EIC Accelerator Winner Kido Dynamics and the Mobility Data Race

Every phone connected to a mobile network leaves a trail of records showing which antenna it used and when. Kido Dynamics, a Lausanne spin-off of the EPFL founded in 2018, sells what can be read from those trails once they are anonymised and aggregated: how many people travel between two districts, how many tourists visit a town and from where, how many pass a billboard. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 3 April 2019, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the European Commission selected its project DEMOGRAPHICA, and the EU paid €1,427,384 of a €2,039,120 budget to turn its algorithms into a commercial platform between September 2019 and August 2021.

The platform exists. Brazil's Claro launched a product called Claro Geodata in January 2023 that was "developed in partnership with a Swiss startup called Kido Dynamics", according to Mobile Time, and in August 2026 Rio de Janeiro's tourism figures for the first half of 2026 were based on Claro data "processed by Kido Dynamics", according to Prensa Mercosur. What cannot be seen is the business behind it. The last funding round was announced in November 2021, and in June 2025 the company cancelled its entire share capital and issued new shares, most of them against debt, according to the Swiss commercial register.

Where Kido Dynamics Stands Now

Kido Dynamics is active. Kido Dynamics SA is registered as existing in Lausanne, with Alberto Hernando de Castro as a board member with sole signature since July 2022, when co-founder Ignacio Barrios Baños left the board, according to the Vaud commercial register and North Data. The company's website names Hernando as chief executive. Its Spanish affiliate, Kido Dynamics España SL, is listed as active in Madrid with 1 to 9 employees and annual turnover below €2 million by Infoempresa, which shows its last entry in the Spanish companies gazette on 18 November 2022.

The most recent dated evidence of work comes from customers and partners rather than from the company. In July 2025 LatinAd, a Latin American digital out-of-home advertising platform, announced an integration with Kido, describing it as using mobility data from agreements with operators "such as Claro, Telcel, Vtr.com, Orange, Vodafone". In August 2026 Rio de Janeiro's tourism observatory published visitor counts for the city's attractions for the first half of 2026, from Claro data processed by Kido Dynamics, with 193,247 visits counted in the Vidigal favela. The company's LinkedIn page lists 17 employees and posts on visitor numbers during a solar eclipse in Spain and on tourism in Querétaro, Mexico. Its own news page has published nothing since October 2022.

The Technology: Physics Applied to Phone Records

Traditional mobility statistics come from household travel surveys, roadside counts and hotel registers: expensive, slow and based on small samples. Mobile network records cover every connected phone continuously, but they are coarse, because a phone is located only by the antenna it used, and patchy, because a phone generates a record only when it is active. Operators sell aggregated versions of this data themselves: Spain's statistics office bought origin and destination matrices from the three largest operators' analytics arms for a 2019 experimental study, according to Genbeta and Maldita.

Kido's claim is in how it fills the gaps. Its European patent application, filed in October 2018, describes projecting call detail records onto a grid of locations and times and representing each user's activity "as a superposition of eigenstates of a pseudo-Hamiltonian", a method borrowed from quantum physics, to reconstruct missing stretches of a trajectory and then map antenna areas onto the street network. A 2020 international application by Hernando and David Mateo extends this to separating human phones from machine-to-machine devices and classifying trips by type. The DEMOGRAPHICA report on CORDIS says competitors "use simple origin-destination matrixes which gives a much lower level of detail", a claim that no independent benchmark found for this article tests. The one external accuracy figure dates from 2019, when Barrios told Hosteltur that Kido's tourist counts differed by less than 5% from Spain's official Frontur statistics.

What DEMOGRAPHICA Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of winners of the 3 April 2019 cut-off names Kido Dynamics SA of Lausanne as the only beneficiary of DEMOGRAPHICA. The grant agreement was signed on 23 July 2019, and the project ran for 24 months from 1 September 2019 under the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument. CORDIS also lists Kido Dynamics España SL as a linked third party that received €402,500 of the EU contribution, while the Swiss company received €1,024,884.

The name was not new. In 2017 the EU paid €50,000 for a Phase 1 feasibility study also called Demographica to SThAR SA, another EPFL spin-off at the same Innovation Park building, which Hernando chaired from 2016. SThAR was declared bankrupt by the Lausanne district court on 26 August 2021 and struck off on 12 November 2021, according to the Swiss commercial register. Whether rights to its work passed to Kido Dynamics is not public.

The final periodic report, covering September 2020 to August 2021, set four goals for the second year: validate the approach in at least one market, refine the software installed at operators, validate the full platform at TRL8+ in transport, tourism and outdoor advertising, and prepare international market uptake. It reports a cloud platform on Amazon Web Services packaged as a Docker image for installation inside operators' networks, a machine-learning trajectory reconstruction algorithm, a client web interface and API, partnerships with Orange in Spain, Sunrise in Switzerland, Altice in Portugal, Ooredoo in Qatar and Kuwait, DIGI in Malaysia and América Móvil through Claro in Brazil and Chile, and three new patent filings.

1. Trajectory and forecasting algorithmDeliveredReported on CORDIS; described in WO2022117482.
2. Commercial platform for transport, tourism and outdoor advertisingDeliveredClaro Geodata launched January 2023, with tourism, toll road, airport, outdoor media and retail clients, per Mobile Time.
3. Deployment at mobile operatorsDeliveredAltice Portugal launch and Claro work in Brazil and Chile reported by Startupticker in 2021.
4. Patent protectionPartlyThe 2020 international application ceased without entering the European phase, per Google Patents.
5. "Fast and ambitious" international uptakeUnverifiedNo revenue, customer count or accounts are public.

On its own terms the project delivered: the software exists, it runs on at least one large operator's data, and paying public customers have used it. Spanish procurement records list five contracts won by the Spanish affiliate worth €88,380 in total, including €14,450 from the state tourism agency Segittur in April 2020, according to Gobierto. The CORDIS report also cites work for a Spanish ministry on mobility in seven cities during the pandemic and a study with the IFISC institute of the Spanish research council CSIC on mobility and the spread of COVID-19.

What Kido Dynamics Has Achieved Since the Award

Private money followed the grant until 2021. Kido raised about CHF 500,000 from Swiss business angels of the SICTIC group in 2018, when its paying customers included the toll road operator Cintra, Segittur and the utility Enel, according to Startupticker. It borrowed CHF 400,000 from the Foundation for Technological Innovation (FIT) in March 2019, raised a CHF 850,000 pre-Series A led by Spicehaus Swiss Venture Fund in October 2020, and announced €1.9 million in November 2021 from Spicehaus, B4Motion Labs and Boundary Holding, according to Startupticker and El Referente. At that time the company said it operated in 12 countries and analysed about 2 billion trips a day. CB Insights puts total funding at $3.54 million over seven rounds.

Public institutions became its research partners. From 2021 to February 2023 Kido ran queries and algorithms for Eurostat on real operator data, which Eurostat called a "successful collaboration" on its CROS portal; North Data lists an EU contract of €125,050 from August 2020 titled "Preparation of a Longitudinal Reference Dataset of Mobile Network Operator Data". In August 2024 the CSIC's Institute of History published a study with Kido showing that the Roman gold mines of Las Médulas, a UNESCO World Heritage site, received 221,370 visitors in 2019, with up to 6,530 on a single day. CORDIS lists Kido Dynamics España SL as a partner in PHYMOL, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral network, with no EU funding and its participation marked as ended.

The Money

Swiss companies of Kido's kind do not publish their accounts, so revenue, losses and headcount cannot be checked in the register. What the register does show is the share capital. It rose from CHF 100,000 at incorporation to CHF 164,068 in June 2023 as each round created new preferred shares. On 10 June 2025 the shareholders reduced the capital by CHF 164,068, the entire amount, by destroying shares, and at the same time increased it in cash and by offsetting CHF 663,455.60 of claims, for which 162,428 new shares were issued. The new capital is CHF 168,426, including 5,966 preferred "Prime" shares, according to the notice of 18 June 2025 in the Swiss commercial register and North Data.

Why Europe Should Care

Mobile network data is one of the most promising new sources for official statistics, and the EU is building the methods to use it. In August 2026 Eurostat opened a €385,000 tender to extend and field-test its open-source "Multi-MNO" reference pipeline for processing operator data on longitudinal data. A European company that has already processed operator data for Eurostat, Spanish public bodies and Latin American operators, while keeping individual records out of reach, fits both the EU's interest in better tourism and transport statistics and its privacy rules.

The field is also hard on start-ups. Teralytics, a Zurich company founded in 2012 that sold mobility insights from telecom data, was declared bankrupt by the Zurich district court on 7 January 2026, according to the Swiss commercial register. Operators such as Orange and Telefónica run their own analytics units, and Kido's largest visible customer channel, Claro Geodata, is sold under the operator's brand. The race for mobility data is being run largely by the companies that own the networks.

The Verdict

Kido Dynamics was checked against the official EIC Fund portfolio list and does not appear in it; its 2019 award was a grant only. The company has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.