Trameto's EIC Accelerator Bet on Energy Harvesting ICs, Revisited

Every wireless sensor needs power, and most still get it from a coin-cell battery that someone eventually has to replace. Trameto, a fabless chip company from South Wales, set out to remove that battery with a single power management chip that could take energy from a solar cell, a thermoelectric generator, a vibration harvester or all of them at once. In 2019 the European Commission selected its HarvestAll project in the 3 April cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot of what became the EIC Accelerator, and paid €2,184,389.38 towards a €3,120,556.25 project, according to CORDIS.

The chip was built. Pre-production samples arrived in April 2022 and harvested energy "over a wide range of source voltages and impedances", the project's final report says. Volume sales never followed. On 29 January 2025 Trameto's members resolved to wind the company up in a creditors' voluntary liquidation, according to The Gazette, and on 8 July 2026 it was dissolved, according to Companies House. Its patents had by then passed to e-peas, a Belgian competitor.

How Trameto Ended

The liquidation was handled by Begbies Traynor in Cardiff. The directors' statement of affairs, dated 17 January 2025 and filed at Companies House, listed three assets: £103,578.68 in the bank, a £46,966.32 research and development tax credit claim and a £1,060 VAT refund. Only the cash was expected to be realised. Against it stood £741,207.39 owed to two secured lenders, Innovate UK Loans Limited (£384,587.39) and DBW Investments (3) Limited (£356,620.00), a vehicle of the Development Bank of Wales, plus claims from two employees, the directors and HM Revenue & Customs. The estimated deficiency to creditors was £697,046.98.

The joint liquidators' final report, covering 29 January 2025 to 22 January 2026, shows how little came back. The tax credit was lost because, as the liquidators explain, a claim is treated as not made once a company stops being a going concern. The two secured lenders received £29,111.33 each on 24 December 2025, unsecured creditors received 31.24 pence in the pound from the prescribed part, and the liquidators drew £19,905 in fees. They reported finding no matters that warranted further investigation or recovery action. The final meeting was filed on 8 April 2026, and the company was dissolved three months later, which North Data also records.

The intellectual property went elsewhere. On 30 March 2025 e-peas, a Louvain-la-Neuve company that makes energy harvesting power management chips of its own, announced that it "now owns the patents and intellectual property of Trameto" and that it would not add any of Trameto's products to its range. Trameto's own domain now redirects to that announcement. The statement of affairs lists no intellectual property, and the liquidators' final report records no proceeds from selling any; the liquidators state that no assets subject to a fixed charge remained when they were appointed. Companies House shows both lenders' charges as partly satisfied in filings of 10 January 2025, a week before the statement of affairs. How and when the patents changed hands, and for what price, is not public.

The Technology: One Chip for Every Harvester

Micro energy harvesters differ electrically. Photovoltaic and thermoelectric harvesters are "low-voltage DC, resistive, trickle sources", electrodynamic harvesters are "high-voltage, inductive, pulsed sources" and piezoelectric harvesters are "high-voltage AC, capacitive, bursty sources", the HarvestAll report on CORDIS explains. A conventional power management IC (PMIC) is designed around one of these. Trameto's pitch, which it trademarked as "any-many-multi", was a chip that adapts to any single harvester, many identical ones or several different ones, and combines their output.

The product line was later branded OptiJoule. Its lead part, the TM2040, accepted up to four harvesters of the same or mixed types without extra interface components and supplied a regulated 1.8 V at up to 15 mA, according to Embedded Computing Design and Electronics For You, both in August 2022. Chief executive Huw Davies called it "the only power management device able to do this economically, replacing up to four traditional PMICs". In a 2022 investor summary for the Silicon Catalyst incubator, Trameto named Texas Instruments, Analog Devices and e-peas as competitors whose devices were "limited by their single input harvester capability". That comparison is the company's own; no independent benchmark of the TM2040 against those parts has been published.

What HarvestAll Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The EIC award followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility grant for a project also called HarvestAll, which ran from 25 June to 24 October 2018, according to CORDIS. The trade press reported that grant as €70,000 at the time, in eeNews Europe; CORDIS gives €71,429 as the total cost and €50,000 as the EU contribution. The Phase 1 report set the bar high: market feedback, it said, justified "our claims of achieving annual revenues of €100M per annum by 2023".

The Commission's list of the April 2019 Phase 2 winners names Trameto Limited of Swansea as the only beneficiary of HarvestAll, and CORDIS lists no partner. The grant agreement was signed on 31 October 2019 and the project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 July 2022, 33 months, over three reporting periods. Whether that end date reflects an extension is not shown on CORDIS. The stated aim was to deliver HarvestAll first as an engineering sample and then "to TRL8 and pre-production status", so that customers could design it into their own systems.

1. Supply chain for volume productionDeliveredThe final report says contracts were signed with wafer aggregators, device makers and packaging firms; the partners are not named.
2. Engineering samplesDeliveredPre-production samples made on a multi-project wafer arrived in April 2022 and were characterised, per CORDIS; the TM2040 engineering sample went into public demo kits in August 2022.
3. TRL8 and pre-production statusPartlySamples reached pre-production stage, but no qualified production part or volume shipment was ever announced.
4. Customer adoption and reference designsUnverifiedCORDIS says first purchase orders arrived at the end of the project; no customer or order value was ever named.
5. €100M annual revenue by 2023 (Phase 1 claim)MissedNo revenue was disclosed; the company was liquidated in January 2025 with £103,578.68 in the bank.

On its own terms the EU project did a good part of what it set out to do: a working multi-input chip was taped out, made and tested, and evaluation kits reached engineers. What it did not do was reach the "pre-production" stage in a form that produced a business. That is the gap the delivery rating reflects.

After the Grant: Demo Kits, Not Volume

Trameto was funded from the start by Welsh public money and grants. Its first seed round, in December 2017, came from Swansea Innovations, Swansea University's commercialisation arm, and the Development Bank of Wales, according to Global Venturing. In May 2022 it closed a second seed round with u-blox, the Swiss GPS module maker, and the Development Bank of Wales, for undisclosed sums, reported by eeNews Europe and PIC Magazine. eeNews added that Trameto had received £380,000 in UK government grants since 2017. Trameto also joined the Silicon Catalyst incubator in 2019, and said it won the Elektra Awards' power systems product of the year in 2021; both appear only in company material.

Product news stopped in 2022. After the TM2040 demonstration platform in August, Trameto launched the smaller Severn proof-of-concept board for light and heat in September, according to Embedded Computing Design. Its spring 2022 Silicon Catalyst summary said it had completed the first phase of a collaboration with Murata on an evaluation platform, expected "initial purchase orders for our devices in early 2023", and forecast revenue of $15 million in 2025 rising to $100 million in 2030. No production release, named customer or Murata product followed in public, and no product news from the company after September 2022 could be found.

The Money

Trameto filed small-company accounts without a profit and loss account, so its revenue and losses are not public. The balance sheets tell a story of their own. From the year to March 2021 the company capitalised its chip development as an intangible asset, restating 2020 to do so; that line grew from £633,700 to £3,358,673 by March 2024 and was never amortised, because amortisation was to start "upon commencing commercial production of the product", the accounts note. In the same 2024 balance sheet, £2,188,939 of grant income sat in deferred income, and net assets were £670,163. Without the restatement, the 2020 accounts as first filed had shown net liabilities of £161,168.

Cash peaked at £847,024 in March 2022, just after the second seed round, and fell to £255,928 two years later. The team followed the cash: eight average employees in 2021/22, five in 2022/23 and three in 2023/24. Ten months after the last balance sheet showed £3.36 million of development on the books, the statement of affairs valued none of it.

Why Europe Should Care

Low-power chips for connected sensors sit inside the EU's own semiconductor ambitions. The European Chips Act, in force since 21 September 2023, aims to build Europe's capacity to design and make chips, and battery-free sensors would cut the waste and lithium demand that the HarvestAll report itself put at the centre of its case. Trameto was a British company, and the United Kingdom left the EU while the project was running. Its technology now sits inside the EU after all: e-peas, founded in 2014 after a decade of research at UCLouvain, develops its ambient energy managers in Belgium and has put Trameto's patents on its research roadmap. Whether that turns the EU's €2.18 million into a product depends on e-peas, not on the company the grant was paid to.

The Verdict

Trameto's former directors, its liquidators and e-peas have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.