Why TelLab's EIC Accelerator Nutrient Analyser Stopped at Nitrate

T.E. Laboratories, an Irish chemistry company in Tullow, Co Carlow, trading as TelLab, applied to the EIC with a single analyser that would sit in rivers, lakes and treatment plants and measure nitrate, nitrite, phosphate and ammonia on its own. The European Commission selected the project, H2OMon, in the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, where T.E. Laboratories is the only company listed for it. The grant agreement was signed on 31 October 2019 and paid an EU contribution of €1,013,468 towards a total cost of €1,447,812.50, from 1 November 2019 to 31 October 2021, according to CORDIS.

Seven years later the product exists and is sold, but as a nitrate and nitrite analyser. Its maker, Aquamonitrix, a spin-out from the same industrial estate, sells analysers, a sampler and a data portal, all built around those two nitrogen compounds. Phosphate and ammonia, the other half of the EIC promise, appear nowhere in its range. The company has not publicly explained why.

Where TelLab Stands Now

T.E. Laboratories is operating. The Irish company register shows it with status "Normal", owned by Technical Environmental Laboratories Limited, classed as a small company, and with accounts for the year to 31 December 2025 filed on 5 August 2026, according to Solocheck. The same record lists trade names including Tellab, Standard Chemicals, Reliability Ireland and Trend Institute. Its website presents water testing, laboratory chemicals, oil and fuel analysis and training, with a lubrication course advertised for November 2026. Small Irish companies file abridged accounts, and no revenue, profit or staff figure for either company could be found in free sources.

The EIC-funded analyser now lives in Aquamonitrix Limited, incorporated on 19 February 2021 at the same Tullow address and filing its 2025 accounts on the same day as its sister company, according to Solocheck. Silicon Republic dated the spin-out's founding to August 2021, six months after the register date. Aquamonitrix posted application notes in May and June 2026 and lists trade fairs through Pollutec in October 2026 on its events page.

The Technology: Chromatography in a Field Box

Nutrient pollution is usually checked by filling a bottle and sending it to a lab, which gives one reading days later. Probes that sit in the water exist, but the H2OMon report says they are costly, inflexible and prone to fouling. TelLab's answer was to shrink ion chromatography, the standard lab method for separating dissolved ions, into a portable unit with ultraviolet LED detection. In the column, nitrite reaches the detector before nitrate, so the analyser can read nitrite accurately even when nitrate levels are high, the company's research officer Sandra Lacey told CORDIS, giving detection limits of 0.05 mg/L for nitrite and 0.6 mg/L for nitrate. The method was published in the Journal of Chromatography A in August 2021, with TelLab's Breda Moore among the authors, and CORDIS lists a patent application for the UV-LED flow cell detector dated 1 March 2019.

An independent check exists for nitrate. James Hutton Limited, a Scottish verification body, tested an Aquamonitrix unit on treated sewage at the Bo'ness works between 21 October and 18 November 2021 and found nitrate readings agreed with accredited lab results within a 95% confidence interval of 98% to 102%, based on 117 data pairs, according to its verification statement of 14 March 2022. Nitrite was too low in that effluent to verify, so the statement covers nitrate only.

What H2OMon Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project objective on CORDIS describes an "integrated nitrate/phosphorous/ammonia all natural water monitoring system" and forecasts €27.3 million in revenue and €18.6 million in profit over five years, 22 new jobs in the firm and about 150 in its supply chain. Announcing the grant in August 2019, the company spoke of up to 25 new jobs in three years and said the device was being trialled in the US EPA's septic system nitrogen sensor challenge, according to Engineers Ireland and TechCentral. TelLab's entry in the US Nutrient Sensor Challenge described Aquamonitrix as measuring pH, nitrate, nitrite, phosphate and ammonia simultaneously.

The last periodic report, covering November 2020 to October 2021, set out the plan: an integrated nitrite, nitrate and phosphate analyser ready for pilots across Irish fresh and marine water sites in early 2021, and the ammonium analyser later in the first quarter of 2021. The report, published in April 2022, still describes that piloting in the future tense and reports no results from it. The results page lists the journal paper, the patent application, two trademark filings for the Aquamonitrix and Monitrix names in May 2020, a web page and a final report that is not public.

1. Nitrate and nitrite analyser on the marketDeliveredLaunched 2021 per CORDIS; sold on Aquamonitrix.com.
2. Independent performance validationDeliveredETV statement for nitrate, March 2022.
3. Phosphate analyserNot deliveredPlanned for early 2021; no product announced.
4. Ammonia analyserNot deliveredPlanned for Q1 2021; no product announced.
5. Large-scale pilots across IrelandPartlyWest Cork river monitoring from October 2021 on the company's case study page; no pilot results in CORDIS.
6. 22 jobs and €27.3M revenue in five yearsUnverifiedNo revenue or staff figures public.

The project ran to its planned end date. On the evidence available, it delivered the nitrogen half of what it promised and not the phosphate and ammonia half, which is why the award is marked as partly delivered here. Whether those analysers are still in development could not be verified: the 2022 quote above speaks of versions for "more analytes" on the way, and none has appeared in the four years since.

Customers, Awards and a Spin-Out

The nitrate product found buyers in aquaculture. In October 2023 Aquamonitrix won the first Aquatech Business of the Year award from BIM, Ireland's seafood development agency, according to Silicon Republic and BIM, with fish farm customers named in Norway, the Netherlands and Canada. Its website carries a 2025 user story with The Kingfish Company, a land-based fish farmer, and a sampler for activated sludge developed in April 2023 for wastewater plants.

In January 2024 chief operating officer Colm Lynch became CEO of Aquamonitrix, with founder Mark Bowkett staying as a director, after the company signed a 12-month deal with Thames Water to show that nitrite and nitrate monitoring can improve wastewater treatment, according to Silicon Republic; the company's team page confirms the change. The result of the Thames Water trial and whether it led to a wider contract are not public.

The size of the business is harder to pin down. Silicon Republic wrote in 2023 that Aquamonitrix "employs more than 50 people", and in 2024 that it had "grown to a team of 50". Engineers Ireland gave the same figure, 50, for the whole of TelLab in 2019. It could not be verified whether the later figures count the parent laboratory staff. No outside funding round for Aquamonitrix has been reported, and neither company appears in the EIC Fund portfolio, checked across all 16 pages of the list on 7 October 2026.

A Regular in EU Research Projects

H2OMon was not TelLab's first EU money. Before it, the company led EcoSens Aquamonitrix, a LIFE programme project from June 2018 to March 2021 that built, deployed and validated 42 sensor prototypes in 13 operational environments with partners including Kemira, according to the EU's aquaculture knowledge base; TechCentral called H2OMon the company's second major EU grant after LIFE. CORDIS lists T.E. Laboratories as a partner in seven other Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects, among them the microfluidics pilot line HoliFAB, the ocean observing project AtlantOS, the farming project PestNu and the soil and food testing project E-SPFdigit, which runs to 2027. It is also listed in MERLIN, with no EU contribution shown.

Why Europe Should Care

Nitrogen and phosphorus from farms and sewage feed algal blooms in rivers, lakes and coastal waters. The recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/3019, requires nitrogen and phosphorus removal at all plants of 150,000 population equivalent or more by the end of 2039 and at plants of 10,000 or more by 2045, and sets a target for larger plants to cover their energy use from renewable sources by 2045, according to the EUR-Lex summary and the European Parliament's legislative observatory. Real-time nitrate and nitrite readings serve both goals: they show whether nitrogen is being removed, and, as the ETV statement notes, real-time control can significantly reduce the electricity used for aeration, the use case Aquamonitrix pitched to Thames Water. Phosphorus removal, the other half of that obligation, is the measurement the EIC paid for and TelLab has not brought to market.

The Verdict

T.E. Laboratories and Aquamonitrix were not asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.