ZUMA: EIC Accelerator Grant for Bike Shifting, and What Came Next

Since parallelogram derailleurs arrived in the 1950s, front gear changes on a bicycle have worked the same way: a derailleur shoves the chain sideways from one chainring to another while the rider eases off the pedals. ZUMA Innovation, a small engineering company in Galdakao, outside Bilbao, proposed to turn this around. Its chainring is cut into segments that slide over to meet the chain in the part of the rotation where the chain is not under load, so the gear can change while the rider keeps pushing. In the European Innovation Council's January 2020 cut-off, the EU backed the idea with a €1,217,475 grant for a project called SEGSEQ.

The project ended in January 2023 with a race-ready prototype tested by an elite cycling team, according to the company's final report on CORDIS. What it has not produced, as of October 2026, is a groupset anyone can buy. The company's website describes road, gravel and e-bike systems with no prices, dates or retailers, and no launch, customer or bike-brand deal has been reported anywhere this review could find.

Where ZUMA Stands Now

ZUMA is still a registered company, but its public record has gone silent since May 2025, so this review classes it as dormant. Empresia and Infoempresa both list it as active, with accounts filed for 2024, according to Empresia and Infoempresa. The last dated public sign of activity is a capital increase registered on 5 May 2025, which added €6,263 of nominal capital and took the total to €162,835, as published in the Official Gazette of the Mercantile Register (BORME) on 13 May 2025. Nothing dated from the following seventeen months could be found: no news, no product page with a date, no filing published in the gazette.

The size of the company is also unclear. Empresia puts annual turnover below €500,000. Infoempresa gives fewer than €2 million in turnover and 10 to 49 employees, while the patent database PatSnap lists fewer than 10. The filed accounts themselves are behind paywalls and were not reviewed.

The Technology: Moving the Chainring, Not the Chain

The problem ZUMA attacks is mechanical. When a rider pushes on the pedals, the chain is pulled tight against the front chainring. A conventional front derailleur has to lift and push that tensioned chain sideways, which is why front shifts are slow, rough and usually done with the rider easing off. Even electronic groupsets, which replace the cable with a motor, use the same parallelogram mechanism, the project's final report notes. ZUMA's answer is to split the chainring into segments that low-power actuators move sideways while they pass through the "chain-free zone", so each segment meets the chain already in its new position as the crank turns.

The approach goes back to ZUMA's first EU project. In 2016 it received €50,000 under the SME Instrument Phase 1 for EVOTRANS, a five-month feasibility study, in which, by its own account, the first prototype showed "a smoother, more precise and more reliable shifting", according to CORDIS. The core patents date from that year: US11279441B2, granted in March 2022, and US11685468B2, granted in June 2023, both claim a June 2016 priority date, name Mikel Zubieta Andueza as inventor and are assigned to ZUMA.

Because the chainring can shift at any moment, ZUMA says it can offer sequential shifting, where the rider only asks for "harder" or "easier" and the system chooses the chainring and sprocket, and fully automatic shifting driven by cadence, power or heart rate. The SEGSEQ proposal claimed "30% more usable gears, 15% wider gear-range, 15% closer gear-steps, 6% less weight" compared with existing groupsets, according to CORDIS. These figures are the company's own; no independent test or review of the system has been published.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What It Delivered

ZUMA was selected in the 8 January 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot with blended finance, as the only beneficiary named for SEGSEQ in the European Commission's list of selected companies. The grant agreement was signed on 2 June 2020, and the project ran from 1 September 2020 to 31 January 2023, with a total cost of €1,739,250, of which the EU paid €1,217,475, according to CORDIS. CORDIS records no change to the dates, so the project finished on its contractual schedule.

The final periodic report describes three work packages. The first took the concept prototype to a "road-ready" system aiming for technology readiness level 7. The second made it more robust and easier to manufacture, with a smaller chainring and the actuators moved into a sealed auxiliary unit. The third put the system on the bikes of an "Elite category cycling team" to compare it against benchmark products. The report says the system went through "functional", "road-ready" and "race-ready" stages, that ZUMA built its own rear derailleur, cassette and electronics, and that "over ten patents" were pursued. It does not name the team, give test results or say whether TRL 7 was reached. ZUMA's other filings since then include a rear derailleur patent application filed in June 2024 and published in December 2024, one of several derailleur, cassette and suspension filings listed by IPqwery.

1. Develop the groupset to road-ready levelDeliveredFunctional, road-ready and race-ready stages reported on CORDIS.
2. Pilot test with an elite cycling teamPartly deliveredReported by ZUMA; team and results not named.
3. Protect the technology with patentsDeliveredUS patents granted in 2022 and 2023; new filings to 2024.
4. TRL 7 and industrialisationNot achievedNo TRL statement, no manufacturing partner announced.
5. Enter the groupset marketNot achievedNo product, price or customer on record by October 2026.
6. €3.5M EIC equity for market deploymentNot achievedZUMA is not in the EIC Fund portfolio.

The Money

The SEGSEQ objective set out a financing plan: €1.2 million from the EIC grant and €0.5 million "via other sources" for product development, then €3.5 million "via EIC equity" for market deployment. Only the grant is confirmed. ZUMA does not appear on any of the seventeen pages of the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked for this article, and no announcement of an EIC equity investment could be found. Why the equity part did not follow, and whether ZUMA's selection with blended finance was later changed to grant only, is not public.

The investor database VCBacked lists the European Innovation Council, EISMEA and Seed Capital Bizkaia as ZUMA's backers, with an undisclosed round in December 2021. No second source confirms the Seed Capital Bizkaia stake or its size, so it could not be verified. The register does show new money coming in. Share capital rose by €22,305 in January 2022, according to the BORME of 20 January 2022, by €15,657 in March 2024 with new articles of association, according to the BORME of 4 April 2024, and by €6,263 in May 2025. In March 2024 the founders also replaced their joint administration with a board of directors and brought in Alejandro Deleyto Rico as a director, according to the BORME of 1 April 2024. Spanish register notices give only the nominal capital, not any share premium, so how much cash each round raised is not public.

An Older Pattern

Bringing a component to market has been ZUMA's open question since well before the EIC award. In October 2018 BikeRadar covered a ZUMA patent for a cassette with replaceable steel cogs on a reusable carrier, reporting that the company had a working prototype, a target price "between XT and XTR level" and was "currently looking for manufacturing partners", according to BikeRadar. The 2016 EVOTRANS report had already planned a first high-end road product with a manufacturing cost of €1,770 and up to 25,000 units a year, and said "a strong international distribution network is currently being assembled", according to CORDIS. Neither the cassette nor the 2016 road product reached the market on the public record. A subsidiary, Ride Mobility SL, became wholly owned by ZUMA in April 2019 and was put into liquidation with ZUMA as liquidator in January 2021, according to Empresia; its business is not described in the records reviewed.

Why Europe Should Care

Bicycle components are one of the most concentrated supply chains in consumer goods. ZUMA's own proposal describes the groupset market as "very much monopolized by 2 companies", Shimano and SRAM. Asia supplies "almost 95% of the spare parts" needed to assemble bikes sold in Europe, the cycling technology firm Velco wrote in 2021. The European Declaration on Cycling, signed by the Parliament, the Council and the Commission in 2024, commits them to "creating conditions to increase the European production of a broad range of bicycles (including e-bikes and bikes for people with disabilities) and their components", according to the declaration text in Council document 6215/24 and the Commission's summary page.

A European-designed shifting system that does what ZUMA claims would fit that goal squarely. But a patent family and a tested prototype do not change where groupsets are made. Whether SEGSEQ adds to European component production depends on a manufacturing deal and a launch, and neither is on the record.

The Verdict

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