AQUASORTER Swiss Accelerator completed: a new platform, Sortivo, and three new applications
Bionomous has successfully completed its innovation project funded by Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, through the Swiss Accelerator programme. The project, called AQUASORTER (Automation and QUAlity SORting Tools for thE aquacultuRe industry), ran from July 2023 to July 2026 and achieved all five of its milestones.
The outcome: three new applications for our technology, and a new platform, Sortivo, launched in May 2026.
The challenge: judging egg quality
The AQUASORTER project started from one challenge: producing healthy juveniles in aquaculture. In marine hatcheries, mortality is highest at the earliest life stages, and egg quality plays a major role in survival. Checking egg quality early is therefore essential, yet it is still done by eye or by flotation. The process is slow, subjective and hard to compare from one batch, or one operator, to the next.
The project set out to bring automated, AI-based assessment to each individual egg, with one major goal: to enhance juvenile production.
Working with hatcheries and research centres, we learned that egg-level criteria help identify good batches early, but larval quality matters even more, which became a key motivation to develop Sortivo.
A second challenge was diversity. Biological samples vary widely in size, morphology, fragility and the features that need to be assessed. Working across different aquatic species, from eggs to larvae, pushed us to make our technology increasingly flexible and adaptable. These developments created a broader technological foundation for handling a wide range of biological entities, opening new opportunities beyond aquaculture, including organoids, spheroids and other 3D biological models.
Three new applications
Building on these lessons, we expanded our CE-marked EggSorter platform and developed Sortivo to serve three applications:
- Aquaculture quality control. Our technology now classifies eggs of marine species such as gilthead sea bream, sea bass, bluefin tuna, meagre and grey mullet, without compromising their viability, see preprint: Deciphering Embryo Quality for Advanced Mariculture Practices.
- 3D cell models. These developments significantly increased the flexibility of our technology and created the technical foundation for expanding into organoids and other 3D cell cultures, which has been validated by one of our partner CelVivo (Denmark), as described in our application note: Intelligent Automation for Advanced 3D Models.
- Fish larvae screening. With Sortivo, researchers can now screen and sort zebrafish and other fish larvae using multi-channel fluorescence imaging.
Sortivo: a new platform for complex models
Sortivo is a benchtop platform that screens and sorts fish larvae, organoids and other alternative models. It combines brightfield and multi-channel fluorescence imaging with AI that users can train for their own applications.
Launched at SLAS Europe in May 2026, where it won the New Product Award, Sortivo is CE-marked and protected by a new patent application and a registered trademark.
If you would like to know how Sortivo works and how it can automate your workflows with fish larvae, organoids or other complex models, discover Sortivo on our website.
Impact and what’s next
The project helped retain skilled jobs in Switzerland, produced scientific relevant data, and supports research that reduces reliance on animal testing.
Would you like to see Sortivo or the EggSorter in action? Contact our team to book a demo.
This project (PFSA-22-128) was funded by Innosuisse – Swiss Innovation Agency through the Swiss Accelerator programme. We thank Innosuisse and all our partners for their support.