Inside IDVIA's EIC Accelerator Project on Bridge Damage Prediction

IDVIA is a Valencia engineering firm that sells one thing: a diagnosis of how healthy a bridge is, and how fast its damage will get worse. In the European Commission's April 2019 round of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot that later became the EIC Accelerator, it was one of the Spanish companies selected, with a project called PAROST, according to the Commission's list of selected companies. IDVIA is the only company named for that project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,059,217 towards a total cost of €1,513,167.50, a grant signed on 27 August 2019, and a project that ran from 1 September 2019 to 30 November 2021.

The pitch was bold. PAROST would identify, locate and quantify visible and hidden damage in concrete road bridges and tunnels, and then predict how that damage would evolve, something the company said existing structural health monitoring (SHM) systems cannot do. By year 3, IDVIA expected PAROST to be installed on 384 structures of the European road network, bringing it €20.2 million in revenue, €11.8 million in net profit and 6 new skilled jobs, according to the project objective on CORDIS. None of those commercial numbers has been reported since.

Where IDVIA Stands Now

IDVIA is active. The Spanish commercial register lists the company as active, with annual accounts filed up to the 2024 financial year, according to Empresia, which reproduces its entries in the official gazette BORME; Infoempresa also shows it as active. No insolvency, dissolution or name change has been published. The last register entry, in November 2022, appointed Reynaldo Antonio Cabezas Rojas as an attorney-in-fact of the company.

Its recent public activity is technical rather than commercial. In January 2026 IDVIA staff co-authored two papers at the LATAM-SHM 2026 workshop at the University of Chile in Santiago: one on an SHM and digital twin method for predictive maintenance of existing bridges, and one on a monitoring campaign on the Spyckstraße bridge in Germany, a three-span structure completed in 1976. Both list co-authors from Coreal Desarrollos Tecnológicos, a Chilean company; Cabezas Rojas is one of them. In March 2026 IDVIA announced it would be a bronze sponsor of the IC2 construction congress in Santander in June 2026.

How large the company is cannot be settled from public sources. Infoempresa puts it at 1 to 9 employees with sales under €2 million. Empresia places annual sales between €500,000 and €1 million. The company profile on Bouncewatch gives both 14 employees and "32 professionals", and describes offices in Valencia and Santiago de Chile. IDVIA's website names Chile's Ministry of Public Works (MOP), Globalvia, Globalvia-Acega, ISA Intervial, Besalco and Belfi as clients, but gives no contract details, and none of those relationships could be confirmed in a second source.

The Technology: A Digital Twin That Forecasts Decay

Most bridge monitoring systems put sensors on a structure and show what they measure. IDVIA says its method starts from the structure instead: for each bridge it builds a global numerical model of deck, beams, piers, abutments, foundations, joints and bearings, combines it with local models of deterioration, and calibrates both with data from sensors installed on the bridge, according to its service description. The result is what the company calls a digital twin, used to simulate load scenarios and estimate remaining service life. It sells this as continuous monitoring with a 24/7 online platform and weekly reports, or as a one-off diagnosis for bridges that do not justify permanent sensors.

The difference from established SHM suppliers, as IDVIA frames it, is the forecast: not just whether a bridge is damaged now, but how that damage will evolve and when maintenance should happen. The final CORDIS report repeats the claim that this makes PAROST "a real disruptive breakthrough" compared with all SHM systems on the market. No independent comparison or field validation published by a bridge owner could be found to test that claim. CORDIS also lists a 2017 Spanish patent application by IDVIA, number 201730964, for a device and procedure to monitor scour, the erosion of riverbed material around bridge foundations; whether it was granted could not be verified.

What PAROST Promised, and What the Record Shows

The final report, covering September 2020 to November 2021, says every work package was completed: hardware and communication requirements were defined, the hardware architecture and data transmission were upgraded, a database, logic layer and user interface for the digital platform were built and tested, and PAROST was adapted, installed and validated on two demonstrator structures. It does not name the two structures or their owners. Five public deliverables sit on the CORDIS results page, including a user manual (month 14) and a report on tests carried out to certify PAROST (month 15). The report says that after laboratory tests, PAROST "will be able to be certified" under European and international standards; no certificate has been announced.

The project ran to its planned 27 months. What it did not produce, in public at least, is the market entry its business case was built on. The 384 installations by year 3 would have meant more than one new bridge or tunnel a week. IDVIA has announced no installation programme, no named European road operator as a customer, and no revenue figure. In March 2021 it pitched to Brisa, Portugal's largest motorway operator, at an EIC Procurers Day, and discussed "the possibility of implementing a pilot project", according to the company's own account, which says it was one of 13 companies chosen from more than a hundred applicants. No pilot or agreement with Brisa has been reported since.

1. Upgraded hardware and data transmissionDeliveredReported complete in the final report.
2. Digital platformDeliveredBuilt and tested; user manual on CORDIS.
3. Two demonstratorsPartly verifiedReported, but the structures are not named.
4. CertificationUnverifiedTest report filed; no certificate announced.
5. 384 structures by year 3Not achievedNo installations announced.
6. €20.2M revenue, 6 new jobsNot achievedSales bracket €0.5M to €1M per Empresia.

What Came After the Grant

IDVIA has raised no outside equity in public view. Its share capital has stood at €33,115 since a capital increase from €9,410 in May 2015, and no later capital increase appears in the register entries reproduced by Empresia. It is not listed in any EIC Fund record found for this article; the 2019 SME Instrument Phase 2 was a grant-only scheme. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company.

The money that followed was Spanish. IDVIA says it takes part in CAREC, a research project funded by Spain's State Research Agency under reference CPP2021-008857 and by NextGenerationEU through Spain's recovery plan. CAREC developed a low-cost surface sensor unit that continuously records electrical resistivity, humidity and temperature on a bridge, and uses neural networks to estimate how deep carbonation, the chemical process that strips concrete of its protection against reinforcement corrosion, has advanced, according to the company's project page. The amount of IDVIA's share and the names of the other consortium members are not given there, and no second source for the reference could be found.

The second grant is further from bridges. IDVIA's site lists project PLEC2022-009405, CE-COMMERCE, which models citrus fruit freshness from smartphone photos and sets dynamic prices for growers, according to the company's page. The Universitat Politècnica de València lists CE-COMMERCE as a collaborative project funded by the State Research Agency from 2023, without naming IDVIA. It is not the company's first step outside civil engineering: in 2015 IDVIA added restaurants to its registered business purpose, and a subsidiary, IDVIA EAT SL, was set up in 2014 and voluntarily dissolved in October 2017, according to Empresia.

Why Europe Should Care

The problem IDVIA targets is real and growing. Most of Europe's road bridges and tunnels were built between the 1950s and 1970s, the PAROST report says, and it states that "around 30% of European annual investment in road maintenance (€14.860 Million/year)" goes to bridges and tunnels, which make up 3% of the road network's length. The collapse of the Morandi bridge in Genoa in August 2018, cited throughout IDVIA's EU application, made bridge safety a political issue across the continent. Spain itself is now paying for continuous monitoring: in June 2024 the Ministry of Transport tendered €8.5 million of NextGenerationEU-funded work to instrument selected bridges and slopes on the state road network, and in February 2025 it awarded contracts worth €6.45 million, according to Vozpópuli. IDVIA is not named among the winners in that report.

That is the gap in IDVIA's story. Predictive maintenance of ageing infrastructure fits the EU's push for safer, longer-lived transport networks, and the market the company described in 2019 now exists, funded partly by EU recovery money. A home-grown European supplier of bridge forecasting software would be exactly what the grant was meant to create. The public record does not yet show IDVIA capturing that demand.

The Verdict

Credit is due: PAROST was finished on time, its deliverables are public, and IDVIA is still developing its method seven years after the award, now with carbonation sensing added. But an SME Instrument Phase 2 grant was meant to fund market entry, and IDVIA's own targets were explicit. With no named customer beyond its website's client logos, no installation count and no growth visible in its share capital, the project's delivery is partial at best. IDVIA has not been asked for comment for this article, which relies on public records and published statements linked throughout.