Deep Tech Brief #16

Welcome to this week's issue of Deep Tech Brief.

Every Saturday, we break down deep tech companies building genuinely hard things, in plain language. No jargon, no hype.

Three companies this week: a brain implant that could let blind people see points of light, from Leuven; a wound dressing that fights infection without harming the skin, from Tallinn; and a machine that injects helpful bacteria into seeds, from just outside Vienna.

Let’s dive in.

More than 43 million people worldwide are blind, according to a 2020 global study in The Lancet Global Health. Some can be helped by surgery or retinal implants, but those need part of the eye's wiring to still work. For people whose retina or optic nerve is completely destroyed, there is no widely available option. The camera is broken and the cable is cut.

The part of the brain that turns signals into pictures, the visual cortex at the back of the head, is often still fine. Scientists have known since the 1960s that a small electrical pulse there makes a person see a dot of light, even after years of blindness. The hard part is turning a few dots into something useful.

A few years ago, a team led by Eduardo Fernández in Spain implanted a grid of 96 electrodes, four millimetres across, in the brain of Berna Gómez, a former science teacher blind for 16 years. Over six months she learned to recognise some letters and the edges of objects. It proved the idea works, and showed the scale problem. Ninety-six dots is not much of a picture.

ReVision, founded in 2020 out of research at KU Leuven, is building a system called Occular. A camera on a headset feeds an implant made of hundreds of flexible threads, each thinner than a human hair and carrying electrodes. A temporary coating stiffens them for surgery, then dissolves, leaving soft threads that the company says cause minimal scarring. Its aim is thousands of contact points, enough for functional vision: finding a doorway, avoiding obstacles, recognising objects. Not natural sight, as the company is careful to say.

Where they are: led by co-founder and chief executive Frederik Ceyssens, a microelectronics engineer, who co-founded it with KU Leuven neurophysiologist Peter Janssen. A €4 million private round in May followed European Innovation Council grants, and the device received Breakthrough Device designation from the US Food and Drug Administration in March. It also has a strategic collaboration with Cochlear, the hearing-implant company. A first short human study, in Hungary, is planned for this autumn, with a longer study in a blind volunteer to follow in Spain, run by Fernández's group.

One to watch, carefully. The flexible threads are designed around the scarring that limits rigid implants, and the partners include the team behind one of the best-known cortical vision experiments so far. The milestones ahead come in order: first human data showing the threads go in safely, then a blind volunteer seeing with them.

Learn more: revision-implant.com

About 100 million people worldwide live with wounds that will not heal, by Nanordica's figures, and more than half become infected. The most dangerous are diabetic foot ulcers, which the company says lead to a leg amputation somewhere in the world every 20 seconds.

The standard answer to infection is antibiotics, but they often struggle to reach a wound at a high enough dose, and they are losing power. A 2024 study in The Lancet found drug-resistant bacteria directly caused 1.14 million deaths in 2021, forecast to rise to 1.91 million a year by 2050.

So wound care also leans on silver, a bacteria killer used on wounds for generations. The catch is that too much silver slows healing and harms healthy cells. Antibacterial strength and gentleness pull in opposite directions.

Nanordica, spun out of Estonia's National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics in 2019, combines tiny particles of silver and copper on a mesh of silk-based nanofibres. The two metals work together, the company says, so it needs about 40 times less silver than conventional dressings while still controlling infection and helping the wound heal.

The early evidence is unusually solid for a company this size. In a randomised trial of 30 patients with diabetic foot ulcers at North Estonia Medical Centre, published this year in the Journal of Wound Care, wounds shrank by 43% in one week, against 13% with standard silver dressings.

Where they are: founded by chief executive Olesja Bondarenko, Anna-Liisa Kubo, who developed the technology at the institute, Grigory Vasiliev and Meelis Kadaja. A €1.6 million round in June was led by 2C Ventures, with existing backers Specialist VC, Superangel and Amalfi. A €2.4 million European Innovation Council grant is funding a larger double-blind trial in Spain with more than 120 patients enrolled. A veterinary version has been on sale since 2023 in six countries, and the human product launches once its CE mark is complete.

Worth watching, because it has randomised clinical evidence before launch, which is rare at this stage, and a vet product already proving demand. The milestones ahead are the Spanish trial results and the CE mark that opens European hospitals.

Learn more: nanordica.com

Soybeans have a remarkable partnership. Certain soil bacteria live in small nodules on their roots and pull nitrogen out of the air, feeding the plant for free. That is nitrogen that would otherwise come from synthetic fertiliser, which takes a lot of energy to make.

Farmers have long helped the partnership along by coating seeds with these bacteria. In Brazil, inoculants took off on soy in the 1960s, and researchers there say the bacteria can fully replace nitrogen fertiliser on the crop. The weak point is the coating itself. Bacteria on the outside of a seed are exposed, and as the EU's description of Ensemo's project puts it, conventional coatings often leave few microbes alive.

Ensemo, a spin-out of the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology based in Tulln near Vienna, puts them inside. Its SeedJection machine cuts a tiny opening in each seed without harming the embryo, injects living bacteria, and seals it with a biodegradable glue. It handles around 3,000 seeds a second, and its industrial systems process up to 1.2 tonnes of soybean seed an hour, by the company's figures. AIT reports yield increases of 3% to 19% in field trials while using less synthetic fertiliser.

It is precision engineering in an unexpected place. A single hectare of soy takes around 600,000 seeds, so a process that works one seed at a time has to be very fast to matter.

Where they are: co-founded by chief executive Birgit Mitter and chief technology officer Nikolaus Pfaffenbichler, on more than 20 years of plant-microbe research at AIT. In May, Ensemo signed a €2.5 million European Innovation Council Accelerator grant, the only Austrian company in that round. It has its first paying customer and field trials with 13 more European seed producers, and plans to lease its machines and charge by the volume of seed treated. Brazil and maize are next.

One to watch. The idea is easy to grasp and the business model fits how seed companies already work. The milestone ahead is conversion: turning those 13 field trials into customers, and showing the gains hold season after season at industrial volume.

Learn more: ensemo.com

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See you next Saturday.