Seed-Finanzierung für Fraunhofer-Ausgründung Nicoustic
Press release - Fraunhofer IKTS - March 7, 2023
Fraunhofer IKTS spin-off Nicoustic secures 25 MNOK (~2.3 m€) for piloting a vessel level monitoring system. The non-intrusive technology is based on Guided Ultrasonic Waves.
The funding consists of soft funding granted by the Research Council of Norway and Innovation Norway, a convertible loan provided by Equinor Ventures, and an equity investment made by CoFounder, Fraunhofer Venture, employees and local investors.
The funding will be used to finance R&D, trials, and business development efforts necessary to release the final commercial product and to add new features that will provide added value and business opportunities as well as to secure a broad market penetration.
Nicoustic sensor technology has created a lot of traction with the future customers in the industry since the company was founded in June 2022 based on many years of research at Fraunhofer IKTS and an innovation challenge formulated by Equinor. Accurate measurement of levels in process vessels is a challenge in many applications, ranging from separation and storage vessels on offshore oil & gas platforms to process vessels in biorefineries. The challenge can be explained by the fact that probes and sensors that need to be mounted on the inside of process equipment are subject to harsh conditions and thus are prone to failures. Installing and maintaining intrusive level measurement systems also requires process shutdown – a challenge, considering that this is only performed once in several years for many applications. A non-intrusive level measurement system from Nicoustic does not have these drawbacks.