Kore Metals has been awarded the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator program and selected as a participant in the Horizon Europe-funded WISER project.
“Achieving both programs is a testament to our technology, team, and the role we play in strengthening Europe’s strategic metals supply chain,” said Joost Van Oorschot, CEO and Co-founder of Kore Metals. “Producing high-purity silicon locally means opening access to a market worth approximately €10 billion annually, while reducing Europe’s dependence on imports from China, which currently dominates global supply.”
Building Europe’s future strategic metals supply, starting with silicon
Silicon sits at the foundation of modern industrial society. It is an essential material for aluminium alloys, silicones, chemicals, semiconductors, renewable energy systems, and advanced manufacturing. Yet despite its strategic importance, Europe remains heavily dependent on imports for a material that underpins many of its most critical industrial value chains.
As geopolitical tensions, trade disruptions, and growing global competition for critical raw materials reshape supply chains, securing domestic production capacity has become an economic and strategic priority. Industrial consumers increasingly require:
- Sovereign and resilient supply chains
- Reduced dependence on imported critical materials
- Predictable production costs
- Reduced exposure to carbon-related costs
- Compliance with increasingly demanding sustainability requirements
Kore Metals is developing a fundamentally different approach to producing high-value, high-purity critical metals that directly addresses these challenges.
Rather than relying on the conventional carbon-intensive production route, our technology uses electricity as the primary energy source for silicon reduction. This creates a pathway toward significantly lower direct carbon emissions while reducing dependence on fossil-carbon inputs and their associated price volatility.
Beyond the environmental benefits, local silicon production strengthens European industrial sovereignty by reducing reliance on overseas supply and creating a new domestic source of a critical raw material. As demand for silicon continues to grow across energy, electronics, defence, and advanced manufacturing sectors, securing reliable European production capacity becomes increasingly important.
Equally important, our modular production architecture enables silicon—and later also other strategic metals—production to scale by leveraging many of a manufacturer’s existing production units rather than relying on new large-furnace installations. This approach improves operational flexibility, accelerates deployment, strengthens supply resilience, and lowers the capital barriers to establishing production capacity closer to where it is needed.
EIC Accelerator support: Moving toward industrial demonstration
The EIC Accelerator award marks an important transition from technology development toward industrial validation. The program will support Kore Metals in optimising our process for scale-up and in advancing the engineering, construction, and operation of a pilot production cell with an equivalent silicon production capacity of approximately 1,000 tons per year.
The pilot program will focus on:
- Demonstrating stable large-scale operation
- Validating silicon recovery and product quality
- Confirming process repeatability under industrial conditions
- Advancing engineering and permitting activities
- Reducing technical and commercial scale-up risks
Successfully achieving these objectives will represent another major step toward commercial deployment and provide important validation for future production facilities.
“The EIC Accelerator award will significantly derisk our path to pilot-scale production and commercial deployment,” Joost explained. “It enables us to demonstrate our technology at an industrially relevant scale, accelerate customer qualification, and advance on establishing a new domestic source of silicon for European industry.”
WISER project to locally produce high-purity silicon
In the same timeframe as the EIC Accelerator was awarded, Kore Metals was selected as an industrial partner in the newly launched WISER project, a four-year European initiative funded under Horizon Europe. The WISER project brings together 13 leading industrial and research organisations across Europe to recover semiconductor-grade materials from geothermal energy production residues, asbestos mining waste, and end-of-life photovoltaic panels.
“Over the next four years, project partners will demonstrate eight innovative recovery and purification technologies at industrially relevant scale,” explains Bertrand Paviet-Salomon, the coordinator of the project and group leader at the Swiss research institute CSEM. “The goal is to show that valuable semiconductor materials can be sourced more sustainably, at lower cost and with significantly reduced environmental impact compared to conventional extraction and purification methods.”
Participation in the WISER project allows Kore Metals to contribute to this broader European effort by continuing to expand our technological capabilities and demonstrating local silicon production.
“The WISER project comes at a crucial point in time as Europe is strengthening its industrial competitiveness in critical raw materials,” says Pablo Calla, CTO and Co-founder of Kore Metals. “The technologies being developed within the project bring innovative recovery and purification solutions closer to commercial viability, helping establish the foundation for greater technological sovereignty. At the same time, technology alone is not enough. Continued investment and industrial-scale deployment will be essential to transform this potential into resilient European supply chains.”
A growing platform for strategic metals production
Looking ahead, our priorities are to deliver the 1,000-ton-per-year pilot program, continue customer qualification activities, and prepare for commercial deployment. Each milestone brings us closer to establishing a new source of European silicon supply that is cleaner, more resilient, and more competitive.
At the same time, we are laying the groundwork for a broader strategic metals platform. The same innovation that enables silicon production today has the potential to unlock future opportunities across other critical materials.
With strong industrial interest, growing market demand, and support from two major European programs, we are entering an important new phase of growth.