ViewPoint: An EIC Accelerator Story of Living Water Sensors

ViewPoint has spent more than three decades selling camera systems that track how laboratory rodents and zebrafish move. With ToxMate, the company from Civrieux, north of Lyon, turned the same idea on wastewater: 48 small freshwater invertebrates watched around the clock, whose change in behaviour signals that something toxic is in the water. In the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected "VIEW POINT" from Civrieux for the project ToxMate, "Continous real-time monitorin of water toxicity" (the spelling is the Commission's), according to its list of selected companies. The list names no other beneficiary for the project. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 3 December 2019, an EU contribution of €1,234,515.63 towards a total cost of €1,763,593.75, and a project that ran from 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2022, according to the CORDIS fact sheet.

Four years after the project closed, the company is still trading, still publishing research on the device and back in an EU consortium. What cannot be checked is how much ToxMate actually sells: ViewPoint files its accounts with a confidentiality declaration, so its revenue is not public.

Where ViewPoint Stands in 2026

VIEW POINT is an active company with no insolvency proceedings on record. The French public register lists it as an SME with 10 to 19 employees in 2024 and a net result of €44,804 for that year, according to the Annuaire des Entreprises. Societe.com gives the same 2024 net result, rounded to €44,800, and €47,300 for 2023, with revenue marked as not communicated. Its accounts for the year to 31 December 2024 were announced in the official gazette on 16 October 2025, accompanied by a declaration that the accounts are confidential, according to BODACC. The same record shows the company closed its books on 30 June until 2019 and on 31 December from 2020.

Three further signs of activity date from the last 18 months. In June 2025 ViewPoint joined URBAN M2O, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by the Technical University of Denmark on monitoring and modelling urban water quality, with a net EU contribution of €308,612.50 to the company until May 2029, according to CORDIS. In November 2025 Didier Neuzeret co-authored a preprint with INRAE researchers that applied ToxMate data from a wastewater treatment plant and found four distinct recurring types of micropollution event, according to arXiv. And the company's website carries 2025 news from its core business in zebrafish research.

Two details in the public record do not line up. The register gives 1 March 1990 as the creation date; Societe.com gives 16 October 1990. And the register reports a headcount band of 10 to 19, while the Solar Impulse Foundation, which lists the water business as "ViewPoint Water Biomonitoring", gives 24 employees and Mionnay, a neighbouring commune, as its location. Neither source says when its figure was taken.

The Technology: Animals as the Sensor

Wastewater carries thousands of chemical residues, from pesticides and metals to pharmaceuticals. Conventional monitoring tests a list of known substances in samples taken once or twice a year and returns results after at least 72 hours, the project objective says. ToxMate does not look for named substances. It pumps part of the water stream past three panels, each holding 16 animals from three species: a crustacean (Gammarus), a leech and a freshwater snail (Radix). Infrared lighting and industrial cameras record their movement continuously, and software flags abnormal behaviour as a toxicity alert.

The approach grew out of research rather than marketing. INRAE, the French public research institute, says its ecotoxicology laboratory in Lyon and ViewPoint co-developed ToxMate in a collaborative programme from 2013 to 2018, and that the two launched a four-year joint laboratory called ViewTox at the Pollutec trade fair on 14 October 2021, with a 30 m² experimental room, €300,000 of equipment and €160,000 of regional funding, according to its press release. CORDIS lists two patents linked to the project, filed in March and July 2018, for a contaminant-detection method and a toximeter system, among the project's results.

The speed claims have shifted over time. The 2019 objective promised a toxicity result in one hour. The final project report says 10 minutes, and the Commission's 2022 results summary quotes Neuzeret saying the animals change their behaviour "between 2 and 10 minutes" after water quality drops, according to CORDIS. Faster reporting is plausible as the software matured, but no independent benchmark of ToxMate's response time against a defined pollutant dose was found. The method's weakness is the reverse of its strength: it reports that something is wrong with the water, not what the substance is, so a chemical analysis is still needed to find the cause.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The Phase 2 grant followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study that ran from 1 November 2018 to 28 February 2019 on a total cost of €71,429, according to CORDIS. Its report says the company assessed what it would take to bring ToxMate to TRL 9, ran a freedom-to-operate analysis and projected a positive return "since year 2 of commercialization". No figures were published that would allow that projection to be checked.

The Phase 2 final report, covering January to June 2022, lists the work: hardware and software improvements to add new behavioural endpoints, four reference sites running for 14 months each, preparation for in-house medium-scale production with an ERP system, and the start of sales in France. It says sensitivity was raised to detect polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and pesticides below 5 µg, and that applications were validated after secondary and tertiary treatment at urban and industrial plants and at several stages of drinking water treatment. Its image captions name installations at the Solvay chemical plant in Tavaux, a drinking water station run by Saur in Férel, the Paris sanitation authority SIAAP and three stations monitoring advanced treatment in Altenrhein, Switzerland.

The Commission's results summary adds that ToxMate went on sale at the end of 2021 in France and Switzerland, that demonstration sites led to direct sales to Versailles, Chartres and Chambéry, and that China, Germany and the United States were next. The project ended on its scheduled date of 30 June 2022; CORDIS shows no extension.

1. Improve detection and add behavioural endpointsDeliveredFinal report and the 2025 field-data preprint.
2. Reference sites in industry, drinking water and urban wastewaterDeliveredSolvay Tavaux, Saur Férel, SIAAP, Altenrhein named in the report.
3. Market launch in EuropeDeliveredOn sale since end 2021; client testimonials on toxmate.fr.
4. Medium-scale in-house productionUnverifiedNo unit numbers published.
5. Expansion to Germany, China and the USNot achievedNo customer or office announced.

Customers: Mostly in the Company's Own Words

ViewPoint's ToxMate site quotes three clients by name: the chief executive of the textile dyer Teintures et Impressions de Lyon, Veolia's regional director for the Nevers-les-Saulaies treatment plant, and Alain Bellamy, vice-president of Chartres métropole in charge of water, who says ToxMate supports the staff of the Mare Corbonne plant "au quotidien", according to the company's reference page. The Solar Impulse Foundation profile names Veolia, Suez and the city of Laon as users. A customer case by the supplier SMC says ToxMate is deployed in urban and industrial treatment plants and in drinking water production, and describes the temperature control SMC built for it.

None of these customers was found announcing a ToxMate contract on its own channels, and no public tender award naming ViewPoint was found. The number of stations in service is not published anywhere. The most recent post on the ToxMate site's news feed dates from December 2024. That leaves the commercial scale of the product, four years after launch, unverifiable from public sources.

North Data also lists ViewPoint in three earlier EU research projects between 2012 and 2015, on developmental neurotoxicity, aggression and attention disorders, all linked to its laboratory business, according to its company profile; these were not checked individually for this article. The EIC Fund portfolio, checked across all 16 pages, does not include ViewPoint, which fits a grant-only award.

Why Europe Should Care

Micropollutants are now a legal obligation rather than a research topic. The recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/3019, requires an additional, quaternary treatment step against micropollutants at plants serving 150,000 population equivalents and more, phased in for 20% of them by 2033, 60% by 2039 and all of them by 2045, and makes producers of medicines and cosmetics pay at least 80% of the cost, according to the European Parliament's summary. Operators that build ozone or activated carbon stages will need to show that they work; ToxMate's reported use before and after advanced treatment at Altenrhein, which Veolia calls the first treatment plant in the world to combine ozonation with granular activated carbon, is exactly that use case. The company's own blog prepared French customers for the directive in March 2023.

The Verdict

ViewPoint and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.