How Runecast's Czech Arm Spent Its EIC Accelerator Grant on AI Ops

Runecast Czech Republic s.r.o. was the Brno development and support company of Runecast, a software group founded in 2014 by five co-founders from five countries who had met while working at IBM in Brno, according to Brno Tech Region and SiliconANGLE. Its product, Runecast Analyzer, checks the configuration of a company's servers and cloud accounts against vendor knowledge bases, best-practice guides and security advisories, and flags known problems before they cause an outage. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 3 April 2019, the Runecast group won a grant-only award for RAIKA, a project to add artificial intelligence that reads that documentation automatically. The European Commission's list of winners gives the project three rows: Runecast Czech Republic in Brno, Runecast Solutions Netherlands in Hilversum and Runecast Solutions ltd. in London.

The Czech company took the largest share by far. CORDIS puts the EU contribution at €1,899,254 towards a total cost of €2,713,220, of which €1,645,679 went to Runecast Czech Republic, €127,575 to Runecast Solutions Limited in the UK and €126,000 to the Dutch coordinator. That is 87% of the grant for the Brno unit. In March 2024 the US software company Dynatrace bought the whole group, and in August 2024 the Brno company was renamed Dynatrace Czech Republic s.r.o., according to the Czech business register ARES and the commercial register.

Where the Brno Company Stands Now

On 1 March 2024 Dynatrace acquired 100% of Runecast Solutions Limited, the UK parent of the Brno company, for $26.1 million in cash at closing plus $2.3 million in deferred payments, and agreed to issue $9.0 million of restricted stock to the previous owners subject to continued employment, according to Dynatrace's annual report for the year to March 2024. Dynatrace had announced the deal on 29 January 2024 in a press release that quoted Runecast's chief executive Stanimir Markov, and confirmed in its results of 15 May 2024 that it had closed the acquisition. The Brno company's 2024/25 annual report names Runecast Solutions Ltd as its direct owner and Dynatrace, Inc. in Boston as the ultimate controlling company from 1 March 2024, according to the court's collection of documents.

The sources disagree on the date and price. A Brno regional development agency article of August 2024 says the acquisition was completed in 2023, "allegedly for 37.5 million dollars". Dynatrace's own filings date it to March 2024; its cash, deferred and share-based components add up to $37.4 million, though the restricted stock is booked as pay for staff, not as purchase price.

The company is active. Dynatrace still sells Runecast Analyzer, now under its own brand, for VMware, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Windows and Linux, and runecast.com redirects there. Its careers page for Brno describes the former Runecast team as building tools for IT operations on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, VMware, Windows and Linux, at Přízova 9, the address the register has listed as the company seat since October 2025. In the year to March 2026 the company employed 30 people on average and reported sales of CZK 77.83 million, mostly support services charged to group companies, according to its latest filed annual report.

The Technology: Reading the Manuals So Engineers Do Not Have To

The project's premise, stated on CORDIS, was that "90% of all issues affecting ICT infrastructures are known and documented issues" that could have been avoided. The fixes sit in vendor knowledge bases, best-practice guides, security advisories and forums that engineers rarely have time to read. Monitoring tools usually report a fault once it has happened; Runecast's approach is to compare live configuration and log data against that published knowledge and warn before an outage or breach.

Before RAIKA, Runecast built those rules largely for VMware environments. The project set out to use AI to parse unstructured documentation into machine-readable checks, so the company could cover more platforms faster. The Commission's EIC project page quotes Stan Markov describing it as "aggregating relevant human-readable knowledge, analyzing it via our own AI, and providing automated and proactive remediation guidelines".

What the Grant Promised, and What the Record Shows

RAIKA ran from 1 October 2019 to 31 January 2022, according to CORDIS. The EIC project page gives an end date of 30 September 2021, so the project ran four months longer than first published. The final periodic report says the collectors, parsers and "knowledge dictionaries" were developed as planned for the three platforms in scope, AWS, Kubernetes and Dell VxRail, and that the new architecture let Runecast go further: to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Windows and Linux, and into vulnerability management, by parsing published CVE advisories with the same tools. It also lists a "Config Vault" for tracking configuration drift, automatically generated PowerShell and Ansible fix scripts, and compliance checks for GDPR, ISO 27001, Germany's BSI IT-Grundschutz and the UK's Cyber Essentials.

Most of those claims can be checked against the product Dynatrace sells today, which covers AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Windows and Linux and validates against "14+ regulatory frameworks", according to the product page. The report says the cloud coverage brought "many upsell orders" from existing customers, but gives no figures, and Runecast never published revenue. The report also does not say which partner did which work. The Brno company's accounts show it billed its services to the UK parent under a cost reimbursement contract, which makes it the group's development and support centre rather than a seller in its own right.

1. AI parsing of vendor documentation into checksDeliveredCollectors, parsers and knowledge dictionaries built, per the final report.
2. Coverage of AWS, Kubernetes and Dell VxRailDeliveredReported done; AWS in the product today, Kubernetes on Dynatrace's Brno page. Current VxRail support not confirmed.
3. Product on the marketDeliveredSold as Runecast Analyzer by Dynatrace.
4. On timeLateEnded January 2022, four months after the first published end date.
5. Commercial impactNot public"Many upsell orders", no figures.

During the project Runecast also gave hospitals free use of its software. It offered full licences for six months from March 2020, taken up by "75 hospitals, clinics, universities and public schools in 14 countries", according to both the periodic report and the EIC project page, which names NHS Lothian and Hospital du Valais among them.

The Money in Brno

The Czech company's filed accounts show the grant directly. The notes to the 2020, 2021 and 2022 accounts record a receivable from "the RAIKA project grant" (translated) of CZK 23.08 million at the end of 2020, CZK 6.71 million at the end of 2021 and CZK 1.89 million at the end of 2022, after the project had ended. At the end of 2019, three months into the project, a liability line for taxes and subsidies stood at CZK 41.21 million, up from CZK 43,000 a year earlier; the accounts do not break it down. Other operating income, which the profit and loss statements do not itemise, rose from CZK 1.42 million in 2019 to CZK 13.32 million in 2020 and CZK 19.29 million in 2021, and fell to CZK 2.24 million in 2022, according to the documents in the court's collection of documents.

The company was built to break even, not to make money. It reported a loss of CZK 1.60 million in 2019, small profits of CZK 72,000 and CZK 15,000 in 2020 and 2021, and losses of CZK 95,000 and CZK 399,000 in 2022 and 2023; its equity was negative, at minus CZK 2.01 million, at the end of 2023. After the takeover it turned a profit of CZK 7.98 million in the 15 months to March 2025 and CZK 2.64 million in the year to March 2026.

Headcount tells the clearer growth story. The Brno company averaged 4.67 full-time staff in 2019, 8.85 in 2020 and 9.54 in 2021, the two full project years, then 13.64 in 2022 and 19 in 2023. Under Dynatrace it averaged 32 in the 15 months to March 2025 and 30 in the year to March 2026, according to the notes to the accounts.

Before the EU grant, the group's only disclosed outside money was a €1.6 million seed round from Credo Ventures and the Slovak fund Limerock in 2017, reported by Tech.eu and CzechCrunch, which named Verizon, FujiSoft and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as customers. SiliconANGLE put Runecast's total funding at $1.72 million and listed "EIC Fund Management LLC" among its investors. That could not be confirmed: the 2019 award was a grant-only SME Instrument award, and no Runecast company could be found on the EIC Fund portfolio page. CORDIS lists no other EU project for any Runecast company.

Why Europe Should Care

The NIS2 Directive, which member states had until 17 October 2024 to transpose, requires entities in critical sectors to "take appropriate cybersecurity risk-management measures", and names vulnerability handling among them. RAIKA's goal, automated checks for hospitals, banks and airports, fits that agenda squarely.

The ownership story cuts the other way. The EU paid most of the grant to a Czech company, and the development team is still in Brno, but the group that owns it, and the product it built, now belong to Dynatrace, a US-listed company based in Boston. The grant did what it was meant to do; it did not, and was not designed to, keep the business in European hands.

The Verdict

Dynatrace, the former Runecast founders and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.