Did the EIC Accelerator Pay Off for Runecast's Dutch IT Ops AI?

Runecast Solutions Netherlands B.V. was the smallest of three Runecast companies that shared one EU grant, and the one that signed for it. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 3 April 2019, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, the software group won a grant-only award for RAIKA, a project to add artificial intelligence to its product Runecast Analyzer so that it could read vendor manuals, support articles and security advisories and check IT systems against them automatically. The European Commission's list of winners gives the project three rows: Runecast Solutions Netherlands in Hilversum, with the website www.runecast.nl, Runecast Czech Republic in Brno and Runecast Solutions ltd. in London. CORDIS names the Dutch company as coordinator.

The Dutch company did not exist for long before the application. Its deed of incorporation is dated 6 February 2019, eight weeks before the cut-off, with its statutory seat in Hilversum, according to the Chamber of Commerce (KvK) entries reproduced by Drimble and Oozo. Both now describe it as no longer active, and the company data service Liza.nl lists it as closed. The software it coordinated lives on: the Runecast group was bought by the US company Dynatrace in March 2024. That side of the story, and the Brno unit that took 87% of the money, is covered in our article on Runecast's Czech arm. This one follows the Dutch company.

What Became of the Dutch Company

The company is closed. Liza.nl, which draws on KvK data, gives its status as "Closed" and records an end date of 1 January 2025 in its page data. North Data marks the company as terminated, Drimble as "opgeheven" (dissolved) and Oozo as "niet langer actief" (no longer active). None of these three gives a date, and the KvK's own search could not be queried for this article, so the exact date of dissolution rests on one source. One register mirror disagrees: OpenCorporates still shows the company as active at its old Rotterdam address, which appears to predate the move to Utrecht.

The last sign of life in the register is a balance sheet for 31 December 2023, published on 14 November 2024, according to North Data. The Dutch web address the company gave the Commission has long stopped being a website of its own. By December 2021 runecast.nl forwarded to runecast.com, according to the Internet Archive, and today it forwards to dynatrace.com. Runecast's contact page in April 2022, three months after RAIKA ended, listed two companies, Runecast Solutions Ltd. in London and Runecast Solutions Inc. in Wilmington, Delaware, and no Dutch office.

The group around it carried on without it. On 1 March 2024 Dynatrace acquired 100% of Runecast Solutions Limited for $26.1 million in cash at closing and $2.3 million in deferred payments, plus $9.0 million in restricted stock for the former owners tied to continued employment, according to Dynatrace's annual report for the year to March 2024; the deal had been announced on 29 January 2024 in a press release quoting Runecast's chief executive Stanimir Markov, who was also the first director of the Dutch company. Whether the Dutch BV was a subsidiary of the UK company, and so passed to Dynatrace before it was closed, could not be verified: the UK company's accounts at Companies House report "shares in subsidiaries" without naming them.

The Technology: Checks Written From the Manuals

RAIKA rested on a claim set out on CORDIS: that "90% of all issues affecting ICT infrastructures are known and documented issues" that could have been avoided. The fixes exist in vendor knowledge bases, best-practice guides and security advisories, but engineers rarely have time to read them. Classic monitoring tools raise the alarm once something has broken. Runecast Analyzer instead compares the configuration of servers and cloud accounts against that published knowledge and flags problems before they cause an outage or a breach.

Before the project, those checks were written largely for VMware environments. RAIKA was meant to use AI to parse unstructured documentation into machine-readable rules, so the company could add new platforms faster. The Commission's EIC project page quotes Aylin Sali, then chief technology officer and co-founder and the Dutch company's second director, saying it lets companies "see the future" in terms of mission-critical issues. Sali now works for Dynatrace as a product manager for cloud and VMware security posture management, according to the Dynatrace author page.

The Coordinator's Share of the Work

RAIKA had a total cost of €2,713,220 and an EU contribution of €1,899,254, 70% of the cost, according to CORDIS. The Dutch coordinator budgeted €180,000 of that cost and received €126,000; Runecast Solutions Limited in the UK budgeted €182,250 and received €127,575; Runecast Czech Republic in Brno budgeted €2,350,970 and received €1,645,679. The coordinator's share of the grant was 6.6%. The budget split points to Brno as the place where the software was written, which matches the Brno company's own accounts, described in the article on the Czech arm.

What the Dutch company did for its €126,000 is not public. The final periodic report speaks for "Runecast" as one team and never says which partner did which task. The coordinator's formal job is clear, though. Under Horizon 2020 grant agreements the Commission pays the whole grant, including the pre-financing, to the coordinator, which administers it and passes the shares on to the other beneficiaries, as the Austrian funding agency FFG explains in its guides on grant payments and payments within the consortium.

The project as a whole delivered. The report says the collectors, parsers and "knowledge dictionaries" were built as planned for AWS, Kubernetes and Dell VxRail, and that the new architecture also let Runecast cover Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Windows and Linux, analyse published vulnerability advisories, and add compliance checks for GDPR, ISO 27001, Germany's BSI IT-Grundschutz and the UK's Cyber Essentials. Dynatrace still sells Runecast Analyzer for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Windows, Linux and VMware, checked against "14+ regulatory frameworks". RAIKA ran from 1 October 2019 to 31 January 2022, according to CORDIS; the EIC project page still gives the original end date of 30 September 2021.

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, with Azure, Google Cloud, Windows and Linux on top; AWS in the product today.
3. Product on the marketDeliveredSold as Runecast Analyzer by Dynatrace.
4. On timeLateEnded January 2022, four months after the first published end date.
5. The Dutch coordinator's own contributionNot publicThe report does not split the work by partner.

During the project Runecast also gave free full licences for six months to "75 hospitals, clinics, universities and public schools in 14 countries" from March 2020, according to both the periodic report and the EIC project page, which names NHS Lothian and Hospital du Valais among them. Neither names a Dutch institution.

The Money in the Dutch Accounts

The filed balance sheets, as summarised by Liza.nl, show a company with almost no capital of its own and a large balance sheet while the project ran. At the end of 2019, three months into RAIKA, the balance sheet total was €749,118 and equity was €10. At the end of 2020 the total was €1,129,257, debts were €1,156,491 and equity was minus €27,234. At the end of 2023 the total had fallen to €8,430, against debts of €8,464 and equity of minus €34. Liza.nl shows no figures for 2021 and 2022 and gives the workforce as 0 FTE in each year shown; Oozo says one person worked there. These figures could not be checked against a second source, because North Data shows the same filings only to paying subscribers.

The summaries do not say what the assets and debts were. A balance sheet several times larger than the company's own €126,000 grant share, with equity close to zero, fits a coordinator holding EU payments that it owed to its partners, but the accounts as published do not confirm this. No revenue figure is available, and no Dutch customer, contract or hire linked to the company could be found.

Why Europe Should Care

Automated checks for hospitals, banks and airports sit squarely within the NIS2 Directive, which member states had until 17 October 2024 to transpose and which requires entities in critical sectors to "take appropriate cybersecurity risk-management measures". The directive also asks each member state's cybersecurity strategy to cover vulnerability management, the use case RAIKA grew into.

The Dutch company raises a different question: what a coordinator is for. The Netherlands was the official home of the project, but the money, the developers and the product went elsewhere, and the company that carried the Dutch flag on the winners' list no longer exists. Nothing in the record suggests a rule was broken; partner companies in several countries were allowed, and the EU result, a working product, was delivered. It does mean that the Netherlands kept no lasting company from the grant it coordinated.

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.