Tessares After the EIC Accelerator: Hybrid Internet Firm Wound Up

Tessares no longer exists. On 19 February 2026 its shareholders met before a Brussels notary, dissolved the company and closed its liquidation in the same act, without appointing a liquidator, after an auditor confirmed that every debt had been repaid, according to the deed published in the Belgian Official Gazette on 27 March 2026. The Belgian company register lists the enterprise as stopped since that day, with the legal situation "closure of liquidation", according to the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises. Its final statement of affairs, dated 31 January 2026, showed total assets and equity of €4,802.11.

Six years earlier the European Innovation Council had picked the Louvain-la-Neuve company in the October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with blended finance, for MPA, a "Mobile Application for Hybrid Internet", according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names no other beneficiary for the project. The grant paid for software that lets a smartphone use Wi-Fi and 4G/5G at the same time. The software worked in operator trials. It never reached a phone in a customer's pocket.

What Happened to Tessares

The business did not disappear with the company. Wavenet, a Belgian IT services firm, says it has provided maintenance and support for Tessares' hybrid internet systems "since the takeover of Tessares' activities in June 2024", covering deployments at Proximus, KPN, Telia and British Telecom, and at GO Malta until 2025, according to a Wavenet case study that puts the number of end users at more than 100,000 in what it calls "a declining market". Wavenet's telecom services page lists the "deployment and maintenance of the Tessares hybrid internet access solution", and tessares.net now redirects there. The price and terms of the takeover are not public, and no announcement by Tessares itself could be found.

The company was wound down in steps. In September 2023 its shareholders cut the share capital from €5,703,373.33 to €3,256,333.01 and wrote off €4,013,853.75 of share premium to clear the losses carried forward at the end of 2022, according to the deed published in the Official Gazette in January 2024. That puts accumulated losses at the end of 2022 at €6.46 million. The 2023 accounts then showed a further loss of €3,278,977, according to Companyweb, which reproduces the filings of the National Bank of Belgium. In September 2025 the board moved the registered seat out of its Avenue Jean Monnet offices, and in October 2025 it appointed an auditor for a voluntary dissolution, according to the Gazette and the dissolution deed. North Data also lists the company as terminated.

Because creditors were paid in full and no insolvency proceedings were opened, this was an orderly closure, not a bankruptcy. Whether the shareholders recovered any of the more than €6.5 million they put in is not public.

The Technology: Two Networks, One Connection

Tessares was built on Multipath TCP, an extension of the internet's main transport protocol that lets one data session run over several network paths at once. The company was a spin-out of UCLouvain, and the CORDIS report names Professor Olivier Bonaventure, a Tessares co-founder, as the main author of IETF RFC 8803, a protocol that 3GPP adopted for its ATSSS function (Access Traffic Steering, Switching and Splitting) in Release 16.

The company's first product joined a home's slow DSL line with a 4G link inside the router, so that households far from a street cabinet got a faster connection without new fibre. Proximus began a pilot in Frasnes-lez-Anvaing in July 2016 for customers living more than 1,600 metres from their cabinet, according to Proximus. By November 2018 Tessares counted Proximus, KPN, Telia Finland and Telia Lithuania as customers and said the system was active in 50,000 to 100,000 homes, up from 15,000 at the end of March 2018, according to Telecompaper, which also reported revenue above €1 million in the previous year.

MPA was meant to take the same idea from the router to the smartphone. Phones usually pick one network: they stick to Wi-Fi even when it is weak and drop sessions when they leave Wi-Fi coverage. With software in the phone and a matching gateway in the operator's network, a single video stream or download could use both, and hand over from one to the other without a break. For operators the selling point was cost: the CORDIS report says carrying a gigabyte over Wi-Fi is 20 to 100 times cheaper than over a mobile network. Before the project began, Korea's KT and Tessares had tested an ATSSS service, according to Wi-Fi NOW in October 2019.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 21 April 2020 and the project ran from 1 May 2020 to 31 January 2023, with a total cost of €1,747,627.50 and an EU contribution of €1,223,339.25, according to CORDIS. The proposal was ambitious. It promised a launch in Europe in 2021, "right after the end of the project", in Asia, North America and Australia in 2022 and in other markets in 2023, more than €144 million of revenue from 2021 to 2025, 10 new jobs during the project and 30 more afterwards.

The final report describes real technical work. Tessares contributed to the 3GPP and IETF specifications, built and scaled the network-side software, gave its gateway to Apple so that Apple could test its iOS implementation against it, ran a lab test and a field user test with Comcast in the Philadelphia region, ran thousands of lab test iterations with Charter, and joined BT and Deutsche Telekom in a GSMA initiative that ended in a live demonstration at Mobile World Congress 2022. The report says the project "delivered the expected outcome" and is ready for commercial deployment "once the smartphone operating systems are updated with the compatible capabilities". These operator trials are reported by Tessares itself; no announcement by Comcast, Charter, BT or Deutsche Telekom about them could be found.

1. Network-side software (gateway)DeliveredBuilt, lab-tested and field-trialled, per the CORDIS report.
2. Standardisation in 3GPP and IETFDeliveredATSSS in 3GPP Release 16 and RFC 8803, July 2020.
3. Operator trialsCompany-reportedComcast, Charter, BT and Deutsche Telekom named by Tessares only.
4. Launch in Europe in 2021, other regions 2022 and 2023Not achievedNo commercial launch of the app was announced.
5. €144M revenue from 2021 to 2025Not achievedGross margin was €1.19M in 2023 and fell after.
6. 40 new jobsNot achievedThe company was dissolved in 2026.

The project finished on schedule and produced the piece of the system that Tessares controlled. The part it did not control, support in the phone's operating system, is what blocked the product, and the proposal had planned a commercial launch for 2021 regardless. That dependency was the central risk of the project, and it materialised.

The Money and the EIC Equity

Proximus and VIVES II backed Tessares from its creation in April 2015. In March 2018 Proximus, VIVES II and the Walloon regional investor SRIW put in €3 million, when the company had 28 staff, according to Proximus. The Gazette shows that this money came as a bond with warrants, €1 million from each, converted into 240,000 shares in March 2021. Some databases, such as tech.eu, list only Proximus and VIVES II for that round.

On 5 March 2021, following an investment agreement of 1 March, shareholders issued 227,174 new shares at €15.625 each, a cash increase of €3,549,593.75, and named a director proposed by Sagemcom Broadband, the French maker of internet routers, according to the deed in the Official Gazette. The new articles of association gave five investors the right to propose a director if they held at least 5%: Proximus, VIVES II, SRIW, Sagemcom Broadband and the EIC Fund, and they exempted share transfers between the EIC Fund and the European Commission from the transfer restrictions.

The filed accounts show the end of the business. Gross margin, the closest public measure of sales, fell from €1,191,766 in 2023 to €416,394 in 2024 and €84,845 in 2025. Equity was €109,864 at the end of 2023 and turned negative, at minus €94,189, at the end of 2024, before a small 2025 profit of €99,144 brought it back to €4,955.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Digital Decade programme aims for gigabit connections for all households and 5G in all populated areas by 2030, according to the European Commission. Rural homes far from fibre are the hardest part of that target, and bonding DSL with mobile data, Tessares' first product, was one way operators bridged the gap; more than 100,000 people still use it, according to Wavenet. MPA addressed a different European concern: operators' energy bills. The CORDIS report cites studies saying that sending data over a mobile network can take up to 20 times more energy than over Wi-Fi.

The case also shows the limit of a grant to a supplier whose product depends on someone else's platform. A Belgian start-up could write the standard and build the network side, but whether smartphones would support it was decided in Cupertino and Mountain View, not in Louvain-la-Neuve.

The Verdict

Tessares' former management, Wavenet 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.