Inside the first cohort of the European Circular Electronics Kickstart (ECEK).
Europe designs the future of electronics and imports almost everything it needs to build it. Gallium, indium, germanium, silicon, the whole raw base of the microchips that run our cars, our defence systems and our energy grids: most of it arrives from outside our borders, and much of what we throw away leaves before we can recover it.
Closing that loop is a project too big for any single company. It needs a value chain, not a champion.
The European Circular Electronics Kickstart Acceleration Program, ECEK for short, is one of the ways EVEN-CLOSER is building that value chain. Free of charge, equity free, open to ventures at TRL 4 to 8: from June to November 2026 fifteen startups from twelve countries are receiving tailored coaching, MVP pilots across the consortium’s network, workshops on IP, fundraising and commercialisation, and introductions to the investors that can help them scale. The programme closes with Demo Day in Malta, in November 2026.
That is the mechanism. This is what it looks like from inside the cohort.
Upstream: making the invisible visible
Before anything can be recycled, it has to be sorted. Before it can be sorted, it has to be seen. This is where the first group of Cohort 1 startups works.
Wastetide
France
AI software that helps factories sort waste at source, cutting both costs and emissions.
HIRO Robotics
Italy
Robotic, AI-driven systems for the automated disassembly of end-of-life electronics, one of the hardest bottlenecks in urban mining.
Mol-E
Turkiye
AI applied to e-waste recycling operations, turning heterogeneous waste streams into workable feedstock.
iCarbon
Turkiye
Hydrothermal technology to recover carbon and materials from composite waste, taking on the fractions that today mostly end up in landfill.
Four companies, one hypothesis: circular electronics starts with software and hardware that can look at a pile of waste and make sense of it.
Materials and the semiconductor value chain
Then comes the harder problem: what to do with those materials once you have them, and how to build the next generation of semiconductor technology without the dependencies of the previous one.
Ecopolix
Norway
Deep-tech materials company developing polymeric ionic hybrid materials for sustainable electronics.
Intace
United Kingdom
Advanced polymer engineering for high-performance materials in electronics and semiconductors.
NSS Water
Sweden
Patented water purification technology for the semiconductor industry, a sector whose water intensity is a systemic constraint.
Raynetics
Netherlands
AI-driven 3D nanoscale imaging that turns electron-microscope images into precise 3D models for semiconductor analysis.
OptiDetect
Latvia
Edge-AI computer vision for real-time quality control in electronics manufacturing.
TR Semiconductor
Hong Kong
Power-electronics company developing next-generation semiconductor solutions.
Prometheus Plasma Systems
Italy
Italy’s first nuclear fusion startup, developing plasma-core technology, betting on a future where Europe’s clean energy also underwrites its industrial autonomy.
Seven startups. Seven layers of the same stack.
Making circularity work at industrial scale
The third group takes on what happens when circular economy stops being a demonstration and starts becoming an operating system.
PulpaTronics
United Kingdom
Chipless, metal-free RFID tags made entirely from paper, recyclable with regular paper waste: a small design decision with a large ripple effect on industries that today produce vast quantities of unrecoverable tags.
S2S Dynamics
Germany
The operating system for industrial recyclers, the software layer that turns recycling from a craft into a process.
Tech Trinity
Serbia
AI-enabled circular electronics platform for the recovery and reuse of electronic components.
Texus
Finland
AI-powered liquidity for the circular industrial economy, addressing one of the practical challenges of circularity at scale: the financial mechanism that lets recovered materials move.
Four companies, four pieces of the plumbing that circular electronics needs to actually work.
What happens next
Between now and November 2026 the cohort will refine business models, pilot MVPs across the EVEN-CLOSER partners’ network, meet investors, and step onto the Demo Day stage in Malta. The ones that stand out will be classified as Circularity Champions, System Enablers or Emerging Innovators, and supported after the programme through the wider Circular Kickstart community.
But the point is not the classification. The point is that fifteen ventures, from twelve countries inside and outside the European Union, are spending these months inside the same programme, working on interoperable pieces of the same problem.
Cohort 2 will follow in 2027, focused on semiconductor extraction and photovoltaic recycling. Cohort 3 in 2028, on green chemistry and secondary raw material integration in semiconductor production. Together, the three cohorts will accelerate 45 startups by the end of the project.
ECEK is one of the practical answers EVEN-CLOSER is building to a question Europe cannot avoid much longer: whether the continent that invented so much of modern electronics can also become the one that closes its material loop.
Fifteen startups, this summer, are working on that answer.
The European Circular Electronics Kickstart Acceleration Program (ECEK) is delivered by MALTAccelerate, Circular Hub and AID as part of EVEN-CLOSER. This project has received funding from the European Union’s I3 Instrument under Grant Agreement No. 101228240. Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EISMEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.