What Became of Geographica's EIC Accelerator Spatial Data Catalog

Geografia Aplicada SL, a Seville geospatial consultancy that traded as Geographica, appears in the European Commission's list of companies selected at the 20 March 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with the project NextGen.DO and grant-only funding. The list has one row for the project, so no partner company shared it. By the time of that cut-off, Geographica was no longer independent. CARTO, the spatial analytics company, announced on 29 May 2019 that it had acquired Geographica, one of its leading partners, and Geoawesome reported the same day that the whole team would join CARTO from its Seville headquarters. The Spanish companies gazette recorded CartoDB Inc as sole shareholder from 31 July 2019.

So the EU grant did not fund a small Andalusian firm's own product. It paid for CARTO's Data Observatory, the data marketplace inside CARTO's platform. CARTO said so itself: its September 2020 Data Observatory release post acknowledges Horizon 2020 funding under grant agreement 960401, which is NextGen.DO's number on CORDIS.

Where the Company Stands Now

The Seville company still exists and is active, but only as part of CARTO. Its name changed from Geografia Aplicada SL to CARTO Geographic Information Systems SL with an entry dated 1 June 2020, published in the BORME of 19 June 2020. That was after the EIC list went out under the old name and before the grant was signed on 31 July 2020. CORDIS now lists the coordinator as "CARTO GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM SOCIEDAD LIMITADA", without the final S of the registered name. In July 2024 the company added software design and development to its business purpose and raised its share capital by €1 to €3,007, according to the BORME of 29 July 2024.

Empresia lists the company as active, with 90 employees, accounts filed up to 2023 and annual turnover below €500,000. DatosCif gives the same owner, directors and former name. A turnover that low does not fit 90 staff, and the filed accounts that would explain it are behind a paywall, so they could not be checked for this article.

Its parent is still shipping new products. In October 2025 CARTO launched an MCP server that lets AI agents run its spatial workflows. In August 2026 it said every CARTO capability was available as a tool for agents in Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and other platforms.

The Technology: A Marketplace for Location Data

The CORDIS objective sets out the problem. Market analysis and site selection need both a spatial analytics platform and location data, such as demographics, mobility or points of interest. The software and the data traditionally come from different organisations, which makes it hard to combine them and to apply machine learning. NextGen.DO was meant to harmonise data from many providers into a common index and connect it directly to analytics. The goal was to cut the time it takes to put a location dataset to use from "1 month to hours".

The result is CARTO's Data Observatory. Users browse a Spatial Data Catalog, subscribe to public datasets directly and request premium ones, which goes through a licensing process with CARTO's data providers, according to CARTO's user manual. Subscriptions can be used in CARTO's own data warehouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks or PostgreSQL. The difference CARTO stresses is that its analysis runs inside the customer's cloud data warehouse using SQL, as its Series C announcement describes. The size of the catalog has grown, by CARTO's own count. TechCrunch put it at about 10,000 datasets in December 2021, roughly 3,600 of them open data. CARTO's glossary page now says "more than 12,000 datasets".

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

NextGen.DO ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022, as planned. The EU contribution was €1,845,812.50 towards a total cost of €2,636,875, according to CORDIS. The final periodic report says the platform and data science work packages were finished in January 2022, month 18. It also says pilots ran from month 13 to month 24, and that the deliverable "D4.2 NextGen Data Observatory code" was submitted. The report calls the results "very satisfactory". Its impact section, however, repeats the targets as expected results rather than reporting figures:

• a tenfold cut in data discovery time
• at least 10 new data providers
• four or more new customer, reseller or distributor agreements in 2022
• growth from 40 employees in 2019 to "almost 100 in 2024"

1. Location data marketplace on the CARTO platformDeliveredThe Data Observatory release of September 2020 credits grant 960401, and the product is still in CARTO's documentation.
2. Harmonised catalog from many providersDeliveredAbout 10,000 datasets in 2021 (TechCrunch); more than 12,000 now (CARTO).
3. Validated system at TRL8 and on saleDeliveredReleased to CARTO's cloud enterprise customers in September 2020; premium datasets are licensed through CARTO.
4. Tenfold faster data discoveryNot shownNo measured result published, in the final report or elsewhere.
5. 10 new data providers, 4 new agreements in 2022Not shownNo announcement counts them; the report lists them only as expected results.
6. 100 GitHub stars for a CARTO repositoryMetCARTOframes has 251 stars, but the repository dates from 2017.
7. Almost 100 staff by 2024PartlyEmpresia lists 90 employees for the Seville entity, year not stated.

The product was built and is on sale, and the project ended on time. The commercial targets the EIC funded it to reach have not been published as results, and under this series' standard an unreported milestone counts as missed. That makes the award partly delivered.

The Money Since the Award

On 14 December 2021 CARTO announced a $61 million Series C led by Insight Partners, with the "European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund" joining existing investors Accel, Salesforce Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Earlybird and Kibo, according to CARTO and Insight Partners. Insight described CARTO as a company with more than 150 employees. TechCrunch named the new investor as the European Investment Fund, a different EU body. The EIC Fund's own list of invested companies includes "Carto (GEOGRAFIA APLICADA)", with the NextGen.DO tagline, which supports the EIC Fund version. Neither the amount nor the date of the EIC Fund's stake is public. This is notable because the award was listed as grant only. The equity came later, and it went into the parent's round rather than the Seville grantee.

The Seville entity also took part in two other EU projects. It was a partner in NeEDS, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie staff exchange network, with €9,200 (CORDIS). It was also a partner in EMERALDS, a Horizon Europe project on urban mobility data analytics that ran from January 2023 to December 2025, with €372,500 (CORDIS).

Why Europe Should Care

Location data is central to European data policy. The Commission's 2020 European strategy for data aims at a single market for data and common European data spaces. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 makes geospatial data one of six categories of high-value public datasets that public bodies must release free of charge, as summarised by data.europa.eu and datos.gob.es. A catalog that turns such data into ready-to-use layers fits that policy.

The strategic-autonomy case is weaker. The grant went to the Spanish arm of a group described as New York-based, and the resulting catalog runs mainly on US cloud warehouses: CARTO's documentation says Data Observatory subscriptions are served from the US multi-region of its data warehouse by default.

The Verdict

Neither CARTO nor the EIC was asked for comment for this article. It is based on public registers, CORDIS and published statements, linked throughout.