Toposens: Building Bat Sonar With EIC Accelerator Money

Toposens GmbH, a Munich start-up founded in 2015, built ultrasonic sensors that locate objects in three dimensions the way bats do, by listening to echoes with several microphones. In the 8 January 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot it won a grant-only award for a project called TOPOSENS, "3D Ultrasonic Sensors for Automotive", as the European Commission's list of selected companies shows; Toposens is the only company listed for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,446,193.75 towards a total cost of €3,494,562.50, from 1 June 2020 to 31 October 2022.

Eighteen days after the project ended, on 18 November 2022, Toposens applied to the Munich Local Court to open insolvency proceedings, according to Munich Startup. The court appointed Stefan Strüwind of Bendel Insolvenzverwaltung as provisional administrator on 22 November 2022, according to Baker Tilly, which advised the buyer of the business. The legal entity that received the grant stayed behind in insolvency when its business was sold, and has been marked as in liquidation since 10 February 2023, according to North Data.

Two Insolvencies in Two Years

The provisional administrator kept the business running and looked for investors worldwide. Mey Industry, the investment company of Webasto's main shareholder Gerhard Mey, bought the entire business operations, including all trademark rights and patents, and kept all employees, Munich Startup reported on 28 February 2023. Strüwind told the site that interest had been "very large", but that only one written offer arrived, because insolvency pay could only be pre-financed for two months and a buyer had to be found by 31 January 2023. Baker Tilly put the workforce at 24. The sale price is not public.

The business moved into a shelf company registered in July 2022 as UNA 528. Equity Management GmbH, renamed Battotec GmbH in February 2023 and Meysens GmbH in March 2023, according to North Data. Co-founder and former CTO Alexander Rudoy ran it as managing director, according to a KfW portrait and the Implisense company record, and it kept selling under the Toposens brand.

That second company did not last either. North Data lists a Munich Local Court order of 27 November 2024 concerning Meysens' assets under insolvency case number 1542 IN 11886/24, and shows the company in liquidation. The full text of the notice is not freely available, and no press report on it could be found. The toposens.com site was still advertising a June 2024 trade fair when the Internet Archive captured it in June 2025, and it returned only a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" error in a February 2026 capture. Whether anyone bought the technology out of the second insolvency could not be verified.

The Technology: Echolocation in a Matchbox

Parking sensors on today's cars measure only distance: they say something is there, not where. Toposens combined one ultrasonic transducer with several microphones and a patented algorithm that turns the echoes into a 3D point cloud with X, Y and Z coordinates, the CORDIS objective says. Unlike cameras and lidar, sound is not affected by light, and it reflects off glass and other transparent surfaces that optical sensors can miss.

In 2019 the company's TS3 sensor was the size of a matchbox, had a range of up to 5 metres and a field of view of up to 180 degrees, and was expected to cost less than $20 at volume, SAE's Mobility Engineering reported in November 2019, when Toposens had 22 employees and listed Daimler, Porsche, Audi and Continental as customers. In 2022 its lawyers at Bird & Bird named BMW, Continental and Daimler as customers in tested projects, and Infineon and Murata as partners. None of these carmakers or suppliers has announced a production order.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What It Delivered

The project was pitched at cars. The CORDIS objective names rear automatic emergency braking, "living object protection around and below the car", parking assist, autonomous valet parking and in-cabin passenger monitoring, and says the sensor would allow "the highest degrees of autonomy (level 4 or level 5)". The final periodic report for June 2021 to October 2022 describes something narrower: a sensor with a CAN interface, a housing designed for IP67, ROS-based software and a separate processing unit for 3D collision avoidance on automated guided vehicles, plus tests of under-vehicle detection. It says the system is "currently suitable" for mobile robots and low-volume autonomous shuttles, and has "demonstrated functionality" for the later development of passenger car products.

The product came to market. Toposens launched the ECHO ONE, an industrial 3D ultrasonic collision avoidance sensor for forklifts, autonomous mobile robots and AGVs, in July 2022, after "nearly 2 years of co-development" with industry partners, according to The Robot Report and eeNews Europe. The insolvency administrator described it as series-ready and delivered to large warehouse customers, according to Munich Startup. The automotive goals in the project title were not reached.

1. 3D ultrasonic sensor hardware and firmwareDeliveredECHO ONE launched July 2022 (The Robot Report).
2. 3D collision avoidance for robots and AGVsDeliveredProcessing unit with warn and stop zones (CORDIS report).
3. ADAS in cars: emergency braking, parking, under-car detectionNot achievedTests only; no carmaker production order announced.
4. Level 4 and 5 autonomous drivingNot achievedReport limits use to robots and low-volume shuttles.
5. ISO 9001 certificationNot achievedAudit planned in the final report; no certificate announced.
6. New patentsPartlyCORDIS lists only three filings from 2016 to 2019, before the project.
7. Commercial scale-up after the projectNot achievedInsolvency filing on 18 November 2022.

The final report says Toposens "successfully filed various new patents and a new trademark". The CORDIS results page lists three patent applications, dated 29 January 2016, 15 March 2018 and 10 October 2019, all before the project began. North Data shows an "Echo One" word mark from May 2022 and three patent publications on signal processing methods from June 2022, now attached to Meysens, which fits the report's claim but does not show who filed them or when.

The Money

Toposens raised private money in small rounds. In May 2020, the month the EU grant agreement was signed, a round led by the existing investor Alpana Ventures brought in Basinghall Partners and In-Q-Tel, the US strategic investor, in one of In-Q-Tel's first German deals, according to Munich Startup and Geo Week News; the amount was not disclosed. A Series Pre-A round in April 2022, with SPDG Ventures as a new investor, brought total funding since 2017 to "around €3.9 million", according to Bird & Bird. Munich Startup later put the total at up to €4.5 million; the two figures are not reconciled in any public source. Either way, the EU grant was worth more than half of everything private investors put in.

A follow-on round "did not materialise", Munich Startup wrote, and it blamed rising interest rates and a difficult market. North Data also lists €471,501 in COVID-19 state aid in 2022 and €215,959 in German funding from 2018 for I-RobEka, a research project on robotic shopping assistants. Toposens' only filed annual accounts listed by North Data are for 2020, and their figures are not freely viewable; the company's equity, losses and debts at the time of the insolvency are not public. Whether the EU recovered any part of the grant is not public either.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy expects that by 2030 "automated mobility will be deployed at large scale", which needs sensors that see the space right around a vehicle. Toposens' sound-based approach was a European alternative to optical sensors for that close range. Its investor list shows the interest from outside Europe: In-Q-Tel invests in technology for US national security, Munich Startup noted. In the end the patents went to Mey Industry, Gerhard Mey's Munich investment company, but two insolvencies in two years leave their future use unclear.

The Verdict

Toposens' former managers, Meysens and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published reports, linked throughout.