EIC Accelerator Tile Glazing at Tecno Italia Ended 15 Months In

Spray glazing, the standard way of coating ceramic tiles, wastes glaze and fills factory air with silica dust and solvent vapours. Tecno Italia, a maker of tile decoration machines in Italy's ceramic district around Sassuolo, set out to replace it with printers that drop ordinary water-based glaze onto each tile only where it is needed. In the European Innovation Council's Green Deal round of May 2020 it won a grant of €1,382,346.88 towards a €1,974,781.25 project called Glazetile, according to CORDIS. The project began on 1 November 2020 and was meant to run for 24 months. CORDIS records that it was "terminated on 8 February 2022".

The month before, Tecno Italia's business had become part of System Ceramics, the tile machinery maker owned by the Italian packaging group Coesia. System Ceramics announced on 7 April 2022 that it had completed the acquisition of Tecno Italia "through the formation of a new company, Tecno Italia Digital", taking a majority shareholding because of Tecno Italia's digital glazing machine, Digiglaze. A later System Ceramics article dates the move to January 2022. Neither the EU nor the companies have said why the grant was terminated.

Where Tecno Italia Stands Now

The legal entity that signed the grant still exists, but only as a shell. The VAT number CORDIS gives for Tecno Italia, IT02353440361, is still valid in the EU's VIES register, now under the name "T.I S.R.L." at Via Emilia Romagna 83 in Sassuolo, the address Tecno Italia's old website gave for its head office. Filings summarised by aziende.it from the Italian business register list the company as active, with revenue of €2,638,049 in 2021, €368,143 in 2022 and €6,494 in 2024, one employee in 2024, and profits of €2,458,289 in 2022 and €2,098,922 in 2024. What produced those profits on almost no sales is not stated in the summary, and no second source for these accounts could be found.

The operating business sits in Tecno Italia Digital S.r.l. in Fiorano Modenese, home of System Ceramics. A financial profile on Quotidiano.net's TopAziende gives it revenue of €4,020,595 and a profit of €444,731 in 2022, then revenue of €2,932,264 and a loss of €372,645 in 2023, with 5 employees. Tecno Italia's own website, tecnoitalia.it, now shows only a hosting provider's placeholder page.

The Technology: Dropping Glaze Instead of Spraying It

Tiles are glazed in two steps: a base coat, or engobe, that covers the whole surface, then decorative layers. Most lines spray the base coat through airless nozzles inside suction cabins. The Glazetile report on CORDIS calls this "a highly polluting and toxic process", says around 40% of the glaze is lost, and describes Tecno Italia's alternative: a print bar of electromechanical drop-on-demand dispensers that lay ordinary water-based glaze in a defined area, with no spray mist and no extraction plant.

The difference from inkjet glazing matters. A 2019 CORDIS Results in Brief on the project's feasibility phase notes that piezoelectric printheads can only handle glazes with particles below 2 microns, which must be milled at extra energy cost. Tecno Italia's head of R&D, Dino Boccaccini, said there that its machine "can handle cheap water-based glazes with particle sizes of up to 60 microns, similar to those of traditional glazes". The project had two machines: DigiGlaze for the full base coat and DigiGraphic, which uses many micro-valves to build three-dimensional textures in the glaze and was meant to replace expensive structured press moulds.

The machine was not new when the EIC funded it. Tecno Italia's company history says it presented a "Digital Glaze" machine at the Tecnargilla trade fair in 2012, and a 2015 product page already offered DigiGlaze with a promised cut of "25-35%" in glaze use at up to 65 metres per minute. Nor was it alone. Ceramic World Web's digital glazing archive lists Durst's Gamma DG digital glaze printer in production in 2018 and Esmalglass-Itaca's water-based DigitalGlass in 2023. The Commission winner list's description of Glazetile as the "first continuous ceramic tile glazer that uses fully water-based suspensions", which echoes the company's proposal, was not independently tested.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

Glazetile came out of a 2018 feasibility study under the SME Instrument Phase 1, with an EU contribution of €50,000, coordinated by S.C.E. Srl with Tecno Italia as partner, according to CORDIS. Its report says a DigiGlaze prototype had been under test "from January 2019 at a customer factory". Ceramic World Web reported in September 2019 that the Frascari Group, after nine months of running DigiGlaze 4.0 at Antica Ceramica in Rubiera, had bought five more units for its other plants.

In the EIC Accelerator pilot, the European Commission's list of selected companies names the winner only as "TECNO" of Formigine, with the website www.tecnoitalia.it, the acronym Glazetile and grant-only funding. The list has no other partner company for the project. CORDIS identifies the beneficiary as TECNO ITALIA SRL, VAT IT02353440361, sole participant and coordinator.

The single published report covers the work up to termination, although CORDIS labels its period as running to 31 October 2022. It says the team chose drop-on-demand over continuous jetting for DigiGlaze, replaced DigiGraphic's original valve bar with two application bars that raised resolution "from 25 to 200 DPI", and designed a glaze feeding tank, a real-time viscometer and a vision inspection system. It states that beta-test customers judged the glaze deposition "unique on the market" and that the project KPIs were achieved, without giving the measured values. The University of Modena life-cycle assessment promised in the grant agreement was, in the report's words, still being commissioned. The project's results page lists one trade-magazine article from 2021 and no deliverables.

1. DigiGlaze drop-on-demand glazer on the marketDeliveredMarketed by System Ceramics in 2023; its Digiglaze page now opens a digital glazer called Phoenix.
2. Eliminate the ~40% glaze loss of sprayingPartlySystem Ceramics claims savings of "up to 35%"; no independent measurement published.
3. DigiGraphic texture printer replacing press mouldsNot achievedNo launch announced by Tecno Italia or System Ceramics.
4. LCA study with the University of ModenaNot achievedNot published on CORDIS or by the companies.
5. Market entry in Italy and SpainPartlyItalian customers reported; no Spanish customer announced.
6. 24-month project completedNot achievedTerminated on 8 February 2022, after about 15 months.

What Happened After the Sale

Under System Ceramics the glazer kept its name for at least a year. In April 2023 System Ceramics described Digiglaze as "a solution developed in Tecno Italia, the historic ceramics division", promising glaze savings of "up to 35%" a year and daily cleaning cut from 60 minutes to "15/20 minutes", claims repeated by The Tiles of India in September 2023. Today the old Digiglaze address on the System Ceramics website forwards to Phoenix, a digital glazing machine that replaces "traditional airless systems" and lets operators set drop size and frequency. System Ceramics does not say whether Phoenix is the renamed Digiglaze. No DigiGraphic product appears on the System Ceramics pages reviewed for this article.

Tecno Italia had other EU links. It was one of ten partners in LOWCOST-IC, a 2019 to 2022 fuel cell materials project coordinated by the Technical University of Denmark, with an EU contribution of €50,000. The company is not listed in the EIC Fund portfolio, which is consistent with its grant-only award. No private funding round was found.

Why Europe Should Care

The problem Glazetile targeted is regulated. Directive (EU) 2017/2398 set an EU limit for respirable crystalline silica dust at work of 0.1 mg/m³, according to the European Parliament's legislative summary and the minerals association IMA-Europe. The Commission's Zero Pollution Action Plan of 12 May 2021 aims to cut air, water and soil pollution to levels "no longer considered harmful" by 2050. Spray-free glazing serves both.

The case also shows a limit of the EIC model. The grant was meant to help an independent SME scale up a product. Instead, the product passed to a large group mid-project and the funded work stopped early. That keeps the technology in Europe, but it is not the growth story the award described.

The Verdict

Tecno Italia, System Ceramics and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.