Geowox Took EIC Accelerator Cash for Valuations, Then Stayed Irish

Every mortgage in Ireland needs a valuation, and for most of the last century that meant a surveyor visiting the house, filling in a report and emailing it to the lender days later. Geowox, a Dublin start-up founded in 2017, set out to change that by combining an automated valuation model, a statistical engine that prices homes from sales data, with accredited surveyors who check and sign off the result. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2019 cut-off it was selected for blended finance, and it is listed in the European Commission's list of selected companies as the only beneficiary of its project, described as "a platform supercharging residential property valuations".

The grant was €1,092,000 towards a €1,560,000 project that ran from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2022, according to CORDIS. The equity followed in January 2021, when Geowox was among the first 42 companies to receive direct investment from the new EIC Fund, according to Silicon Republic and the Irish Times, which put the equity at about €500,000. Geowox is still in the EIC Fund portfolio today. The platform it built is on sale in Ireland. The expansion beyond Ireland that the project prepared for has not been announced.

Where Geowox Stands Now

Geowox is an operating company. The Irish register, as reported by SoloCheck, lists its status as Normal, with its annual return and accounts for the year to 31 December 2025 filed on 14 April 2026. It files as a small company, so its public accounts do not show turnover or profit, and no figures for equity, results or staff could be verified for this article. North Data lists annual reports for every year from 2022 to 2024 and names Stefano Francavilla and Marco Giardina as directors on the 2024 report.

Its website sells one platform to Irish lenders, brokers, surveyors and loan book investors, with six modules from automatic surveyor allocation to quality checks and delivery into a lender's systems. It claims "3× faster turn time" and fewer than 10% of reports sent back for changes, against more than 35% for the industry, without saying how either figure was measured. It shows the logos of Nua Money, Spry Finance, MoCo, the First Home Scheme, doddl and moneysherpa as customers; none of these relationships could be confirmed from a second source. The about page calls the company "a lean team of industry experts".

The company's most visible output is its quarterly Housing Market Report, built on Ireland's Property Price Register. Its Q4 2025 report, covered by MyHome on 27 January 2026, found that homes with an A or B energy rating sold for a median of €450,000, about €95,000 more than homes rated C to G. A July 2025 edition was covered by Midlands 103. The latest, for Q2 2026, puts the national median at €393,000, according to Geowox's market reports page.

The Technology: Statistics First, Surveyor Second

Lenders in the Netherlands and Sweden have long used fully automated valuations for low-risk loans, while in Ireland valuations were done almost entirely by hand, the project's final report on CORDIS says. Geowox's pitch sits between the two. Its platform first matches each address to geographic coordinates and property characteristics with what it calls a proprietary address encoder, then runs an automated valuation model, and then hands the result to a surveyor, who visits the house or signs off from the desk.

The hybrid approach was a bet on regulation, and the bet paid. The European Banking Authority's guidelines on loan origination and monitoring (EBA/GL/2020/06) were published on 29 May 2020 and apply from 30 June 2021. The CORDIS report describes the rules as forbidding fully automated valuations at origination and calling for "surveyors and statistical data support, in line with our product development". It also cites a 2019 Dutch central bank paper that found surveyors overvalued homes by 5.3% on average because they knew the purchase price.

The earlier Phase 1 study, Geowox COMP, received €50,000 from December 2018 to May 2019 and pitched a different product: a purely automated web application using open data and satellite image recognition, "1000x times quicker", "10x cheaper" and "2x more accurate" than manual valuations. By the Phase 2 grant the surveyor had moved back into the centre of the product.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The fact sheet promised an optimised platform for new mortgage valuations and periodic revaluations, accredited surveyors brought onto it, and a valuation model with a median absolute percentage error, the usual accuracy measure for such models, of under 10%, "with the goal to reduce this to <5% by 2021". The final report, covering April 2021 to March 2022, says the platform was "on schedule to be ready for commercialisation in our first target market of Ireland in 2022 as planned".

Much of the work is documented. Geowox built a lender and surveyor platform, an online sign-off module, automated reports and a consumer site, valuemyhome.ai, which today forwards to the company's main website. It completed paid valuations of more than 5,000 properties for three private equity funds and more than 5,000 for two banks, grew from 5 to 12 full-time staff, and by the end of the project had "signed multi-year contracts with 2, and secured pilots with another 2 mortgage lenders", none of them named. It also dropped a goal: instead of working with the "big 6" surveying firms, it decided to hire surveyors itself and use small panel firms for site visits.

1. Optimised valuation platformDeliveredPlatform version 2 and sign-off module built, per CORDIS; sold today on geowox.com.
2. Commercial launch in Ireland, 2022DeliveredTwo lenders on multi-year contracts by month 24; national coverage claimed today.
3. Accuracy below 5% MdAPE by 2021Not reportedThe final report gives no accuracy figure.
4. Surveyors onboardedChangedBig surveying firms dropped in favour of in-house and small panel surveyors.
5. UK and Dutch marketsNot achieved"Data localisation commenced" for the UK and the Netherlands; the website today covers Ireland's 26 counties only.

The project ran to its planned end date and its report reads as an honest account rather than a sales brochure, including the dropped surveyor goal and events lost to Covid-19. The gap is geography. The report names Ireland as the "first target market" and the UK and the Netherlands as markets where data work had begun, and the Phase 1 plan foresaw the UK and Ireland, then Northern and Southern Europe and North America. Four and a half years after the project closed, nothing on the company's site, in the register or in the press shows Geowox selling outside Ireland.

The Money

The public funding record is short. The Irish Times reported a €500,000 round in June 2019 from Enterprise Ireland, the former WK Nowlan managing director Killian O'Higgins and the Italian angel Gianni Matera, with a Series A planned for late 2020. Its December 2019 report on the EU award described the same summer round as €600,000. In March 2021 Geowox joined the ABN AMRO + Techstars Future of Finance accelerator in Amsterdam, according to Silicon Canals and Startups Magazine, which described its product as a "1-click digital valuation for mortgage borrowers to unlock green mortgage rates".

Staff numbers disagree across sources and none is recent. The Irish Times counted 15 people in January 2021; the CORDIS report gives 12 full-time staff at the end of the project in March 2022. Neither the register summary nor the company publishes a current headcount.

Why Europe Should Care

Property valuations sit under every mortgage book, and the EBA guidelines were drawn up as part of the EU's action plan on non-performing loans: inflated valuations mean weaker collateral on bank balance sheets. A tool that puts a statistical check under every surveyor's figure serves that goal directly, and Geowox's quarterly data on the price premium for energy-efficient homes feeds the debate on green mortgages and retrofits. Its EIC Fund profile files it under AI, data and ICT.

The European angle is weaker in practice. The application sized the residential valuation market at €1.5 billion a year across the EU and the US; Geowox today addresses one national market of it.

The Verdict

Geowox has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.