There's a certain irony to the Internet of Things: a technology meant to make our lives simpler has left us drowning in batteries. Billions of sensors, trackers, and connected devices, each one eventually destined for a landfill once its power source dies.
E-peas, a Belgian semiconductor company, thinks it has a better way. On July 8, 2026, the Louvain-la-Neuve-based startup announced $22 million in new financing to advance chips that harvest energy from ambient sources—light, vibration, even radio frequency signals—eliminating the need for traditional batteries altogether. Crédit Mutuel Innovation led the round, with participation from SFPIM, Belgium's federal investment fund, and a cohort of returning investors.
It's the kind of technology that sounds almost too elegant: IoT devices that power themselves indefinitely, drawing microjoules from their environment. The reality, of course, is more nuanced.
Following the Money
Crédit Mutuel Innovation, the venture arm of Crédit Mutuel Equity, spearheaded the investment through its Belgian subsidiary. SFPIM joined a syndicate that included the European Innovation Council Fund, Wallonie Entreprendre, KBC Focus Fund, Otium, Nomainvest, The Faktory, and Invest BW—most of them familiar names from e-peas' earlier funding rounds.
The company has been at this for a while. A €17.5 million round closed in March 2022, led by Otium Capital. Before that, an €8 million raise in July 2020. With offices now in Belgium, Switzerland, and Palo Alto, e-peas has steadily expanded its footprint alongside its balance sheet.
The Technology Underneath
E-peas doesn't manufacture chips itself—it's fabless, as the industry says. What it does design are ultra-low-power energy-harvesting power management integrated circuits. The company's term for these: Ambient Energy Managers.
The concept centers on extracting usable power from sources most devices ignore: photovoltaic cells (both indoor and outdoor), radio frequency signals bouncing through the air, mechanical vibration, thermal gradients. Feed one of these inputs into an e-peas chip, and it can trickle-charge a capacitor or micro-battery, keeping an IoT sensor alive indefinitely—or at least dramatically extending the time between replacements.
Founded in December 2014 after a decade of research at the Université catholique de Louvain, the company now sells about 20 different power management ICs, each tailored to specific energy sources. Its December 2025 launch, the AEM15820, is a hybrid photovoltaic chip capable of handling everything from dim indoor lighting to direct sunlight, across a power range spanning microwatts to a full watt.
The applications read like a catalog of modern convenience: solar-powered TV remotes, HVAC sensors that never need maintenance visits, surveillance cameras in places where wiring is impractical, asset-tracking tags stuck to shipping containers. In June 2026, e-peas joined Dracula Technologies, Nordic Semiconductor, and MOKOSMART in demonstrating a fully battery-free Bluetooth tracker—powered entirely by organic photovoltaic cells printed on the device itself.
Whether those demonstrations translate into mass adoption is another question entirely.
What Comes Next
The new capital will fund what every growth-stage hardware company says it needs: commercial scaling, new market expansion, product line diversification. E-peas also plans to streamline its shareholder structure, a quiet admission that early-stage cap tables can get messy.
The timing, at least, seems favorable. The broader semiconductor industry is rallying around "Ambient IoT," a term gaining currency as the 3GPP standards body works on ultra-low-power specifications for its Release 19. Emergen Research projects the energy-harvesting PMIC market will nearly triple from roughly $1.2 billion in 2024 to $3.5 billion by 2034—though like all market forecasts, that depends on variables no one fully controls.
E-peas earned a slot in Amazon Devices & Services' Climate Tech Accelerator cohort back in May, a nod to the sustainability pitch that underpins much of its story. Battery-free operation means less e-waste, lower total cost of ownership, fewer truck rolls to swap dead cells in remote sensors.
The pitch is compelling. The execution, harder.
A Crowded Field
E-peas isn't alone in chasing this vision. Wiliot, EnOcean, Everactive, Atmosic—each pursues some variation on batteryless or ultra-low-power sensing. Some offer complete system solutions; others, like e-peas, focus on the silicon layer, betting that device makers will prefer to integrate power-harvesting chips into their own designs rather than adopt turnkey platforms.
It's a strategic choice that reflects the company's origins. Co-founders Geoffroy Gosset, the CEO, and Julien De Vos, the CTO, both came out of UCLouvain's research labs—the kind of background that breeds comfort with deep technical work and perhaps less enthusiasm for the messiness of end-to-end product development.
That semiconductor focus could carve out a defensible niche, assuming the market evolves as e-peas expects. The technology itself works—the physics is sound, the demos functional. What remains uncertain is whether the industry will design these chips into millions, or billions, of devices.
For now, e-peas has capital, momentum, and a thesis about the future of connected devices. Whether that future arrives on schedule is the part no amount of funding can guarantee.
