The Loop Factory's EIC Accelerator: 77 Fibre Machines Against One

Plastic trays, lids and cosmetic jars could be made from paper fibre, but the moulded-fibre factories that make egg boxes and takeaway bowls today use large amounts of water and energy to dry wet pulp. The Loop Factory AB, an innovation company in Varberg on Sweden's west coast with 7 employees in its 2021 accounts, said it had a machine that skips the water altogether. In the European Commission's list of EIC Accelerator pilot winners from the 7 October 2020 cut-off, The Loop Factory appears once, grant only, with a project called YANGI. No other company is listed for the project.

The grant agreement, signed on 8 March 2021, gave the project an EU contribution of €1,994,039.25 towards a total cost of €2,848,627.50, from 1 April 2021 to 31 December 2023, according to CORDIS. The objective promised a demonstration plant, customer pilots in four packaging applications, a manufacturing partnership with a global machine supplier and, in the long run, "77 machines in operation by 2030". Nearly three years after the project closed, one serial machine is publicly known to be running at a customer.

Where The Loop Factory Stands Now

The Loop Factory is active, but it no longer sells the technology the EIC paid to industrialise. Its website presents it as an innovation and scale-up partner for fibre-based nonwoven materials, offering a prototyping lab, material screening, recycled textile materials and acoustic panels and lamps. In September 2026 it announced that Joakim Jögård Wass had become chief executive, with a new commercial director and a head of commercial partnerships. The register data on Syna and Ratsit lists the company as active, with Jögård Wass as external CEO and Anna Altner as chair.

The dry-forming machine lives on in Yangi AB, a separate company at the same Varberg address, also founded by Altner. The Loop Factory's own account says Altner found dry forming "almost by chance in a potato shed in Denmark", brought a machine back to Sweden and that "in 2018, Yangi took over the continued development in a separate company". The final CORDIS report tells it differently: it says the technology "was spun out into a new entity, Yangi AB, during the project". Yangi AB was already named as the project's linked third party when the grant was signed in 2021, and Ratsit shows its current name registered on 7 April 2020 for a company formed in 2014. The two companies' ownership link is also reported differently: Hitta, using Dun & Bradstreet data, places both under The Loop Factory Holding AB, while Ratsit says Yangi belongs to no group.

The Technology: Fibre Packaging Without Process Water

Moulded fibre is usually made wet: pulp is suspended in water, sucked onto a mould and then dried with heat, which is why CORDIS describes the incumbent route as a "two-step" process. Dry forming spreads loose, dry cellulose fibres into a mat and presses them into shape in one line. The YANGI objective claimed the machine "uses 85% less water which minimises the energy needs with 75%", and promised "80% less factory space and half of machinery costs". By the final report the water claim had become "no process water is needed" and energy use more than 75% lower than plastics and wet moulding.

Yangi's own figures have shifted again since. Its August 2026 release claims 90 to 99% less process water than wet moulding, a cycle time of 4.3 seconds against 30 to 60 seconds, and 1.8 kWh per kilogram against a typical 4 to 7 kWh, citing a third-party verified life-cycle assessment for the energy figure only. Voith's 2023 release repeated the "no process water" and 75% energy claims. None of these numbers has been published by an independent test, and the assessment itself is not public.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant was signed by The Loop Factory, but most of the money went to Yangi. CORDIS lists a net EU contribution of €569,901.63 for The Loop Factory and €1,424,137.62 for Yangi AB as linked third party. The final report, covering April 2022 to December 2023, says the technology was matured "from TRL5/6 to TRL 7/8", demonstrated at the company's demo facility "to over 60 stakeholders in the packaging value chain", and that a global machine producer would manufacture it as a subcontractor. It says the team grew "from 8 employees to 30 full-time equivalents" and that the Cellera platform was "ready for commercialization in 2024". It also lists, as a result still expected, customers "prepared" for "trial volumes", which means the customer pilots had not produced trial orders by the end of the project.

1. Demonstration plantDeliveredDemo facility shown to over 60 stakeholders, per the CORDIS report.
2. Customer pilots in 4 packaging applicationsNot shownNo four pilots or pilot customers are named by CORDIS or the companies; the first named trial, with caterer Flavor Boss, came in 2026.
3. Partnership with a global machine supplierDeliveredCellera industrialised with GDM, a Coesia company, and AP&T, per Yangi and Packaging Insights.
4. IP secured for market releasePartlyPending patents and registered trademarks at project end; Yangi now calls its FiberIQ system patented. Patent grants not checked.
5. Commercial launch in 2024LateFirst serial machine announced at a customer site in June 2026.
6. 77 machines by 2030OpenOne serial machine publicly known so far.

On the engineering, the project did what it said: a demonstrator, a machine partner and a platform with a name. The commercial half of the plan arrived late. The report expected commercialisation in 2024; the first serial Cellera machine was announced at a customer in June 2026, and the four customer pilots that were the project's stated demonstration goal were never itemised in public.

What Happened After the Grant

Recognition came first: in May 2021 Yangi's fibre-based beauty packaging, developed with The Loop Factory and the agency Grow, won a Dieline Plastic Free Innovation Award. The private money went to Yangi. In December 2022 the German machinery group Voith signed an agreement to buy shares in Yangi, announced in January 2023; the luxury house Chanel also held shares and "actively supports" the business, according to Voith. The size of either stake was not disclosed. In September 2025 Yangi raised €10 million in an oversubscribed Series A led by Industrifonden, with Almi Invest GreenTech and two unnamed global industrial companies joining Voith, Chanel, FutureLab & Partners and Turret, according to Packaging Gateway and Packaging Journal. Packaging Gateway also reported that the first machine had been sold to a European converter and that products made with the technology had been shipped to Asian clients at the end of 2024; neither the converter nor the clients were named.

On 22 June 2026 Yangi announced that its first serial Cellera platform was operating at a European converter's production site, again unnamed, with dry-formed products such as fibre trays "expected to reach the market" in 2026. On 31 August 2026 it said it would take a quick-serve range of plates, bowls, lids and takeaway trays to US converters, launching at PACK EXPO International in Chicago on 18 to 21 October 2026, backed in part by a Swedish Energy Agency grant. Its only named customer test so far was a day of festival service with the Swedish food-truck operator Flavor Boss, held at Yangi's technical centre in Varberg.

The Money

The two companies tell different financial stories. The Loop Factory has stayed small and close to break-even. Its filed accounts, as shown by Ratsit and Hitta, show revenue of SEK 45.2 million in 2024, with an operating result of SEK 13.0 million, falling to SEK 13.5 million and a net result of minus SEK 1,000 in 2025. Equity was SEK 3.1 million at the end of 2025 and staff fell from 16 in 2023 to 11. What drove the 2024 spike is not explained in public sources.

Yangi is the opposite: a loss-making scale-up. The same two registers show Yangi AB with revenue of SEK 14.8 million and a net loss of SEK 34.8 million in 2024, after a loss of SEK 32.4 million in 2023, and staff of 29 in 2023 and 26 in 2024, as also listed by Hitta. Its equity was SEK 23.6 million at the end of 2024, before the Series A. Its 2025 accounts were not yet shown.

The Loop Factory has kept winning public money for other work. North Data lists Swedish state aid for energy research of SEK 2,988,425 and SEK 2,458,000 in 2024 and SEK 1,650,000 in 2025, and an EU award of €543,217 in July 2025 for recycled mineral-wool acoustic ceilings, according to North Data. That last project is Ceilings4LIFE, a €3 million LIFE programme project with €1.8 million of EU funding led by Saint-Gobain Ecophon, in which The Loop Factory is one of five partners, according to Ecophon. CORDIS lists YANGI as The Loop Factory's only Horizon project; Yangi AB is a partner in ZeroF, a Horizon Europe project on PFAS-free coatings for food packaging, with an EU contribution of €255,500, and an associated partner in the doctoral network ENDURE. Neither company appears in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages and 319 entries; the award was grant only.

Why Europe Should Care

The timing suits the technology. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, (EU) 2025/40, entered into force on 11 February 2025 and has applied since 12 August 2026; it requires all packaging on the EU market to be recyclable in an economically viable way by 2030, and the Commission says EU packaging waste reached a record 186.5 kg per person in 2022, according to the European Commission. A Swedish process that turns forest fibre into trays and lids without process water, built with European machine makers, fits both the circular economy agenda and the wish to keep packaging production in Europe. Yangi's US push leans on the same logic in reverse: its release pitches dry forming to American converters hit by tariffs and anti-dumping duties on imported moulded fibre.

The Verdict

The Loop Factory and Yangi have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.