Where Yoran Imaging's EIC Accelerator Seal Inspection Stands Today

When a packaging machine heat-seals a bag of snacks or a sachet of coffee, the seal stays warm for a moment, and a thermal camera can see where it did not bond. Yoran Imaging, a company from northern Israel, builds that camera into packaging lines so that every pack is checked instead of a handful pulled off the line for manual testing. Its founders, Eran Sinbar and Yoav Weinstein, were team leaders in semiconductor device research at the defence group Rafael before they started the company in 2016, according to CTech, and the company's own site names them as chief executive and chief technology officer.

In the October 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, the European Commission selected Yoran Imaging, of Timrat, for a grant-only award for "PAM 2", a "Packaging Analytical Monitoring System for Heat Sealed Packages", according to the Commission's list of selected companies; the list names no other beneficiary for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €813,575 towards a total cost of €1,162,250, for a project that ran from 1 April 2021 to 30 September 2023. Five years after the award, the company is still active and selling, but how much it sells, and to whom outside Israel, is not public.

Where Yoran Imaging Stands Now

Yoran Imaging Ltd is registered as active with the Israeli Corporations Authority, incorporated on 8 November 2016, with 2024 as the last year for which it filed an annual report, according to the authority's open company data. OpenCorporates also lists the company as active. The sources do not agree on where it is based: the register data gives an address in the industrial zone of Nesher, OpenCorporates and the company website give Andrei Sakharov Street 9 in Haifa's Matam park, and CORDIS still lists Timrat, the village named on all four of its US patents. Israeli annual reports to the authority carry no accounts, so revenue, losses and staff numbers could not be checked.

The last dated company news found is from January 2025, when Yoran Imaging said it had opened a US sales office in Wilmington, Delaware, and hired Ben Szarzynski, previously at the packaging machine maker Multivac, as US director of sales, according to Refrigerated & Frozen Foods; two months earlier the company had announced a North American subsidiary, Yoran Imaging USA, according to Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery. Since then, the only public sign of life found is a New Year post for 2026 on the company's LinkedIn page, which shows 16 employees linked to the company and a stated company size of 2 to 10. A startup database, Startupim, lists 19 employees and an undisclosed "Series B" in September 2025; no announcement of that round could be found, so it is not verified.

The Technology: Reading the Heat in a Seal

Heat sealing closes most flexible food packs, sachets, blisters and lidded cups. The usual check is to pull packs off the line at intervals and test them, often destructively. Yoran Imaging's PAM system films every pack with an infrared camera just after sealing and analyses the heat pattern in the seal area, where a gap, a fold or product trapped in the seal shows up as a different temperature. The CORDIS summary describes "3D thermal imaging and deep learning algorithms" and says the system screens 100% of products "without slowing the line capacity"; the project objective claims that 3% of heat-sealed packages are defective, a figure for which it gives no source.

The approach is protected by four US patents, all assigned to Yoran Imaging and naming Weinstein and Sinbar as inventors: US 11,237,118 on determining package integrity, granted on 1 February 2022 from a 2018 international filing that goes back to a February 2017 provisional application; US 11,321,823 on thermal imaging of moving objects, granted on 3 May 2022; its continuation US 11,568,532, granted on 31 January 2023; and US 11,836,908, granted on 5 December 2023. All four trace back to filings made before the EIC project began.

Since the project ended, the company has stretched the same camera to two other jobs. In November 2024 it launched i-PAM, which looks through a closed cap at the foil liner of induction-sealed bottles, jars and vials and flags under- or overheated, damaged, misaligned or missing foil, according to Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery. For the same Pack Expo show in Chicago it announced PAM Moisture Control, which turns the moisture content of products into thermal images for 100% inline checks, according to Refrigerated & Frozen Foods. Sinbar demonstrated the systems at the show, according to Packaging Insights. No independent test of detection rates, false rejects or line speeds has been published for any of the products; the performance claims in the trade press are the company's own.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

When it applied, Yoran Imaging said it had already run proofs of concept at "major food companies", obtained the CE mark and sold machines, and that the EIC money would take it further: to "implement Deep Learning" and become "an Industry 4.0 enabler platform in the primary packaging area", according to the CORDIS objective. The project ran its planned 30 months, from April 2021 to September 2023, and CORDIS lists it as closed.

The company's final periodic report, for April 2022 to September 2023, lists two PAM systems installed on Ishida flow-pack lines for the Bamba snack at Nestlé Israel, four on Bosch, Wolf and Rovema lines for coffee pouches at Strauss-Elite, and one on a Taro sachet line. It lists pilots at a Hill's pet food plant (part of Colgate-Palmolive) in Czechia, on a Nestlé pudding powder line using new recyclable paper-based material, and on a Nestlé ketchup line with induction-sealed bottles. It also reports a cloud service for statistical process control reports and dashboards, a non-disclosure agreement and pilot talks with Cargill, two new patent filings in Europe and the US, a new thermal camera built with an outside supplier on "European technology", and lower-cost prototypes. CTech's 2021 report independently names Nestlé's Bamba lines, and also PepsiCo's Tapuchips lines, which the project report does not mention.

1. 100% inline seal inspection in productionDeliveredSeven systems at Nestlé Israel, Strauss-Elite and Taro, per the project report and CTech.
2. Data platform with trend alerts and dashboardsDeliveredCloud SPC reports and dashboards, per the company's own report; no customer has described using them.
3. Deep learning that improves detectionPartialMarketed as AI-based; no published accuracy figures or independent test.
4. Pilots abroad turned into ordersNot achievedNo order announced from the Hill's Czechia pilot or the Cargill talks.
5. New markets beyond heat sealingDeliveredi-PAM induction seal inspection and PAM Moisture Control launched in 2024.

Measured against its objective, the project produced working systems in paying factories and a broader product line, and it finished on schedule. What the report does not show is a commercial breakthrough outside Israel: every installation it lists is in an Israeli plant, the European site was a pilot, and no later announcement names a European or American customer that bought systems. The company website shows logos of Groupe Lactalis, Colgate-Palmolive, Nestlé, Osem, Strauss Coffee and Taro and says its systems have scanned "over 1.7 billion products"; neither the scope of those relationships nor the figure could be verified.

Money, Partners and Patents Since the Award

How much private money Yoran Imaging has raised is unclear. In July 2021 CTech reported a $1.5 million seed round, without naming investors, plus a "$1 million" grant from Horizon 2020, for which CORDIS lists €813,575, and said a new round was being prepared. Startupim contradicts itself, giving both $2.5 million and $4.0 million as the total raised, a "Series A" of $1.5 million dated either March 2020 or July 2021, and the unconfirmed 2025 round. No press release from the company or an investor announcing a round after 2021 was found. The board listed on the company website includes Joseph Ackerman, former chief executive of Elbit Systems, Kaminario co-founder Ofir Dubovi, and Dan Ram, who chairs the company, according to its 2023 trade show announcement.

The company also took a share of a second EU project. In Horizon Europe's ZDZW consortium, coordinated by the Spanish research centre Ikerlan and running from September 2022 to August 2025, Yoran Imaging received an EU contribution of €318,240 towards its €509,550 share of the work, according to CORDIS. Its PAM 2 report says the Nestlé ketchup pilot, its first step into induction sealing, was part of that consortium. Yoran Imaging does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 319 entries on 18 October 2026, which fits a grant-only award.

Its marketing push into the United States is documented. The company introduced its systems at Pack Expo Las Vegas in September 2023, with several major food manufacturers piloting the technology, according to Food Industry Executive and Packaging Strategies, neither of which named them. Its PR agency, Turchette, credits its campaign with more than 60 editorial placements and more than 80 sales leads, without dates. How many of those leads became orders is not public.

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, (EU) 2025/40, has applied since 12 August 2026 and aims to make all packaging on the EU market recyclable in an economically viable way by 2030, according to the European Commission. That pushes food makers from aluminium and multilayer plastic laminates to paper-based and mono-material films, which seal less predictably; Yoran Imaging's Nestlé pudding pilot on recyclable paper-based material is that use case. The EU has also set binding targets to cut food waste in processing and manufacturing by 10% by 2030, against 2021 to 2023 levels, under Directive (EU) 2025/1892, according to the Commission's food waste pages. Catching bad seals on the line, rather than in recalls, serves both goals. The company's own report also points to supply chain dependence: it says its new camera, based on European technology, lets it enter markets that were closed while it relied on US technology alone.

The Verdict

Yoran Imaging was not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.