IN Brief:
- The $22m financing was led by Crédit Mutuel Innovation with Belgian public and existing investors.
- e-peas develops ultra-low-power management ICs harvesting light, RF, vibration, and thermal energy.
- Battery-free IoT growth depends on efficient electronics, realistic energy budgets, and dependable storage.
e-peas has secured $22m in financing to accelerate the development and international commercialisation of power-management semiconductors for battery-free and extended-life connected devices.
Crédit Mutuel Innovation led the investment with support from its Belgian operation and SFPIM, the Belgian federal investment fund. Existing investors including the European Innovation Council, Wallonie Entreprendre, KBC Focus Fund, Otium, Nomainvest, The Faktory, and Invest BW also participated.
The Louvain-la-Neuve company will use the capital to expand into additional markets, increase commercial activity, and develop new product lines. The transaction has also simplified its shareholder structure as the business moves from specialist component development towards broader international growth.
e-peas develops ambient-energy-management devices that collect small amounts of power from photovoltaic cells, radio-frequency sources, vibration harvesters, and thermoelectric generators. Its ICs manage startup, conversion, storage, and load delivery under conditions where available energy can be intermittent and far below the level supplied by a conventional regulated rail.
Existing applications include solar-powered remote controls, HVAC equipment, cameras, and tracking devices. Harvested energy can eliminate a primary battery, extend replacement intervals, or allow a rechargeable storage element to be smaller than would otherwise be required.
Battery maintenance constrains IoT scale
Connected sensing is relatively straightforward when a device can be reached easily and supplied from the mains, whereas the economics change when thousands of nodes are installed in ceilings, machinery, buildings, logistics assets, agricultural equipment, or infrastructure. A low-cost sensor can create a much larger maintenance liability when its battery must be located and replaced every few years.
The operational burden of battery replacement across industrial IoT estates includes labour, access equipment, travel, production interruption, disposal, and uncertain remaining life. Those costs can exceed the original electronics price, particularly when the device is difficult to reach or its battery condition cannot be assessed remotely.
Energy harvesting offers an alternative, although design must begin with a realistic power budget. Indoor light levels vary by location and time, vibration depends on machine operation, thermal gradients may disappear, and usable RF energy can be extremely small. The available source has to be assessed under the least favourable operating conditions rather than its best laboratory output.
Although average consumption may be low, the load profile can include much larger pulses during radio transmission, measurement, encryption, or actuator operation. The harvesting IC, storage capacitor or rechargeable cell, voltage converter, and firmware must therefore cooperate to prevent those peaks from collapsing the supply.
Ultra-low-power microcontrollers and radios have widened the range of feasible applications by allowing systems to remain dormant and wake briefly to measure and communicate. Protocol choice can have as much effect as semiconductor efficiency because message frequency, retransmission behaviour, network discovery, security handshakes, and over-the-air updates all consume energy that must eventually be harvested.
Alongside the electrical case, supply-chain and environmental pressures are accelerating Ambient IoT development. Removing disposable batteries reduces replacement logistics and waste, while a smaller rechargeable element can cut material use; those gains weaken if the harvester requires an oversized mechanical assembly or if the storage component still reaches end of life before the installed product.
Reliability extends beyond the PMIC. Solar cells can become obscured, mechanical harvesters can wear, capacitors age, and installation conditions may differ from the original model. Successful products need diagnostics that indicate falling energy availability before a node simply disappears from the network.
The financing gives e-peas additional resources to broaden its IC portfolio and support customers through that system design. Battery-free electronics will advance through lower quiescent current and better conversion efficiency, but commercial deployment will depend on complete devices maintaining useful sensing and communications through the poorest energy conditions encountered in service.
