May 15, 2022

NIREOS announces today it will receive a €1.5 million grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC). The project, called HYPERIA, aims to develop an innovative camera capable of measuring not just the colour of objects around us, but their entire light spectrum for each pixel of the two-dimensional field of view. These systems, called hyperspectral imaging (HSI) cameras, are typically limited by their bulk size, high cost, poor sensitivity and limited spectral coverage, covering either the visible or the near-infrared portion of the spectrum. The breakthrough innovation in HYPERIA is constituted by NIREOS’ core and proprietary technology: time-domain Fourier-transform spectroscopy, a radically different paradigm with respect to competitors. This will enable to develop a HSI system with a hitherto inaccessible level of sensitivity even in low-light illumination conditions, covering a dramatically wider wavelength range from the visible to the short-wavelength infrared (SWIR).

Fabrizio Preda, NIREOS’s CEO and coordinator of HYPERIA project, said:
“We are proud to see our technology recognised by the EU as a potentially disruptive innovation, enabling future users to capture spectral signatures that can be used as unique fingerprints for stand-off and non-destructive physio-chemical analysis of materials and for detecting fluorescence signals from non-visible features.”

He further commented: “The HYPERIA camera will have a wide range of possible applications, such as monitoring of food freshness and composition, plastic waste separation, analysis of fine arts, remote sensing and inspection of building materials.”

Enrico Deluchi, CEO of PoliHub, told:
"It’s an excellent news for PoliHub. The grant received by NIREOS confirms the growing interest in a complex sector such as photonics. It is the confirmation that deep tech is capable of attracting important investments and that we are going in the right direction, supporting companies that show themselves capable of similar important results".

HYPERIA is one of the 42 projects selected for funding from 292 submitted in the EIC Transition call, aimed at transforming research results into innovation opportunities. The EIC is the European flagship programme to identify, develop and scale up breakthrough technologies and game-changing innovations.

NIREOS (www.nireos.com) is a deep-tech company based in Milan (Italy) that provides innovative technologies in photonics that boost the performances of commercial spectroscopic devices. Its portfolio comprises ultra-stable interferometers, ultra-broadband spectrometers (with unrivalled spectral coverage from the UV to the mid-infrared), and hyperspectral cameras.