Belgian fabless semiconductor startup e-peas raises €17.5M to accelerate deployment of its energy harvesting solutions

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium-based e-peas, a fabless semiconductor firm that develops ultra-low energy administration for vitality harvesting, introduced on Wednesday that it has secured €17.5M in a brand new funding spherical led by Otium Capital.

New buyers Nomainvest and EIC Fund, and present buyers KBC Focus Fund, The Faktory, Wallonie Entreprendre, Noshaq-Leansquare, and Begin.Make investments, participated within the funding spherical. 

The most recent funding spherical will assist e-peas to speed up the industrial improvement of its Ambient Power Administration (AEM) merchandise and broaden its product portfolio. 

e-peas: Serving to companies create battery-free merchandise

Sustainability has change into an vital focus for digital distributors, who’re searching for methods to scale back their carbon footprint and use uncommon earth supplies. 

Based by Geoffroy Gosset and Julien De Vos, e-peas develops ultra-low-power circuits resembling vitality harvester interfaces and microcontrollers to make IoT units extra energy-efficient and longer-lasting.

The corporate has pioneered vitality harvesting applied sciences that collect ambient vitality resembling mild, radio frequency, temperature gradient, or vibration, eradicating the necessity for battery substitute and decreasing C02 influence. 

e-peas’s merchandise enhance the quantity of harvested vitality and drastically cut back the vitality consumption of all power-consuming blocks inside wi-fi sensor nodes. 

At present, the corporate’s vitality harvesting has already been adopted in a number of merchandise, resembling TV distant controls, good residence units, digital shelf labels, wearables, and industrial sensors.

Moreover, it’s being thought-about for a number of different functions the place vitality effectivity is essential.

The investor

Otium Capita is a household workplace, managing the property of founder Pierre-Edouard Stérin. 

With over €1.6B in Belongings Underneath Administration, Otium invests in any respect levels of improvement, from Seed and Collection A to Development and Purchase & Construct initiatives, in varied fields, from enterprise tech and shopper to trade and actual property.

Pierre Menard of Otium Capital says, “e-peas revolutionary innovation is poised to handle the booming vitality harvesting market.”

Nomainvest is a Belgian multi-family funding firm with a robust concentrate on non-public fairness investments (enterprise capital, development capital, and buyouts) in Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. 

The agency focuses on bold corporations with modern development initiatives in sectors resembling sustainable development and housing, atmosphere, local weather and sustainable vitality, mobility, and healthcare and demographics.

Philippe Niessen from Nomainvest provides, “A disruptive know-how fixing a sustainability challenge satisfied us to assist Geoffroy, Julien, and their crew.”

The European Innovation Council Fund from the European Fee is agnostic: it invests throughout all applied sciences and verticals and all EU nations and nations related to Horizon Europe. 

It offers the funding element of the EIC Accelerator blended finance. 

The EIC Fund offers financing to corporations creating disruptive applied sciences, bridging them with buyers, and constructing a big community of co-investors and strategic companions to share threat and enhance their probabilities of success.

Svetoslava Georgieva, Chair of the EIC Fund Board, says, “The EIC Fund has established itself as a robust drive in EU deep-tech investments, and we’re very completely satisfied to assist e-peas, main the best way in direction of vitality effectivity in digital units. Their groundbreaking know-how permits for carbon footprint discount and may be very a lot aligned with EU’s Inexperienced Deal aims, and in addition new rules like Company Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).”