Predictiva Turned an EIC Accelerator Grant Into Call-Audit AI

Call centres record almost every conversation and listen to almost none of them. Quality teams pick a few calls at random and score them by hand; "less than 0.5% of these calls are manually audited," Predictiva's chief executive Pablo Enciso told the EU's CORDIS results service. Predictiva, a start-up from Marbella on Spain's Costa del Sol, set out to transcribe and score all of them with machine learning.

The European Commission picked its project, CLARA, "the first superbot to audit calls", in the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator. The list names Predictiva as the only beneficiary of the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,079,750 towards a total cost of €1,542,500, for a project that ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2021, according to the project fact sheet. The software was built and sold. The company that built it was not: in July 2024 a Barcelona telecoms firm, Numintec, bought the Upbe business as a going concern.

Where Predictiva Stands Now

The product survives under another name. On 1 July 2024 Numintec announced that it had bought "la unidad productiva de Upbe", the operating business of the Málaga speech analysis company, after "recibir la aprobación de todas las autoridades regulatorias pertinentes", according to the Spanish trade title Relación Cliente. In an interview with the same title on 24 July 2024, Numintec chief executive Albino Campo said the deal brought "capacidades avanzadas de análisis de voz" into its platform. The price, and how many Predictiva staff moved, were not disclosed.

The old Upbe website now carries a banner reading "Upbe es ahora Numintec Speech Analytics" and links to the Numintec product page, which sells transcription, automatic call tagging and quality audits of "el 100% de las interacciones". Numintec credited "la adquisición de la tecnológica Upbe" for part of its 2024 growth, when its revenue rose 18% to €17.7 million, according to Bolsamanía.

Numintec itself has changed hands twice. Sweden's Telavox bought it in March 2021, according to a Telavox release, and in July 2026 Telavox passed it to Enreach, a European communications group backed by Waterland Private Equity, in exchange for Enreach's Finnish business, according to Telavox's lawyers Gómez-Acebo & Pombo. The software funded by the EU in Marbella now belongs to a private equity-backed European group.

What Happened to the Company That Won the Grant

The legal entity, Sistemas de Inteligencia de Negocio SL, is still listed as active. Empresia and North Data show the same last entry in the official gazette BORME: on 27 December 2023, six months before the sale was announced, the board of directors was dissolved and replaced by two joint administrators, Sierra Sol Cadiz SL and the venture investor Swanlaab Venture Factory. No insolvency filing appears in the BORME history that Empresia lists for the company. The two registers disagree on the filed accounts: Infoempresa gives 2019 as the last ordinary accounts deposited, Empresia lists accounts for 2020 and 2021. Neither shows anything later.

Enciso's role had already changed. The register shows that he stepped down as chair and managing director in November 2020, when Sierra Sol Cadiz SL was appointed to both posts; who represents that company is not public. Press reports in 2022 still described Enciso as chief executive. What he does now could not be verified.

The Technology: Scoring Every Call, Not One in a Hundred

CLARA, later Upbe, works in layers, the company explained in its CORDIS results article. A proprietary speech-to-text engine, trained on call-centre audio with its overlapping voices, background noise and compressed lines, turns each recording into text. A natural language processing layer then looks for "contexts" in the conversation: whether an agent read a compliance disclaimer, why a customer called, whether they threatened to leave. Audio signal analysis adds a sentiment score for customer and agent. Results go to dashboards by campaign, agent and call.

The established alternative is human quality auditors who listen to a random sample. Predictiva's pitch, in the final project report, was that business users could set up their own models without IT support or large budgets, under the slogan "Artificial intelligence applied to phone calls driven by your operations team". The report's claim that Predictiva had become "the most accurate speech to text engine for Call Center domain in Spanish language" comes with no published benchmark and could not be verified.

What CLARA Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The grant agreement was signed on 20 September 2019. The plan had six work packages: technical maturation, integration, validation, pre-commercialisation, dissemination and management. The report for the second period, to 30 September 2021, says the first two were carried out "according to the established project plan", that validation and pre-commercialisation were "successfully implemented" with integrations, proofs of concept and "several agreements with relevant stakeholders", and that the product was "rebranded to UPBE for commercialisation purposes". It lists a quality and compliance template, the "UPBE Score", that "can identify automatically over 50 categories in phone calls", plus dashboards and combined text and audio sentiment analysis. No delay is recorded; the project closed on its scheduled end date.

1. Call-centre speech-to-text engineDeliveredDescribed in the final report; the accuracy claim is unbenchmarked.
2. Automatic quality scoring of every callDeliveredUPBE Score with over 50 categories; still sold by Numintec.
3. Validation and pre-commercialisationDeliveredNamed clients by 2022, per Publimetro.
4. Commercial roll-out at scalePartlyTurnover stayed under €500,000; business sold in 2024.

Measured against what CORDIS records as the project's scope, CLARA delivered: a working product, renamed and sold to paying customers. The weaker part is the growth that an EIC grant is meant to set up, which the scorecard's last line covers.

What Predictiva Achieved After the Award

The money arrived around the grant. In July 2019 Predictiva announced €2.6 million led by Swanlaab Venture Factory, a Spanish-Israeli venture firm, with Sabadell Venture Capital and the Horizon 2020 grant, according to capital-riesgo.es; it then had 11 technical staff and planned to triple that number "en los próximos meses", and to expand to the United States and Latin America. In October 2020 the same outlet reported that Spain's public innovation agency CDTI had committed €900,000 through the Swanlaab Giza Innvierte I fund and put the total raised at €4 million: €2.4 million from Swanlaab, Sabadell and CDTI, €1.1 million from the EU and €500,000 from the state lender Enisa, according to capital-riesgo.es. The two reports do not reconcile the €2.6 million and €2.4 million figures. The Enisa loan and a Torres Quevedo grant of more than €116,000 to hire a doctoral researcher are also reported by the consultancy CTA, which advised on them.

Customers followed. In July 2022 the Mexican daily Publimetro reported that Upbe served Brazil's Grupo Bradesco, the outsourcer Webhelp and the Málaga call-centre operator ICCS, with operations in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Peru. Bradesco and Webhelp have not confirmed this themselves in any source found. Upbe's own site advertised analysis in "más de 90 idiomas", but the newest blog posts shown on its homepage date from 2020.

The filed numbers are thin. Infoempresa's summary of the 2019 accounts, the first year of the grant, shows revenue of €172,000, down 62.5% on the year before, a loss of €245,000, equity of €2.61 million after the funding round, and 13 employees. Empresia puts annual turnover below €500,000 without naming the year. No later revenue figure is public. Registered share capital, a nominal figure that records new share issues, rose in small steps until February 2023 and then stopped.

No EIC Equity

The 2019 SME Instrument Phase 2 award was a grant only, and Predictiva does not appear in the EIC Fund portfolio. CORDIS lists no other EU research project for the company.

Why Europe Should Care

The technology stayed in European hands: Numintec is a Barcelona company, owned by Sweden's Telavox at the time of the deal and now by Enreach.

The bigger policy issue is new. Since 2 February 2025, Article 5(1)(f) of the EU AI Act has banned AI systems that infer the emotions of workers, and call-centre operators are among the workers such tools were marketed for, while systems that analyse call-centre customers fall outside the ban, according to a Wolters Kluwer analysis. CLARA's final report promised to "evaluate customer – agent sentiment". How Numintec has adapted the agent side of that feature is not public.

The Verdict

Predictiva, Numintec and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.