A Second Look at VitalFluid's EIC Accelerator Plasma Fertiliser

Lightning fixes nitrogen from the air into rain, and VitalFluid's founders set out to do the same thing in a box. The Eindhoven company passes air through an electrical plasma and bubbles the result through water, producing what it calls plasma activated water: water carrying nitrate, the form of nitrogen plants take up, plus short-lived reactive oxygen and nitrogen compounds that kill microbes. In April 2019 the European Commission selected its project Plan2fix in the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 programme that became the EIC Accelerator, to sell the machines to greenhouse growers as a replacement for synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. The EU contributed €1,417,923.50.

Seven years on, VitalFluid is growing, but not as a fertiliser company. Its machines now run on British strawberry farms to control powdery mildew, and in August 2026 it closed a €17.2 million Series A to sell that crop protection application in the UK and the United States. This article checks what the EU grant promised against what happened.

Where VitalFluid Stands Now

VitalFluid is active, funded and selling, and the product it sells is not the one the EU paid to bring to market. Its website now presents its machine as a way to fight fungal diseases such as mildew, fusarium and venturia "without chemical residues", tested in more than 30 trials on strawberries, cucumbers, apples and tomatoes. Its own explainer describes plasma activated water as "a natural fungicide and disinfection solution". The nitrogen fertiliser that Plan2fix was built around appears there only as background.

In January 2026 VitalFluid delivered its first five machines to strawberry growers in England and Scotland, among them Angus Growers, Hall Hunter and Homme Soft Fruit of the EC Drummond group, according to Hortidaily and ioplus. By the time of the Series A, the company said its technology was deployed on more than 100 hectares of commercial strawberry production in the UK, and that Hall Hunter Partnership, Angus Growers and EC Drummond had moved from pilot programmes into multi-year contracts, according to High Tech Campus and Global AgInvesting.

The Technology: Lightning in a Box

Almost all synthetic nitrogen fertiliser comes from the Haber-Bosch process, which turns natural gas into ammonia. The Plan2fix report on CORDIS puts annual production at around 140 million tonnes, about 2% of global energy use and roughly 200 million tonnes of CO2 a year, and says that up to 70% of the nitrogen can be lost into soil and water before plants absorb it. Fertiliser supplied this way also depends on gas prices and on long supply chains.

VitalFluid's alternative uses only air, water and electricity. An electrical discharge turns air, which is about 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, into a plasma; the reactive compounds that form are dissolved in water, producing nitric acid and nitrate that can be fed directly into a greenhouse irrigation system. The machine produces fertiliser on site, so there is no transport or storage, and if it runs on renewable power, there is no fossil fuel in the chain. The trade-off is that it is an electrical process with its own energy bill, and the project's public reports do not give the energy needed per kilogram of nitrogen, so its cost against Haber-Bosch fertiliser cannot be checked.

The same reactive water is also a disinfectant, which is how the company's focus could move without changing its core hardware. The patent record shows both uses: North Data lists filings in 2024 for a "fertilization and disinfection system with plasma-activated water" alongside older patents for the plasma reactor itself, and the Plan2fix fact sheet lists the trademarks Nitraid and Plasma Nitraid, registered in the Netherlands in 2021.

What Plan2fix Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Plan2fix was VitalFluid's second step through the SME Instrument. A Phase 1 feasibility grant of €50,000 ran from December 2018 to March 2019. The Phase 2 project followed: the grant was signed on 7 August 2019 and the project ran from 1 September 2019 to 31 December 2021, 28 months, with a total cost of €2,025,605. VitalFluid was the only beneficiary; the Commission's list for the April 2019 cut-off gives it a single row, with its city as Nijmegen, while CORDIS records the Eindhoven campus address.

The commercial promises were specific. The CORDIS objective targeted professional greenhouse growers, first in the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland and the UK, and forecast 450 units sold from 2022 to 2026, €44.5 million of cumulative revenue, €22 million of EBITDA and 22 new jobs.

The final report describes the technical work. VitalFluid scaled its plasma units to 15 kWh modules that can be connected to drip irrigation and fertigation systems, built prototypes that it says meet the applicable standards, and ran large-scale demonstrations from May to November 2021 in organic tomato cultivation in hydroponics and in vertical-farm lettuce, with Wageningen University & Research and Botany as test sites. It reports that its fertiliser performed as well as synthetic fertilisers. A Wageningen trial of what VitalFluid called Natural Nitrogen in tomatoes grown to USDA organic rules, reported by Hortidaily, found equal cumulative yields until 23 September and higher yields after that, because nitrogen stayed available while the reference crop needed Chilean nitrate to correct deficiency.

1. Scale plasma units for greenhouse useDelivered15 kWh modules and prototypes built, per the CORDIS report.
2. Field demonstrations with growersDeliveredTomato and lettuce demonstrations, May to November 2021; Wageningen tomato trial reported by Hortidaily.
3. 450 units sold, 2022 to 2026Not achievedNo sales figure published. The first UK delivery in January 2026 was five machines, and for crop protection, not fertiliser.
4. €44.5M cumulative revenueNot publicThe company files abridged accounts with no turnover; equity of €2.85M in 2025 does not point to revenue on that scale.
5. 22 new jobsUnclear22 staff in the 2025 balance sheet; the headcount at the time of the award is not public.

The project ran to its planned end date, and the technical half of the plan was done. The commercial half is where the record breaks off. In 2024 the company said "multiple plasma systems" were running around the clock in greenhouses of growers including Azura, BioSabor and PortaNova, according to Silicon Canals and Hortidaily. Neither report says how many systems there were or whether they supplied fertiliser or disinfection. No public source shows the fertiliser rollout the project forecast.

Funding and Finances Since the Award

Private money arrived after the grant ended. In January 2022 VitalFluid announced €2 million from the regional development agency BOM and VDL Participatie, part of the VDL industrial group, and said it had been granted a €1 million REACT-EU subsidy from the EU and the Netherlands for a project with a total budget of €1.8 million, according to Silicon Canals. The EU's state aid register, as summarised by North Data, lists €1,770,891 of state aid under the REACT-EU programme for South Netherlands in December 2021, a figure close to the project budget rather than the subsidy; the public records do not explain the difference. North Data also lists further Dutch subsidies in 2022 to 2025, including NXTGEN HIGHTECH awards in 2023.

In April 2024 the company raised a €5 million seed round from Future Food Fund, Graduate Entrepreneur, Horticoop and Innovation Industries, which Silicon Canals said brought its total funding to about €9.35 million. Then, in August 2026, came the €17.2 million Series A, co-led by Invest-NL, which put in €4 million, and Alder Tree Investments, with all the existing shareholders joining. High Tech Campus and nordic9 both say the €17.2 million includes a €2.7 million innovation credit from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO); Global AgInvesting mentions the credit in a separate sentence, which could be read as additional. On the first reading, the equity raised is €14.5 million.

The filed balance sheets show what the money did to the company's position. According to Liza, which republishes Chamber of Commerce filings, VitalFluid had negative equity of €2,590,041 at the end of 2022, against debts of €4,071,096. A year later equity was €2,533,011. It fell to €1,833,430 in 2024 and rose to €2,854,463 at the end of 2025, with a balance sheet total of €4,996,748. As a small company, VitalFluid files no turnover or profit figure, so its sales cannot be checked. North Data shows the same filings but only to paying subscribers, so these numbers could not be cross-checked against a second free source.

VitalFluid has no EIC equity: Plan2fix was a grant-only award, and the company is not in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies. It appears in one other EU project on CORDIS, as an associated partner without EU funding in PlasmACT, a 2024 to 2027 doctoral network on plasma medicine for a precancerous skin condition led by the Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology.

Why Europe Should Care

Both of VitalFluid's markets sit inside EU policy. Its fertiliser pitch answered Europe's dependence on imported natural gas for nitrogen, a point the Plan2fix objective made explicitly, and its final report tied the work to the Farm to Fork Strategy, which aims by 2030 to cut nutrient losses by at least 50%, fertiliser use by at least 20%, and the use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50%. The crop protection product addresses the second goal directly.

Yet the company's first commercial market is outside the EU. Hortidaily reported in October 2025 that the treatment is approved in the US and UK markets as a physical process, avoiding the long approval needed for chemical crop protection products in Europe; this article could not confirm the regulatory status in either country from an official source. The Series A will pay for expansion in the UK and the US. A European-funded technology for a European policy goal reaching growers in Britain and America first is a pattern worth noting for EU regulators.

The Verdict

VitalFluid has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.