Deal cut-off as Sveltedca Partners SRL of Brașov, funding type "blended finance", with no partner company listed for the project. Romanian news site G4Media reported in July 2020 that it was the only Romanian SME among 64 companies in that €307 million round. It had come through the EIC's SME Instrument Phase 1 first: a €50,000 grant for a four-month feasibility study in 2020, during which it supplied moulds to the University of Applied Arts Vienna, according to CORDIS and the Phase 1 report. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company.

The EIC grant agreement was signed on 14 December 2020 and the project ran from 1 January 2021 to 30 June 2023. The company says it obtained a six-month extension "following delays in the global supply chain of electronic components", which matches the original end date of 31 December 2022 still shown on the EU's BUILD UP portal. The objective was to bring the machine to technology readiness level 9 and start selling it both as a "factory in a box" and as a service, producing moulds and panels in Svelte's own facility.

1. Industrial prototype machineDeliveredThe AC1200 machine-system was built, per the CORDIS report, with photos.
2. Four pilots with market playersSelf-reportedReported in CORDIS, including moulds for curved beams of a Romanian railway bridge; the bridge could not be identified. An acoustic ceiling pilot is shown on LinkedIn.
3. ISO certification and CE markingSelf-reportedClaimed in the CORDIS report; no certificate is public.
4. Two more patent applicationsSelf-reportedClaimed in the CORDIS report; not traceable in public sources.
5. TRL 9 and machine sales (factory in a box)Not achievedNo machine sale announced; turnover was zero until 2023.
6. Mould and panel production as a serviceNot achievedRON 59,930 turnover in 2023, then insolvency.

The engineering part of the project was done, if the company's report is taken at its word: a prototype, pilots and certification work. The commercial part, which is what an EIC Accelerator grant exists to unlock, did not follow. The project ended six months late, and the market launch it was meant to prepare never showed up in the company's accounts.

What Svelte Achieved Along the Way

The clearest outside recognition came in November 2022, when Svelte won the Purpose-Driven and Green category of the EU's Innovation Radar Prize, ahead of ALGAplus, INOQ and R3 GIS, according to CORDIS and Silicon Canals. Its LinkedIn page shows a curved lamellar ceiling for an IT company's event room, made with Svelte foamwork, which the company said cut reverberation from 1.5 to 0.9 seconds.

No private funding round, named investor or commercial customer could be found. Svelte's own investor page was still seeking "Strategic Lead Investors" in December 2022 to support its "industrial pilots and early market activities". A 2024 webinar notice from Poland's EU programmes contact point describes Svelte's former chief operating officer as having worked at "the first Romanian startup funded by EIC and EIB"; no European Investment Bank financing for the company could be verified. A December 2022 report by IQ Digital puts the EU funding at €2.4 million; that is close to the project's total cost, while the EU's share was €1.67 million.

The Money

The accounts follow the grant almost exactly. Cash jumped from RON 96,267 at the end of 2019 to RON 4,568,813 at the end of 2020, weeks after the grant agreement was signed, and the balance sheet showed RON 4,646,349 of deferred income, according to Totalfirme and firme.info. Total income then rose to RON 2.35 million in 2021 and RON 3.13 million in 2022 while turnover stayed at zero, so the income did not come from sales. The company made net losses of RON 190,138, RON 386,650 and RON 381,140 in 2021, 2022 and 2023, and its equity fell to minus RON 905,204.

By the end of 2023 the company held RON 21,396 in cash, owed RON 395,890 and still carried RON 2,619,064 of deferred income and RON 1,927,110 of fixed assets, the largest item on a balance sheet that the liquidator's valuer is now working through. The headcount dropped from seven in 2022 to two in 2023, the year the EIC project ended.

Why Europe Should Care

Svelte was funded in the EIC's Green Deal round on the argument, made in its own CORDIS report, that buildings use more concrete than their loads require and that shaping elements to the loads would cut materials, transport and emissions. The EU's new Construction Products Regulation, (EU) 2024/3110, entered into force on 7 January 2025 and applies from 8 January 2026, with the stated aim of supporting the Green Deal through "sustainability and resource efficiency in the construction industry", according to PU Europe; it also lets the Commission set minimum environmental performance requirements for public procurement and introduces a digital product passport, according to the European Parliament's Legislative Observatory. Tools that make material-saving concrete shapes cheap to cast fit that agenda, and Svelte was the only Romanian company in its round.

The weakness was the step from prototype to market. Svelte's records show no sign that a contractor or precaster committed to buying a machine or a steady flow of moulds before the grant money ran out, and the EIC equity that could have bridged that gap is not on file.

The Verdict

Svelte, its administrator and its liquidator have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, court data, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.