What Became of OrbitalAds' EIC Accelerator Keyword Automation AI

OrbitalAds, the trading name of Orbital Advertising SL of Madrid, set out to automate the one task in paid search advertising that its founders said was still done by hand: choosing which keywords a Google Ads campaign should bid on. The European Commission selected its project OA in the October 2019 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, with blended finance, as the only beneficiary listed for the project. The grant agreement, signed on 26 March 2020, gave the company an EU contribution of €1,500,000 towards a total cost of €2,478,358.13, for a project that ran from 1 April 2020 to 30 June 2023, according to CORDIS.

The software was built and sold. The company's final report on CORDIS says 26 paying clients in 9 countries used it during the project. But on 26 July 2024 Madrid Commercial Court No. 2 concluded the company's insolvency case for lack of assets, ordered its legal personality extinguished and closed its registry sheet, according to the official register gazette BORME of 9 October 2024 and the register summary on DatosCif. The domain listed for the company in the EC winner list, orbitalads.io, now redirects to an unrelated gambling website.

How the Company Ended

The register entry is short. Insolvency case 515/2023 at Madrid Commercial Court No. 2 was concluded by a final order of 26 July 2024 "por insuficiencia de masa activa", meaning the estate did not hold enough assets even to pay for the proceedings. The court lifted the effects of the insolvency, subject to a possible reopening, extinguished the company's legal personality and provisionally closed its sheet at the Madrid commercial register, the Spanish equivalent of being struck off. The order was entered in the register on 2 October 2024 and published in the BORME on 9 October 2024; DatosCif reproduces the same act and labels the company "cierre hoja registral". The case number shows the insolvency was filed in 2023, but the date on which it was opened could not be found in the published register notices. Because the case closed without assets, there was no liquidation sale of the business, and no buyer of the software has been reported.

Not every database has caught up. Infoempresa still showed the company as "Activa" in October 2026, while eInforma lists its situation as "Situación Concursal". The official BORME notice is the deciding source.

The commercial product was still on sale shortly before the end. An archived copy of orbitalads.com from 30 December 2023 shows a live pricing page, from €39 a month for up to three Google Ads accounts to custom enterprise plans, with case studies from travel, telecoms and insurance clients.

The Technology: Keywords Chosen by Language Models

In search engine marketing, advertisers pay to appear next to the results for chosen keywords. OrbitalAds argued that picking and pruning those keywords was "the only process that after almost 20 years is still performed manually in SEM strategies", and that its "Language Agnostic Smart Semantic Targeting", built on natural language processing and machine learning, could read search terms in hundreds of languages and choose long-tail keyword combinations automatically, according to the project objective on CORDIS. The company called itself "the first and only" developer of such a solution; that claim is the company's own and could not be checked independently. Its own final report names the existing alternatives: "tedious manual work, or programming complex scripts".

In practice the product was a software-as-a-service tool connected to Google Ads through its API. The final project report lists the modules: Keyword Locator, Keyword Booster, Search Term Booster, Keyword Traffic Driver, a cleaner for low-volume keywords and duplicated traffic, a Quality Score dashboard, and later a keyword relocator, a Microsoft Ads (Bing) search term analyser, white labelling for agencies and self-service onboarding. The company claimed performance gains of "up to 40%" in the report; in its January 2022 crowdfunding pitch, reported by Capital-Riesgo.es, it cited time savings of up to 25% and results up to 15% better. Neither figure was independently audited.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What Was Delivered

When the award was announced in December 2019, the company said the money would improve its software, create a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering and adapt it to "other search engines, such as Amazon, Facebook or Yahoo", according to EU-Startups, which described it as "a two-year project". Baker Tilly's technology blog reported the same plans and added that the company expected to grow from 30 employees to nearly 150 by the end of 2024.

The final report, covering April 2021 to June 2023, gives a mixed account. The Google Ads product was finished, tested with clients and put into production, with a commercial product "by Q1 2021". The PaaS was not built: "market research concluded that there was no market demand for a PaaS service at this stage", so the work shifted to designing a future architecture, a REST API test and features fed back into the existing product. Amazon Ads, Facebook and Yahoo integrations are not reported; Microsoft Ads got a search term analyser. The report also mentions a patent application for "Smart Locator"; no published patent under the company's name could be found. The project ran 39 months, not the two years announced.

1. Commercial SaaS for Google AdsDeliveredProduct in production by Q1 2021 per the CORDIS report; pricing live in the December 2023 archive.
2. Paying customersPartly26 paying clients in 9 countries, by the company's own report; the 2018 Phase 1 plan had aimed for 270 clients by 2022.
3. PaaS platformNot deliveredDropped for lack of demand; only an architecture design and API test.
4. Amazon, Facebook and YahooNot deliveredOnly a Microsoft Ads add-on reported.
5. Series A roundNot deliveredOnly a €500,000 crowdfunding round is public.
6. Growth to about 150 staff by 2024Missed18 employees in 2022; insolvency case filed in 2023.
7. Smart Locator patentUnverifiedFiling mentioned in the report; no publication found.

The Equity That Changed Shape

The proposal on CORDIS asked for "€3M (50% Grant + 50% equity)". In December 2019 both EU-Startups and Baker Tilly reported that OrbitalAds had received €3 million and that the Commission would become a shareholder through the EIC Fund. The record does not bear that out. The signed grant was €1.5 million, and the company's own report includes a work package task, running from the sixth month to the end of the project, to search "for potential investors due to changes in equity terms and conditions".

The only later trace of EIC money beyond the grant is in January 2022, when OrbitalAds opened a €500,000 crowdfunding round on Startupxplore and said the EIC-managed fund would add €500,000 "en notas convertibles", convertible notes matching the equity raised, according to Capital-Riesgo.es, which reported €340,000 pledged in the first week. Whether the notes were issued could not be verified. Orbital Advertising does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages for this article. VCBacked records a seed round of $395,000 in February 2022.

Before the EIC award, the company had raised €1.5 million since its founding from investors including Wayra, Adara Ventures, Caixa Capital Risc, Iñaki Berenguer, ESADE business angels and Ethos AI, according to El Referente in October 2018. It had also won an SME Instrument Phase 1 grant of €50,000 for a feasibility study called PTC in 2018, whose objective on CORDIS projected 270 clients and cumulative revenue of €17.8 million by the third year.

The register shows the money coming in during the project. Share capital rose from €24,094.17 to €41,392.38 in two increases published on 6 August 2021, and to €50,199.51 in two more published on 7 June 2022, according to the BORME and DatosCif. On 1 March 2022 the BORME recorded that William Pedro Murphy Garcia had left as joint director, that Gabriel Madruga Ortega had been appointed and that the company had moved to Calle Núñez de Balboa 120, according to the notice of that day.

The filed accounts tell the rest. The last accounts deposited at the register are for 2022, according to eInforma, which reports 18 employees that year, sales up 178.07% from 2021, a negative result, and a return on assets of minus 62.84% in 2022 after minus 83.21% in 2021. Infoempresa places the company at 10 to 49 employees and under €2 million in annual sales. The absolute revenue and loss figures are behind paywalls and were not checked for this article.

Why It Mattered to Europe

On 6 September 2023 the Commission designated Alphabet a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, naming both Google Search and Alphabet's online advertising service among its core platform services, according to the DMA gatekeeper register. A European tool that helps advertisers spend less for the same results on those platforms fits the EU's interest in a contestable digital market, and the EIC backed it on that basis. But OrbitalAds' product lived entirely on top of Google's and Microsoft's advertising APIs, and the planned move to a broader platform of its own, the PaaS, was the part that was dropped.

The Verdict

Orbital Advertising's former directors and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.