Counting the Results of Didimo's EIC Accelerator 3D Avatars

Didimo, a 2016 spin-off of the University of Porto, set out to give every internet user a 3D double: an animated head built automatically from a single smartphone photo. The European Commission picked it, under the name MyDidimo, in the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot that became the EIC Accelerator, according to the Commission's list of winners. The list gives the project as "Humanity in Digital Communication" and names no other company for it. CORDIS records a grant of €1,808,625 towards a total cost of €2,583,750 for a two-year project from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2021, coordinated by Didimo, S.A. in Leça da Palmeira, with its UK company MyDidimo UK Ltd as a linked third party.

Seven years after the award, the company is still trading, and the avatar pipeline it built with the grant now sits behind a different product. Its website now sells Popul8, a tool that lets game studios generate hundreds of non-player characters in their own art style, and makes no mention of creating an avatar from a selfie.

Where Didimo Stands in 2026

Didimo, S.A. is registered as active. The business information service eInforma holds balance sheets for 2023, 2024 and 2025, the last of them added on 20 July 2026, and Racius lists a share capital of €2,500,100, a capital increase in August 2022 and a reappointment of the company's officers in September 2025. Neither register shows insolvency proceedings. Revenue, results and staff numbers sit behind paid reports on both sites and could not be checked for this article. Iberinform places the company in a revenue band of up to €2 million and a staff band of 11 to 15, without stating the year; if those bands are current, the team is smaller than the 27 people Didimo reported in 2020.

The UK company is active too. Companies House shows MyDidimo UK Ltd, incorporated on 9 December 2020, filing accounts for 2025 in March 2026, moving its registered office to Chichester the same month and losing a director in April 2026. An older MyDidimo UK Limited, incorporated in 2017, was dissolved in September 2018.

The latest product news is a partnership with the 3D art start-up P-Labs, announced in July 2025, which lets studios turn 2D concept art into 3D models and then feed them into Popul8 to generate crowds, according to GamesBeat. No other source for the partnership was found, and no customer for it has been named.

The Technology: From a Selfie to a Rigged Head

Building a realistic digital human has traditionally meant scanning rigs, artists and animators. The CORDIS summary put the job at "at least 420" hours per character and claimed Didimo's software cut it to about 30 seconds from one smartphone photo or scan. The pipeline detects facial landmarks, deforms a template mesh to fit them, transfers the photo's texture onto it and builds a custom control rig so the head can be animated. That sequence is described in Didimo's US patent US 12,067,662, granted in August 2024, and in an earlier patent, US 11,645,800, granted in May 2023, which covers combining input from phones, depth sensors and cameras. Both name Orvalho first among the inventors, and both are assigned to Didimo Inc, the company's US entity, rather than to the Portuguese company that received the grant.

The selling point was automation. "No more arbitrary choices or generic options to choose from: users automatically receive an avatar that looks just like them," Orvalho told the CORDIS results service in 2021. Popul8 turns the same machinery around. Instead of copying one real person, it takes a studio's base character and varies it into hundreds of game-ready figures in the studio's style. At launch in April 2023 Didimo said the models export to Unity, Unreal Engine and ARKit and are licensed per game, with Sony, Soleil Game Studios and tagSpace among early users, according to Voicebot.ai and Jornal Económico.

That endorsement from the Finnish studio behind Cities: Skylines II is the clearest independent evidence of a shipped commercial use. Colossal Order says Didimo built a base mesh in its art style, from which the studio generated citizens of different ages, professions and seasons. Didimo's website lists Sony, Colossal Order, Avalon, Playable Worlds and Electric Square as customers; apart from Colossal Order and Sony, which earlier press reports also name, those relationships could not be confirmed from a second source.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The proposal aimed the avatar at two markets: mobile apps, where 3D content is slow and costly to make, and online fashion, where shoppers return clothes they could not try on. The consultancy Inova+, which presents the award as one of its success stories, says the project foresaw pilots with Sony and Farfetch as early adopters.

The final CORDIS periodic report, covering October 2020 to September 2021, says Didimo raised its technology to readiness level 8 and ran both pilots. In late 2020 it launched a Customer Portal, an Android app, a Unity SDK and a Unity Editor plug-in, and an iOS app called Didimo Showcase; it billed the platform as generating a digital human "in around 90 seconds from a single selfie". The fashion pilot, the report says, was "initially developed for Farfetch" but was delivered for DREST, a mobile styling game in which players can order the luxury clothes they dress their avatars in. The report also lists 22 new hires in the second year and "a large enterprise deal with a new retail customer", without naming it. A CORDIS results article from May 2021 adds two US patents secured and names Amazon, Sony, Altice, Ceek and Atom Republic as partners in sector pilots. The project closed on its scheduled end date; CORDIS records no termination.

1. Automated selfie-to-avatar platform at TRL 8DeliveredCustomer Portal, API, Unity SDK and apps launched in late 2020, per the CORDIS report and CORDIS results article.
2. Mobile pilot with global mobile customersDeliveredPilot reported; Sony named as a user in the 2019 seed announcement and by Armilar in 2022.
3. Fashion virtual try-on with FarfetchPartlyPilot ran for the DREST game instead; no Farfetch launch found.
4. Consumer avatar app at scaleNot publicNo user numbers; Apple's App Store lookup for Didimo Showcase now returns no listing.
5. Project on timeDeliveredRan October 2019 to September 2021 as planned, no termination recorded.

What Came After the Grant

The EU money arrived alongside private rounds. In December 2019 Didimo announced $4.9 million from Portugal Ventures, Farfetch UK, Bynd VC, Beta-I and LC Ventures, presented together with the EU grant as a "$6.9 million" package, when it had 22 staff in Porto, Vancouver and London, according to Road to VR and tech.eu. Both put the grant at $2 million; CORDIS gives €1,808,625. In September 2020 a further €1 million came from Armilar's tech transfer fund, Bright Pixel and PME Investimentos, when the company had 27 employees and offices in Porto, Delaware and Vancouver, according to the lead investor Armilar; no second report of this round was found.

In October 2022, a year after the EIC project ended, Armilar led a $7.15 million Series A with Bright Pixel Capital, Portugal Ventures and Techstars, reported by Armilar, Forbes Portugal and AWN. The pitch then still centred on 3D avatars from photos for games, virtual concerts and virtual try-on, with NPC generation one use among several. Six months later Popul8 launched, and by 2026 it is the only product on the website.

Didimo also kept winning EU research money. Since January 2024 it has been one of 19 beneficiaries of PRESENCE, a €7.66 million Horizon Europe project led by the Catalan research centre i2CAT building "a toolset for hyper-realistic and XR-based human-human and human-machine interactions", with an EU contribution to Didimo of €427,810 until April 2027. No other EU project of the company was found on CORDIS.

The award was grant only, and no source found reports an investment by the EIC Fund in Didimo.

Why It Matters for Europe

In July 2023 the Commission adopted its strategy on Web 4.0 and virtual worlds, which calls for a European industrial ecosystem for the technologies behind them, according to the Digital Skills and Jobs Platform and Bird & Bird. Tools for building digital humans are one such layer. Didimo is a small European supplier in that layer with customers among game studios, and its PRESENCE work sits inside the EU's own research agenda for virtual worlds. Two caveats limit the strategic return: the patents behind the technology are held by its US entity, and the company's growth after 2022 cannot be measured from free public data.

The Verdict

Didimo was not asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.