e-peas raises €19.2M to make battery-free Ambient IoT the standard

e-peas, a fabless semiconductor company based in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, has raised €19.2 million ($22 million) in a financing round led by Crédit Mutuel Innovation — the venture arm of Crédit Mutuel Equity — with participation from its Belgian subsidiary. SFPIM, Belgium's federal investment fund, joined alongside a broad syndicate of existing investors: the European Innovation Council, Wallonie Entreprendre, KBC Focus Fund, Otium Capital, Nomainvest, The Faktory, and Invest BW.

The battery problem in IoT

e-peas designs power management and energy harvesting ICs — the chips that sit between an ambient energy source (solar, radio frequency, kinetic vibration, thermal gradient) and the low-power sensor or MCU it powers. The result is a device that draws its operating energy entirely from its environment: no battery, no charging, no maintenance crew.

At small scale, batteries are a non-issue. At any scale that resembles an actual IoT deployment — tens of thousands of sensors distributed across a building, a factory, or a supply chain — the battery problem becomes an operational one. Replacement schedules, logistics, and the environmental cost of disposable cells turn a cheap sensor network into an expensive one. e-peas' pitch is that energy harvesting chips don't just reduce battery consumption; for a wide class of ambient-energy-rich environments, they eliminate it.

The product portfolio today covers PMICs (power management integrated circuits) for solar, RF, thermal, and kinetic energy inputs. The round funds expansion into adjacent ultra-low-power processing and sensing lines — a move from supplying a single component in the Ambient IoT bill of materials to supplying more of the subsystem.

An unusual lead

Crédit Mutuel Innovation does not typically lead deeptech semiconductor hardware rounds; its natural territory is B2B software and fintech. Its decision to lead here — through two separate entities, a French innovation vehicle and a Belgian subsidiary — signals that e-peas' commercial traction has reached a stage where the round reads as much as a financial bet as a technology one.

"The IoT market is booming, and e-peas is set to become the undisputed leader in energy harvesting," said Alexis Riou of Crédit Mutuel Innovation.

SFPIM's participation follows a pattern visible across Europe since the Chips Act: national development capital co-investing in chip-design companies as insurance against the continent's dependency on non-European semiconductor supply chains. Belgium, with Louvain-la-Neuve's established semiconductor research ecosystem (IMEC is nearby), has particular reasons to back domestic chip talent.

The 18-month test

Three ambitions run in parallel: international expansion (US and Asian markets named), new verticals (smart buildings and consumer electronics alongside existing industrial IoT), and product portfolio growth into processing and sensing. The risk is that three simultaneous expansion bets dilute execution on any one of them. The test that would validate all three simultaneously is a design win with a tier-one OEM or system manufacturer — one that commits to building e-peas components into a next-generation product line at meaningful volume. Without that, the round proves market traction without yet proving market scale.