Simacan Promised the EIC Accelerator EU Truck Tracking: The Record

If a supermarket truck in the Netherlands is running late, there is a good chance Simacan's software knows it first. The Amersfoort company, set up by two digital mapping specialists, combines GPS positions from trucks with live traffic data to predict arrival times and flag delays for planners, drivers and shop staff. In its EU grant application it claimed that 55% of supply trips to Dutch supermarkets and 80% of Dutch home grocery deliveries already ran through its platform, according to CORDIS and the company's January 2020 announcement. Those shares are the company's own figures and could not be checked independently.

In the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 programme that became the EIC Accelerator, the European Commission picked Simacan LINK, a plan to turn that national product into a "commercially scalable Europe-wide Connected Transport platform". Simacan is the only beneficiary named for the project in the Commission's list of June 2019 winners. The grant was €2,321,812.50, 70% of a €3,316,875 budget.

Where Simacan Stands in 2026

Simacan B.V. is active. Its register entry shows the company's status as active with 40 full-time staff and a balance sheet for 2025, according to Liza.nl, which reads the filings of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (KvK); North Data lists the same filings, the latest published on 6 May 2026. No insolvency, name change or change of legal form appears in either source.

The company is still selling and still shipping new products. In March 2025 the online supermarket Picnic chose Simacan to run its middle-mile transport between warehouses and hubs with several outside carriers, according to Emerce and Simacan's own post. In March 2026 it presented Simacan Drive, a navigation app for delivery drivers linked to the planning system, at the LogiMAT fair in Stuttgart, and on 10 June 2026 TomTom announced a multi-year agreement under which Simacan Drive runs on TomTom's navigation software, according to TomTom. Simacan's product page describes the app; it does not name the TomTom software.

The Technology: A Shared View of Every Truck

Large retailers in the Netherlands rarely run all their own trucks. A supermarket chain may use its own fleet, several hauliers and a parcel carrier, each with its own planning system, on-board computer and driver app. Simacan's pitch is that it sits on top of all of them. It takes in planned trips and live vehicle positions, adds TomTom traffic data, which it has used for more than a decade according to TomTom, and gives shippers, carriers and stores the same picture of where each load is and when it will arrive, according to the CORDIS project report and a TomTom partner story from December 2020, which says Simacan was founded by two former TomTom employees.

The difference from a classic transport management system is the vendor-neutral model: Simacan does not plan routes from scratch or sell the telematics hardware, it connects other companies' systems. The company claims its users cut waiting times by 15%, raise on-time delivery performance by 50% and lift planning productivity by 25%. Those figures appear only in Simacan's own statements, repeated in the CORDIS report, and no independent measurement was found.

What Simacan LINK Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran from 1 December 2019 to 30 November 2021, exactly as planned, and CORDIS marks it closed. The grant agreement was signed on 14 November 2019. Its public deliverables on the CORDIS results page are three demonstrations: a self-service portal for clients to set up their own integrations, including third-party ones such as eCMR; an "e-CMR solution" for electronic consignment notes in multimodal transport; and a "demo of market expansion towards Europe" meant to show uptake "in the Netherlands and other European countries". The only periodic report published, for the second year, reads like a press release: it repeats the market-share claims and announces that Simacan "expects to double its workforce in the next two years", but gives no results, customer counts or countries.

In January 2020, when it announced the grant, Simacan named Ahold Delhaize, PostNL, Spar, Jumbo, bloomon, Daily Fresh and ANWB as users and repeated the plan to double its staff, according to Emerce. In April 2020 it hired a sales manager to scale its business "across European markets" and a director of business strategy for Europe, and said it had already taken on about ten new staff, according to a second Emerce notice. How many people Simacan employed when it applied is not published, so whether the workforce doubled during the project cannot be verified.

1. Self-service portal and third-party integrationsDeliveredDemo filed on CORDIS; Simacan dates its white-label track and trace portal to 2021 in a 2023 company review.
2. eCMR on the platformDeliveredDemo filed on CORDIS; eCMR is listed among its products on Simacan's LinkedIn page.
3. Europe-wide connected transport platformPartlyOne foreign customer case, DHL Supply Chain in Germany; 12 of 14 published cases are Dutch.
4. Double the workforce within two yearsUnverifiedNo starting headcount published; 51 employees in the 2022 accounts, 40 in 2024 and 2025.
5. Finish on timeDeliveredEnded 30 November 2021 as scheduled; period 2 report published on CORDIS.

The European Part of the Plan

The grant was for international scale-up, and that is where the record is thinnest. Simacan's case study page lists 14 customers. Twelve are Dutch, among them Albert Heijn, Jumbo, PostNL, Spar, Nedcargo, Boels Rental and KSZ Transport. One is AS Watson Benelux. The only case outside the Benelux is DHL Supply Chain Germany & Alps, which uses Simacan with a driver app from Aventeon to track store deliveries for a fashion customer in southern Germany; the case is undated, and it was found only in Simacan's own material, not in any DHL publication.

In April 2023 chief executive Rob Schuurbiers said Simacan was "operating in eight European countries", in a ten-year review on the company's website. The countries are not named, and no second source confirms the figure. The 2021 project report said Simacan had offices in Amersfoort, Enschede and Münster in Germany; the company's website now gives only the Amersfoort address, and North Data lists no German subsidiary. What is visible is a sales push into Germany: Simacan has booked stands at German logistics fairs, including LogiMAT 2026 in Stuttgart and the BVL Supply Chain CX congress in Berlin on 21 and 22 October 2026.

What Simacan Has Achieved Since the Award

At home, the customer list grew. In December 2021 Nedcargo became the fourth large Dutch carrier on the platform, after Cornelissen Transport, Dasko Groep and Simon Loos, according to TTM.nl and Emerce. In August 2022 Simacan connected the Bumper incident-reporting tool of TVM, a Dutch transport insurer, to its platform, according to Simacan. In October 2023 it deepened a near ten-year partnership with Bridgestone's fleet telematics business Webfleet, with a focus on electric trucks and charging, according to its announcement. It reported ISO 27001 certification for information security in August 2023, and Picnic followed in 2025.

Simacan also won a second, smaller EU-backed project. From September 2021 to August 2023 it led LastMile.info, a €1,789,300 project with Conundra, Breda University of Applied Sciences, Jumbo and the municipality of Tilburg to publish digital delivery instructions for drivers in city centres, with €872,397 from the EU's REACT-EU recovery funds through the OPZuid programme, according to the programme manager Stimulus. North Data records a state aid entry of €1,852,071 for Simacan under the same scheme in November 2021; the two figures do not match, and the difference is not explained in either source. CORDIS lists no other EU research project for the company.

The Money

No equity round, outside investor or acquisition could be found. Tracxn lists the EIC Fund as an investor, but that entry dates to the grant, and Simacan does not appear among the about 320 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages. The EIC award was grant only.

Simacan files abridged accounts, so revenue and profit are not public. The balance sheets, as reported by Liza.nl from the KvK filings, show equity rising from €1.95 million at the end of 2022 to €3.93 million at the end of 2024 and then falling to €3.20 million in 2025, while debts stayed between €1.07 million and €1.56 million. Without an income statement, it is not possible to say whether the 2025 drop came from a loss or a payout to shareholders. These figures rest on one aggregator; North Data confirms that the four balance sheets were filed but shows the figures only to paying users.

Why Europe Should Care

Road freight data is about to become a regulatory matter. The EU's regulation on electronic freight transport information (eFTI), Regulation (EU) 2020/1056, applies in full from 9 July 2027, after which authorities in every member state must accept transport documents shared through certified eFTI platforms instead of paper, according to the European Commission and ERTICO. Simacan's eCMR work, part of its EIC project, sits in that space. Whether Simacan will seek eFTI certification is not public.

A European-owned, vendor-neutral layer for sharing truck data also matters for competition, because the alternative is that large carriers, telematics makers or non-European platforms own the data. Simacan's own traffic and navigation data come from TomTom, another Dutch company, so the whole chain from map to control tower is European.

The Verdict

Simacan has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.