Xnovo: EIC Accelerator Grant for Fibre Imaging, and What Came Next

Plastic parts reinforced with glass or carbon fibres are only as strong as the direction their fibres point in, and until recently the usual way to check that direction was to cut a part open and look at slices under a microscope. Xnovo Technology, a 2012 spin-out from the Technical University of Denmark based in Køge, south of Copenhagen, set out to read fibre orientation across whole parts with X-rays instead. The European Commission's list of winners of the 9 October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot names "XNOVO TECHNOLOGY APS", Køge, with the project FIONA, "FIbre OrientatioN Analysis of FRP components", grant only. No other company is listed for the project.

The grant was €1,261,137.50 towards a total cost of €1,801,625, according to CORDIS. The advisory firm Innovayt, which says it helped write the application, reported the award as €1.25 million in January 2020. Seven years later the scanner exists as a product, but the company that built it no longer stands alone: in November 2024 the German nanofabrication group RAITH bought it.

Where Xnovo Stands Now

Xnovo is an operating subsidiary of the RAITH Group. On 21 November 2024 capiton, the private equity owner of RAITH, announced that RAITH would acquire Xnovo, then a company of 32 people led by Erik Lauridsen and Christian Holzner. Øresund Startups reported the same figures and placed RAITH in Dortmund; ASM International described RAITH as Danish, which the other two sources contradict. No price was published. The Danish register, as shown by ownr, lists RAITH GmbH as owner of 66.66% to 89.99% of the shares; the 2025 annual report shows that Xnovo holds 25.15% of its own share capital itself.

The company is busy. In January 2026 it announced a partnership with the makers of the Dragonfly image analysis software. In September 2026 it said it had deployed an AI-based 3D-CT inspection system for battery cells at the BMW Group's Cell Manufacturing Competence Centre in Parsdorf, quoting a BMW manager. That system is built on its XAIA software, not on the EIC-funded scanner. Since April 2026 Xnovo has also been a partner in Lab4DMade, an EIC Transition project led by DTU, with an EU contribution of €888,968.93 to Xnovo, according to CORDIS and North Data.

The Technology: Seeing Fibre Directions Without Seeing Fibres

A standard X-ray CT scanner can show fibres only if it resolves each one, which limits it to small samples. Xnovo's method, which CORDIS says builds on research at Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute, measures how the X-rays scatter in different directions as they pass through the material. That directional signal encodes how the fibres are aligned without imaging them individually, so a whole component can be scanned. The technique is called X-ray tensor tomography, and until recently it was done mainly at synchrotrons, large particle accelerator facilities.

The commercial case, as the FIONA final report puts it, is that injection moulders of fibre-reinforced plastics find the right fibre layout through test castings and manual 2D checks of small samples, and that parts designed this way reach only about 30% of their potential strength. A 3D scan of the whole part would close the gap between moulding simulations and what actually comes out of the mould. That 30% figure is the company's estimate and could not be checked independently.

Xnovo did not start with fibres. Its first business was crystal grain mapping: in February 2018 ZEISS and Xnovo signed a strategic partnership on laboratory diffraction contrast tomography, in which ZEISS X-ray microscopes collect the data and Xnovo's GrainMapper3D software reconstructs the 3D grain structure of metals and ceramics, as ZEISS's own product pages describe. Fibre orientation was meant to be the second leg.

What FIONA Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

FIONA followed a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study with the same acronym, which ran from September 2018 to January 2019 and covered a market study, a business plan and a freedom-to-operate review, according to CORDIS. The grant agreement for the main project was signed on 27 March 2020. The project ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 October 2023. It promised to prepare the scanner "for full market roll-out" and to document its performance and cost benefit in demonstrations "in collaboration with a worldwide leading manufacture of imaging solutions", which the fact sheet does not name.

The final report says the COVID-19 pandemic and then the war in Ukraine slowed the work, "however, despite the initial challenges the project has succeeded in reaching all project goals". It lists an in-house prototype, a compact add-on design for commercial microCT systems, reconstruction and analysis software with a cloud interface for injection moulding simulation tools, and the integration of the add-on "onto two different commercial microCT platforms". It ends with the scanner "being prepared for commercialisation in 2024". Whether the end date was extended is not shown on CORDIS.

1. Working FibreScanner3D prototypeDeliveredIn-house prototype built and demonstrated, per the CORDIS report.
2. Add-on for commercial microCT systemsDeliveredIntegrated on two platforms per CORDIS; offered on Exciscope's Polaris from January 2024.
3. Market launch in 2024DeliveredLaunched with Exciscope, reported by CompositesWorld and BINDT.
4. Demonstration with a leading imaging manufacturerNot namedNeither CORDIS nor Xnovo names the manufacturer or publishes the cost-benefit results.
5. Full market roll-out to the FRP industryNo sales publicNo buyer of FiberScanner3D has been announced; Xnovo's product page offers the scanner and a scanning service but names no customer.

The engineering was delivered. In January 2024, three months after the project ended, Xnovo and the Swedish X-ray microscope maker Exciscope launched FiberScanner3D as "the world's first laboratory-based X-ray tensor tomography" system, available on Exciscope's Polaris platform. The launch partner was a Swedish start-up rather than one of the large microCT makers. What is missing is evidence of the market roll-out that justified the grant: no sale, installation or industrial user of FiberScanner3D has been announced by Xnovo, Exciscope or a customer, and the 2026 BMW deployment uses different software.

What Xnovo Has Achieved Since the Award

Xnovo grew steadily through and after the project. Its audited accounts, filed with the Danish Business Authority and summarised by eStatistik, show average staff of 9 in 2019 and 2020, 15 in 2022, 26 in 2024 and 31 in 2025. The register showed 25 employees (24 full-time equivalents) in July 2026, according to ownr and eStatistik, below the 2025 average; whether staff left or the two counts differ in method is not public.

Unlike most EIC Accelerator beneficiaries, Xnovo was profitable before the award and stayed profitable in every year since. The company reports gross profit rather than revenue, as small Danish companies may. Gross profit rose from DKK 6.35 million in 2019 to DKK 17.78 million in 2025. It never needed venture capital: no equity round is public, and the company is not in the EIC Fund portfolio, which was checked across all its pages. FIONA was a grant-only award, so no EIC equity was involved.

The Money Around the Sale

The two latest results need reading with care. In 2024 operating profit fell to DKK 977,716, but the net result jumped to DKK 16.6 million because of DKK 15.6 million of "income from investment in participating interests"; the 2025 report does not say which holding produced it. Xnovo proposed a dividend of DKK 22 million for 2024, after DKK 5.14 million for 2023 and DKK 1.30 million for 2022. Cash fell from DKK 19.98 million at the end of 2024 to DKK 1.87 million at the end of 2025, when the balance sheet also showed DKK 5.45 million owed to group companies.

In 2025 Xnovo changed its accounting policy and capitalised development costs for the first time, which the annual report says raised the pre-tax result by DKK 5.10 million. Without that change, the 2025 pre-tax profit of DKK 6.02 million would have been about DKK 0.93 million. Equity fell from DKK 28.4 million to DKK 16.7 million over the year.

Why Europe Should Care

Fibre-reinforced plastics are central to lighter cars, aircraft and wind turbines, and testing them without destroying them is a supply-chain capability in its own right. The Commission's February 2024 communication on Advanced Materials for Industrial Leadership calls advanced materials "crucial building blocks" for the EU's resilience and names mobility, energy and construction as first application areas. A European laboratory method that brings synchrotron-class measurements into factories fits that agenda closely.

Xnovo also shows a common path for EIC-funded technology: it stays in Europe, but inside a larger group. RAITH is a German company owned by a German private equity fund, and Xnovo remains in Køge with a new EIC Transition project. The fibre scanner itself has not yet shown the industrial uptake that would make it a European standard.

The Verdict

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