From EIC Accelerator Grant to €3M Seed: Zymvol's Designer Enzymes

Enzymes are the catalysts of living cells, and a growing share of drug and fine chemical makers want to use them in factories instead of metal catalysts, solvents and heat. The bottleneck is finding or engineering an enzyme that does the job, which usually means building and testing thousands of variants in the lab. Zymvol Biomodeling, founded in 2017 and now based in Barcelona, does most of that work on computers: it simulates how candidate enzymes bind and transform a target molecule and sends only the best few to the lab.

In April 2019 the European Commission selected Zymvol in the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, then part of the Horizon 2020 EIC pilot, for UNLOCK-EDD, "UNLOCKing next generation computer-guided Enzyme Discovery and Design". The list names Zymvol, under its then registered seat in Lleida, as the project's only beneficiary. The grant was €1,301,496.88 towards a total cost of €1,859,281.25, according to CORDIS. Seven years on, the company is active, has raised two private rounds and signed a manufacturing partner. Not every promise of 2019 was kept.

Where Zymvol Stands Now

Zymvol is an active company. Its register entry shows new officers as recently as September 2026, when a new company secretary, a vice-secretary and three proxies were appointed, among them its chief operating officer Marina Cañellas and chief scientific officer Ferran Sancho, according to BORME acts collected by empresia. Infoempresa also lists it as active, with its last BORME notice on 28 September 2026. In August 2026 the certification body Applus renewed its ISO 9001 quality certificate, first issued in September 2020, until September 2029, according to the certificate the company publishes.

The biggest recent step is a collaboration with Olon, an Italian contract manufacturer of active pharmaceutical ingredients, announced in February 2026. Zymvol's design platform supports Olon's projects, and Zymvol gets access to Olon's fermentation, process development and manufacturing for its own programmes and those of its clients, "from enzyme discovery to production at ton-scale", according to Manufacturing Chemist. Speciality Chemicals Magazine puts Olon's microbial fermentation capacity at 5,000 cubic metres and reports that no financial terms were disclosed.

The Technology: Testing Enzymes in Silico

An industrial enzyme project usually starts with a reaction a customer wants to run, such as making one mirror-image form of a drug intermediate. The classic route is directed evolution: mutate an enzyme at random or by design, screen thousands of variants in the lab and repeat. Zymvol replaces most of the screening with molecular simulations on high-performance computers, which model how a substrate fits into an enzyme's active site and how mutations change that fit. In 2019 it promised CORDIS that its predictions could "replace up to 90% of experimental tests", cut development cost tenfold and development time by half.

Those figures come from the company and have not been tested independently. Its current marketing quotes similar numbers: in its 2025 funding announcement, reported by Tech.eu and Vestbee, Zymvol said its simulations replicate experimental conditions with more than 90% accuracy, cut lab work by 90% and raise the success rate of discovery and design campaigns above 75%. What can be checked is the product list. Its website now sells enzyme discovery and enzyme optimization as services, a reaction screening tool called Zymscan, a feasibility assessment, "Biomatched Kits" of commercial enzymes picked for a customer's reaction in partnership with the enzyme supplier Prozomix, and lab validation at its own wet lab. A management platform, Zymbrain, is listed as "coming soon".

What UNLOCK-EDD Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 10 September 2019 and the project ran from 1 October 2019 to 31 March 2022, according to CORDIS. The company's own list of public projects gives an end date of 30 September 2021; no source explains the difference. The project had two technical goals: integrate artificial intelligence into the design software to improve its predictions and output, and develop a software module to discover and design "special purpose" enzyme kits, called ZYME-Kit, and test them in industry. Its commercial goals were to deploy the upgraded software in Zymvol's ZYMEVOLVER platform, obtain regulatory compliance, and grow internationally. The objective said Zymvol planned "to capture €11.17M by 2022 after entering into the North American market".

The final periodic report, covering January 2021 to March 2022, says AI had been incorporated into the design pipeline, that machine learning now feeds experimental data back into the models, and that the output of computational enzyme variants had risen "by 5-10 fold". The company had also obtained ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certification. The enzyme kits were not finished: ZYME-Kit was "currently in experimental validation stage", and the report said "by the end of the project, we expect to have in our portfolio 2 new enzyme kits available". No launch of a ZYME-Kit was announced. In February 2025, almost three years after the project ended, Zymvol still listed bringing "its first custom enzyme kits" to market among the uses of its seed round, according to Biotech Spain and Vestbee. The kits it sells today are commercial enzymes chosen with Prozomix, not enzymes it designed in-house.

1. AI in the design pipelineDeliveredMachine learning integrated and 5 to 10 times more variants produced, per the final report; not independently tested.
2. ISO certificationDeliveredISO 27001 and 9001 obtained; ISO 9001 renewed until 2029.
3. Two ZYME-Kit enzyme kitsLateIn validation at project end; kits of partner enzymes sold only after the 2025 round.
4. North American marketUnverifiedA Boston office was reported in 2023 and 2025; no US sales figures are public.
5. €11.17M revenue by 2022Not achievedThe register places annual sales between €1M and €2.5M.

The software goals were met by the project's end, by the company's account. The product goal slipped by years and changed shape. The revenue goal was missed by a wide margin: empresia states that Zymvol has "una facturación anual entre 1.000.000 y 2.500.000 euros", an annual turnover between €1 million and €2.5 million, against €11.17 million planned for 2022. Infoempresa gives sales of less than €2 million. Zymvol's filed accounts for 2020 to 2024 are deposited with the Lleida register but are not free to read, so its exact revenue, result and equity could not be verified.

What Zymvol Has Achieved Since the Award

In September 2020 Maria Fátima Lucas, a Portuguese chemist, won one of three main prizes of €100,000 in the EU Prize for Women Innovators 2020, as Catalonia.health also reported. The company moved its registered seat from Lleida to Barcelona in January 2021 and to its current offices in 2023.

Private money came four years after the EIC grant. In February 2023 Zymvol raised €1.3 million in a round led by the venture firm Elaia Partners, to open a lab at the Barcelona Science Park and grow its team of "more than 20", according to AseBio and Catalonia.health; both said Zymvol had invested €4 million in R&D by then and completed more than 80 projects. The 2023 announcements called it a seed round; the 2025 announcements call Elaia a pre-seed investor. In February 2025 Zymvol closed a €3 million seed round led by Faber, with Elaia and Übermorgen Ventures, by which time it reported more than 100 projects for clients including Axplora, Medichem and Sanofi.

The register reflects both rounds and a change in the shareholding. In early 2023 the share capital was reduced by €3,164.80 and the CEO was registered as sole shareholder; in July 2023 the capital was increased, Elaia Partners and Edouard Rozan were appointed directors alongside the CEO; two further increases followed in April 2025, according to BORME acts on empresia. The other two founders named on CORDIS in 2019, Emanuele Monza and Victor Gil, are not on Zymvol's current leadership page. Pierre Monsan joined the board in 2024, and John Nicols, who ran the US enzyme engineering company Codexis, joined it in 2025, according to the register and SynBioBeta.

Zymvol has also kept winning public money for research. CORDIS lists it in eight other EU projects: a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 study, ZYMVOLVER, in 2018; the bio-based industry project SMARTBOX; and Marie Skłodowska-Curie training networks, the latest of which, COMENZE, pays it €251,971.20 until 2029. Its website adds Spanish grants, among them €697,753.65 from the Recovery Plan for a project called BRAINZYME and a Eurostars project, OXYMEL, for which it gives a figure of €1,115,053.20.

Why Europe Should Care

Enzymes let chemical and drug makers run reactions at room temperature and normal pressure with less waste, which the UNLOCK-EDD report presented as a step towards "a true circular bioeconomy". The European Commission set out plans to boost biotechnology and biomanufacturing in March 2024, in a communication that promised regulatory sandboxes and an EU Biotech Hub, and in December 2025 it proposed a Biotech Act aimed in part at reducing dependence on suppliers outside the EU. A European company that designs enzymes for European pharma manufacturers, now paired with an Italian producer, is a small part of that supply chain.

The Verdict

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