TF-Technologies: EIC Accelerator Paving Grant Ended by a Takeover

Asphalt is laid by a paver and a crew who, for most of the industry's history, have had no instrument telling them whether the mat they leave behind is the right weight, temperature and thickness. TF-Technologies, a family-owned company in Fredensborg, north of Copenhagen, has made electronic controls for road pavers since 1978. Its MatManager system logs what a paver actually puts down. In the European Innovation Council's January 2019 round of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot of what became the EIC Accelerator, the company won an EU grant of €988,312 to take that system to a large-scale pilot and full commercial launch.

The project never got there. On 30 December 2019 the French Fayat Group, owner of the paving equipment brands Dynapac and Bomag, took control of TF-Technologies, according to the company's own announcement and the Danish register entries shown by North Data. As part of a group with an annual turnover of €4.4 billion, as its sale adviser put it, the company was no longer a small or medium-sized enterprise, and the EU terminated the grant on 2 April 2020, before the full field trials had run, according to the project's CORDIS report.

Where TF-Technologies Stands Now

TF-Technologies is an active subsidiary of Fayat. The Danish register lists Fayat SAS as its only owner and a board chaired by Paul Corneel M. Hense, with the company still at its Fredensborg address, according to companydata.dk and ownr, both drawing on the CVR register. Its latest accounts, for the year to 30 September 2025, were filed on 13 April 2026 and show gross profit of DKK 14,020,717 and a net loss of DKK 2,646,038, its first loss in the accounts listed back to 2012. Equity fell to DKK 19,964,567 from DKK 24,110,605 a year earlier. Revenue is not disclosed; the company uses the Danish exemption that lets it report gross profit only, as its filed annual reports state.

The sale was run as an international auction by the Danish adviser ATRIUM Partners, which says several component developers and equipment manufacturers took part and that the deal included TF-Technologies' 50% stake in a Chinese joint venture, according to ATRIUM and the advisory network Advior. The price was not disclosed. The sources differ slightly on the date: the register shows Fayat's shareholding and new board members from 30 December 2019, while the company dated the change "as of the new year", 1 January 2020.

The takeover came in two steps. In the year to September 2020 the company booked a cash capital increase of DKK 8,392,871, which lifted its share capital from DKK 1,000,000 to DKK 1,050,000, according to its 2019/20 annual report; North Data records the new capital on 27 December 2019. The founding family's holding company, Teilmann Holding ApS, stayed in until March 2023, when Fayat SAS was registered as the sole owner. Lisbeth Teilmann Melchior, who had led the company since 2011, stepped down as managing director on 31 December 2022.

The Technology: A Data Logger on the Paver

MatManager is a set of sensors on an asphalt paver, an interface box and a touch display for the operator. It measures how many kilograms of asphalt are laid per square metre, the temperature of the material, paving speed, tamper speed, stops and starts and truck deliveries, and adds GPS and weather data, according to Dynapac's 2018 launch release and TF-Technologies' product page. After the job, the data goes to MatWiser, a web platform that compares it with the specifications in a tender and produces reports for the contractor and the road owner.

The difference from the established practice is the record. Contractors traditionally rely on the experience of the paving crew and on cores drilled after the road is finished; if those show a defect, the road is dug up. MatManager's pitch is to catch overuse of material, cold loads and stoppages while the paver is still on site. The EU-funded version was meant to add an infrared camera and analytics that rate a job against best practice, which TF-Technologies described as "patent-pending".

The product was not new when the EU funded it. Dynapac, already part of Fayat, launched MatManager as an option for its pavers in June 2018 and said it was "already used by Dynapac customers such as NCC, Skanska and Svevia", according to its press release. The CORDIS summary says a basic version had been used by 50 contractors on more than 134 road jobs. The grant was for the next step, not the first product.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 winners names TF-Technologies A/S of Fredensborg as the only beneficiary of MatManager. The grant agreement was signed on 14 June 2019, with the project backdated to start on 1 May 2019 and planned to end on 30 June 2020. Its stated goal was to validate the advanced system in a large-scale pilot, reach technology readiness level 9 and launch it commercially in the first quarter of 2021. The application promised a market share of 1.8%, turnover of €50.5 million, EBITDA of €24.5 million and 172 additional jobs by 2025, according to CORDIS.

The single periodic report, covering the whole shortened project, says an infrared camera was developed and integrated, all hardware was made "sales- and production ready" with certification and labelling, and the MatWiser platform was rebuilt for scale. Pre-trials ran in October and November 2019 with three partners in the Nordic countries and were described as "a proven technical success". The full field trials had been pushed to early spring 2020 because of the paving season. They did not take place.

1. Sales-ready hardware with infrared cameraDeliveredDeveloped, certified and labelled, per the CORDIS report; the current product page does not mention a camera.
2. Scalable MatWiser analytics platformDeliveredRebuilt during the project; Dynapac still promotes MatManager with MatWiser in August 2023.
3. Large-scale pilot to reach TRL 9Not achievedOnly short pre-trials with 3 Nordic partners; full field trials cancelled with the project.
4. Patent for the analyticsNot achievedEP3680833 withdrawn in 2021 and EP3908998 withdrawn in 2024, per Google Patents.
5. Commercial launch, Q1 2021PartlyMatManager is sold through Dynapac and TF-Technologies; no launch of an upgraded version was announced.
6. €50.5M turnover and 172 new jobs by 2025Not achievedAverage staff 20 in 2024/25, gross profit DKK 14.02M.

The patent record is specific. TF-Technologies filed for "a system and method for assisting in improving a paving job" with a priority date of 8 January 2019, published internationally as WO2020144219 in July 2020. The first European application, EP3680833, was withdrawn on 16 January 2021, and the second, EP3908998, was deemed withdrawn on 24 January 2024 after examination had begun, according to Google Patents. No granted patent from the project could be found.

What Happened After the Grant

MatManager survived the project as a product. TF-Technologies still lists it alongside a quote from the Norwegian contractor Veidekke Industri, and Dynapac described it in August 2023 as its "latest breakthrough in connected job site documentation", with data sent automatically to MatWiser after each job. Neither company has published sales figures, customer numbers or results from a large-scale pilot. The company's own news page has not been updated since its announcement of the Fayat deal on 1 January 2020.

The accounts show a business that kept investing but did not grow. It capitalised DKK 2,650,800 of development costs in 2019/20 and DKK 3,580,558 in 2020/21, and its reports describe these projects as "electronic control for machines within road construction". Gross profit has stayed in a band of DKK 11.6 million to 14.7 million since 2017. The first annual report after the takeover restated gross profit for 2018/19 to DKK 14,786,475, from DKK 14,675,491 as first reported; the chart uses the figures as first reported.

Staff numbers fell after the takeover. The average headcount was 26 in 2018/19 and 28 in 2019/20, then 24, 23 and 19 in the following years; the 2022/23 and 2023/24 reports count 19 full-time employees on average. Companydata lists 20 for 2024/25, while the CVR register showed 28 employees and 24 full-time equivalents in July 2026. The two measures differ, and neither comes close to the 172 additional jobs the application projected for 2025.

Why Europe Should Care

The Commission's Transition Pathway for Construction, published on 15 March 2023, calls for better data and digital tools to make the construction ecosystem greener and more competitive. A device that documents exactly how much asphalt went into a road, and at what temperature, fits that agenda, and it gives road owners an objective way to check a contractor's work.

The technology also stayed in Europe. Fayat, a French family-owned group that agreed to buy Bomag from SPX in 2004 and Dynapac from Atlas Copco in January 2017, kept TF-Technologies running under its own name in Denmark. The awkward part for the EIC is the sequence: public money was granted to an SME whose owners were, according to ATRIUM, running an international auction for it, and the project ended as soon as the sale closed.

The Verdict

TF-Technologies and Fayat have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.