Published 3 years ago on the SEPARATIVE organization's page
The deep-tech start-up SEPARATIVE obtains €7.4 M in funding from the EIC Accelerator Pilot
SEPARATIVE, an innovative start-up and creator of high-performance multicapillary chromatography (HPMC) columns for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries has been awarded 7.4 million euros of mixed funding by the EIC Accelerator Pilot. The success rate for this call of proposals, that is dedicated to innovative start-ups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) with high growth potential, was 0.9%.
Based in Solaize, south of Lyon, France, on the Axel’One Innovative Processes Platform, SEPARATIVE is revolutionizing molecule separation thanks to its disruptive chromatography columns with unparalleled resolution at low pressure.
“This award from the prestigious EIC Accelerator Pilot is a recognition of the major impact that our breakthrough innovation will have on key European strategic applications in green chemistry and health. SEPARATIVE has been supported since its creation by the French State, BPI France, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region and the technology transfer acceleration company PULSALYS, through various grants and awards for innovation, but this European funding marks a key milestone in marketing our innovative technology. We will be able to strengthen our teams, finalize industrialization and offer our first product range to pharmaceutical research laboratories.”
Cyril Burkovic, SEPARATIVE’s COO
SEPARATIVE’s award-winning innovation* makes it possible to reduce the pressure required in state-of-the-art chromatography by a factor of 30, making purification processes 10 times faster and more efficient, at a much lower cost than current technologies. Chemists and process engineers will have at their disposal a new economical, energy efficient and highly productive separation tool that will allow all kinds of mixtures to be separated using the full range of known chemical reactions, instead of just relying on heat.
The expected performances represent a huge potential for innovation and value creation for the pharmaceutical industries and wherever the separation of molecules is required. This technology will allow new drugs to be marketed faster and cheaper, which have been impossible to develop until now, and will lead to more powerful medical analysis tools for the early detection of disease.
“This innovation also opens the way to new means of energy storage and should accelerate research in “green” chemistry leading to new, more economical biomaterials and biofuels. Up to 10% savings in global CO2 emissions can be achieved by replacing separation methods based on distillation with more heat energy efficient techniques such as the SEPARATIVE technology.”
François Parmentier, SEPARATIVE’s CEO and inventor of the chromatography columns
Supported by the consultancy agency ZAZ Ventures, SEPARATIVE is one of 38 SMEs selected by the 11 EIC jurors in October 2020, out of 4,223 applications. The winners share a budget of more than 176 million euros.
* SEPARATIVE’s technical innovation consists in casting a bundle of parallel, straight and cylindrical capillaries a few microns in diameter in a semi-porous block of silica allowing transverse diffusion of the molecules.
Press Contact – Agence Amalthea
Coradine Sersiron I presse@SEPARATIVE.net I +33 (0)4 26 78 27 18
About the EIC Accelerator Pilot
The EIC Accelerator Pilot is a European public funding scheme for innovative start-ups and SMEs. It finances projects for the launch of breakthrough market-creating innovations with high-growth potential, from the R&D phase through to their marketing. The EIC Accelerator Pilot is part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, the objective of which is to fund research and innovation. Since December 2019, 293 start-ups and SMEs from 18 countries have been selected for funding totaling more than 1 billion euros.
About SEPARATIVE
SEPARATIVE is a start-up based in Solaize, central France, founded in 2014. In 2016, it was one of the award winners of the French Ministry of Research’s i-LAB competition which placed it in the top 10 start-ups in France for its innovative project. In 2019, the American company Agilent Technologies acquired a stake in SEPARATIVE. The same year, the start-up won the national I-NOV competition to industrialize its process. With five patents registered, all possible aspects of this technology from the chromatography process and its optimization to products and materials have been protected by SEPARATIVE.