Smart Materials, the Maltese deep-tech firm behind the Zetic foam mattress Huggah, will open a bridge funding round to pay for international expansion and a bigger production run, as it marks the end of its first commercial year.
The company said that almost twelve months after its earliest deliveries, Huggah had built a local following, landed a spot in a five-star hotel suite, won over leading Maltese athletes, moved into trials with top-tier international teams and recorded its first sales abroad in Rome and Denmark. Malta, it said, was deliberately picked as the testing ground for a new category of material.
Word of mouth carried the brand into hospitality. This autumn one of the executive penthouse suites at ME Malta in St Julian’s was fitted with a Huggah mattress. ME by Meliá is the premium brand of Meliá Hotels International, a group that runs more than 380 hotels across over 40 countries. Suites of that standard usually rely on long-established international bedding names, so the placement hands Smart Materials both a reference point and a second route to market. Neal Debono, general manager at ME Malta, said he had slept on the mattress himself and wanted guests to have the same quality of rest, adding that an exceptional stay came down to detail and that good sleep was part of it.
Elite sport followed. Huggah already works with Maltese athletes including Olympic weightlifter Yazmin Zammit Stevens and open-water swimmer Neil Agius, who holds the record for the longest open-water swim. Abroad, the mattress is being tested by Premier League-level clubs and by athletes ranked inside the world’s top 10 in their sport, a stage the company expects to convert into formal partnerships.
Over the next three to six months Smart Materials plans to take Huggah into Rome and Denmark through partners, the opening move in a phased European rollout. Output in Malta is being increased and a larger mainland European site is under review.
“Year one was about proof,” said Keith M. Azzopardi, chief executive and co-founder. He said customers had bought and liked the product, pointing to average feedback of 9.3/10 and that the second year would be about testing international markets and preparing to scale.
Zetic, developed with the Metamaterials Unit at the University of Malta, is an auxetic polyurethane foam made in a single production step, which removes the post-processing that has long kept such foams out of mass markets. Because it stiffens under pressure, a single layer can do the work of several, simplifying both manufacturing and recycling. Patents have been granted in the United States, Canada, Japan and China, with European cover still pending.
Recognition came too. Smart Materials was picked as a winner of the EIT Regional Innovation Booster Malta Edition, run by Xjenza Malta and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. It pitched at the invite-only INPHO Venture Summit in Bordeaux, which gathers investors from 24 countries and has raised €1.4 billion since 2018 and was a finalist for Start-up of the Year at the Malta Business Awards 2026.
