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Neural Grader - Digitizing the Wood Industry

Objective

Fordaq SA has been leading the wood products B2B global market for almost 20 years. We provide our 200.000 user companies with a specialized digital platform for buying products. We have observed how low digitization of the wood industry poses problems for success & often survival for SMEs. There is an urgent need of an automated solution for processing lumber. The current methods are too expensive for SMEs and in practice lead to errors, enormous economic & environmental waste.

Our newest product - Neural Grader is the solution to this problem, having the potential of disrupting the European and global wood industry. Its innovation lies in the industrial cameras that capture images of each board and, using state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence methods, accurately classifies wood quality. Neural Grader also computes the optimal way for cutting the boards and sends commands to the cutting machine, preventing wood waste.

Competitive advantages:
- Efficiency: it detects defects and grads lumber at high speed, with accuracy that exceeds the one of existing systems;
- Affordability: the price will be 1/4 of the price of our competitors’ products, making it accessible for the SMEs, who are currently overwhelmed by overly expensive technology and dominated by large companies;
- Full-control of production: companies can manage the production lines and inventory and focus on quality.

We have a large base of existing clients and 10 sawmills in Europe & North America sent us Letters of Support (ANNEX 1).

Finance: We expect revenue growth of €1.2 €4.4 and €8.3 million in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively. Job creation increases from 12 to 29 employees. Operating expenses start at €0.9 million in 2019 and grow to € 2.3 million in 2022.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

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Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020

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Coordinator

FORDAQ
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 50 000,00
Address
AVENUE LOUISE 523
1050 BRUXELLES
Belgium

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SME

The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.

Yes
Region
Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Région de Bruxelles-Capitale/ Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest Arr. de Bruxelles-Capitale/Arr. Brussel-Hoofdstad
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 71 429,00
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