EIC Accelerator Check: Wimao and Its Mixed Plastic Waste Pallets

Most plastic recycling starts with sorting: polyethylene here, polypropylene there, everything dirty or mixed to the incinerator. Wimao, a start-up from Lappeenranta in eastern Finland, said it could skip that step. Its patented process pressed mixed plastic waste, together with wood or other fibres, into composite products such as pallets, and it was built to take the waste that sorting plants reject. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2019 cut-off the European Commission selected Wimao's project REMAT for blended finance, a grant plus equity, according to the Commission's list of selected companies. The list gives Wimao as the only beneficiary of the project.

Six years later, Wimao Oy is bankrupt. The Finnish trade register shows a bankruptcy entry dated 1 December 2025, according to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH), and the Päijät-Häme District Court declared the company bankrupt after a restructuring attempt, the regional daily Etelä-Saimaa reported on 5 December 2025. Kauppalehti and Asiakastieto also list it as bankrupt.

What Is Left of Wimao

The company tried to save itself first. Wimao Oy was granted a corporate restructuring in Finland as of 21 March 2025, according to the preliminary restructuring plan of its Swedish subsidiary, and the trade journal Uusiouutiset confirms that the restructuring began in spring 2025. The company cut costs, and its slightly more than 20 employees took part through furloughs, but no investor and no bridge financing were found. "Bridge financing did not come," Jori Halkola, chief executive since June 2025, told Uusiouutiset in January 2026. The equipment and about 2,700 tonnes of unprocessed plastic waste were put up for sale, and the hall in Lappeenranta is to be emptied for new tenants.

The board chair, Timo Vartiainen, told Etelä-Saimaa that the growth targets of earlier years had been "aika rajut", quite drastic. The Swedish subsidiary, Wimao Impossible Plastics AB, went into restructuring at the Gothenburg District Court on 25 March 2025, its restructuring plan shows, and it then went bankrupt as well, Uusiouutiset reported. Tic.io lists the Swedish company as ceased on 11 September 2026. The company's old Finnish domain, wimao.fi, no longer resolves; an English site at wimao.com is still online and carries no news.

The Technology: Pallets From Plastic Nobody Wanted

According to the CORDIS summary of REMAT, Wimao's process takes "mixed plastic waste that is not wanted by the plastic recycling industry" and turns it into composite products without separating the waste stream first, and the products can be recycled again at the end of their life. A proof-of-concept plant began production in January 2019, making composite decking tiles and half euro pallets from mixed plastics and wood waste. The pilot plant sat at the Kukkuroinmäki waste centre of the regional waste company Etelä-Karjalan Jätehuolto, according to Yrittäjät.

Sources disagree on the size of that pilot. Yrittäjät reported in December 2019 that it produced about 2,000 tonnes a year; Uusiouutiset describes it in 2026 as a pilot factory with a capacity of about 1,000 tonnes, financed by Tekes. Wimao's own website says a plant can handle about 4,000 tonnes of plastic waste a year. The Swedish factory in Motala had a stated annual capacity of 7,000 tonnes, according to the restructuring plan.

The approach differs from mainstream mechanical recycling, which sorts plastics by polymer and turns them into pellets for sale to manufacturers. Wimao kept raw material and finished product in one factory: the Swedish plan describes waste coming in from customers, who were paid SEK 500 a tonne for it, and leaving as branded pallets. Its patents, including the technology that the Swedish plan calls unique, were held by the Finnish parent company.

What REMAT Promised, and What the Record Shows

REMAT ran from 1 March 2020 to 31 March 2022, with an EU contribution of €2,350,796.88 towards a total cost of €3,358,281.25, according to CORDIS. The project summary projected 26 licensed plants by 2024, diverting 168,000 tonnes of waste a year and generating €48.75M of turnover. The final periodic report, for March 2021 to March 2022, says the team redesigned the REMAT line as a next-generation system with automatic adjustment, processed difficult streams such as mixed plastics from municipal collection, multilayer and low-density plastics, built prototypes of full-size euro pallets and reached the commercialisation phase. These results rest on the company's own report.

1. Next-generation REMAT lineDeliveredRedesigned line with automatic adjustment, per the CORDIS report.
2. Larger products such as euro palletsDeliveredPrototypes by 2022; pallets later sold from Motala to named Swedish customers.
3. 26 licensed plants by 2024Not achievedOne licensee found: Wimao's own Swedish subsidiary, with one running factory.
4. 168,000 tonnes a year divertedNot achievedStated plant capacities were 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes in Finland and 7,000 tonnes in Motala.
5. €48.75M turnover by 2024Not achievedFiled revenue of €1.516M in 2024.

The licensing model did not take off. After REMAT, Wimao built production capacity itself instead. In February 2021 Fortum outsourced the manufacture of recycled plastic profiles to Wimao at its site in Riihimäki, with Fortum supplying plastic from its Kuuloja plant, according to Aamuposti. The Riihimäki plant had a budget of more than €3M, Uusiouutiset reported. On the night of 23 to 24 October 2022, seven months after REMAT ended, the 2,000 square metre hall burned down with practically all its machinery, causing several million euros of damage, according to Yle and Etelä-Saimaa. Nine people had worked there.

Did the EIC Equity Arrive?

The October 2019 award was blended finance. In December 2019 Yrittäjät reported that Wimao was to receive €2.5M of grant and €1M of equity from the European Innovation Council. Whether that equity was paid could not be confirmed from an official source:

1. The Commission's list of EIC Fund equity investments, last updated on 24 February 2021, names three signed investments, none of them Wimao, and lists Wimao only among the companies selected for blended finance in October 2019.
2. The current EIC Fund portfolio, checked across all its pages in October 2026, does not list Wimao.
3. The data providers CB Insights and Tracxn name the EIC Fund as an investor. CB Insights dates a $550,000 round with the EIC Fund and Nostetta Ventures to 28 March 2022. Neither gives an EIC amount.
4. A later share issue on Invesdor lists eight shareholders holding 6.16% or more; the EIC Fund is not among them.

The Money

The accounts of Wimao Oy (2844772-8) show revenue rising from €183,000 in 2021 to €1.516M in 2024, with an operating loss of €1.907M in 2024 and an equity ratio of 18%, according to Asiakastieto. Vainu gives the same revenue and staff figures and net losses of about €4.2M in 2021, €372,800 in 2022, €926,800 in 2023 and €2.3M in 2024. That adds up to roughly €7.8M of net losses in four years.

The legal history complicates the picture. The first Wimao Oy (2733387-6), registered in January 2016, ceased on 31 May 2021. The next day Kompopat Oy, a company registered in 2017 at the Kukkuroinmäki address, took the name Wimao Oy, the PRH register shows; North Data also lists the first company as terminated. The free register data does not state whether the first company was merged into the second. CORDIS lists the REMAT beneficiary at the Hulkonmäentie 130 address, which has been the second company's registered address since November 2018.

Sweden was meant to be the growth market. Wimao Impossible Plastics AB, registered on 31 July 2020, ran the Motala factory and had started building a second one in Ljungby. It had invested about SEK 20M in the plants, with grants from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, and had 11 employees in March 2025. Its larger customers included Elon Group, Koenigsegg Automotive, Boxon, Stadium Sweden and S-Invest Trading. It reported revenue of about SEK 2.28M and a preliminary loss of about SEK 15.3M for 2024, according to the restructuring plan. The sources disagree on ownership: the plan says Wimao Oy held 57%, Uusiouutiset says 53%. Halkola told Uusiouutiset that some of the Motala equipment came from China and that integrating it and the automation took extra work.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's plastics strategy, adopted in January 2018, aims to make recycling profitable for business. Mixed and multilayer plastic waste, which Wimao targeted, is the hardest part of that goal, and keeping its value inside Europe reduces dependence on virgin plastic imports. Wimao's collapse is part of a wider pattern: in January 2026 Uusiouutiset reported a 50% rise in plant closures among European plastic recyclers, with industry groups such as Plastic Recyclers Europe calling for higher mandatory recycled content, and named Clean Plastic Finland, bankrupt in July 2025, alongside Wimao. The same report names competition from cheap imported virgin plastic as the main pressure on the sector.

The Verdict

What the bankruptcy estate will recover, who buys the patents and equipment, and how much of the EU grant and any EIC equity was lost are not public. Wimao's estate administrator and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.