How Zapiens Spent Its EIC Accelerator Grant on a Knowledge Chatbot

Zapiens Technologies, a Gijón software company founded in 2015, sold companies a mobile training app and a chatbot called Zap that answers employees' questions and, when it does not know the answer, passes the question to the colleague most likely to know it. In the first 2019 round of the Horizon 2020 EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, the EU agreed to pay €1,487,966.38 towards a €2,169,942.50 project to turn that product into a self-service "knowledge connector" for platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, SAP and Salesforce, according to CORDIS. The company appears under its own name, with no partner companies, in the European Commission's list of SME Instrument Phase 2 winners, which still gives its old website, blunder.es; that domain now hosts an unrelated online casino.

The proposal was ambitious. Zapiens told the EU it expected €1 million in revenue in 2018 and €24 million by 2021, an aggregate of "€ 35+ millions" three years into the project, and called itself a future "global game-changer company". The record six years later is thin: the register files place the company in the lowest turnover band, its website has been replaced by a parking page, and the last of its directors resigned in May 2026.

Where Zapiens Stands Now

Zapiens Technologies SL has not been dissolved, and the register extracts show no insolvency proceedings; Infoempresa lists it as active with 1 to 9 employees, and Empresia lists it as active with annual turnover below €500,000 and 2022 as the last year of accounts deposited. Both are paid aggregators of the Mercantile Register; the underlying accounts are not free to view, so profit, equity and the exact revenue could not be verified.

The public signs point to a business that has wound down its activity without formally closing. The company's website, zapiens.ai, still offered the training app, the Zap chatbot and demo bookings in an archived copy from July 2025; by February 2026 the domain showed only a registrar notice that it was "temporarily parked and is pending validation", in an archived copy and in a live check for this article. The newest posts on the company blog, archived in June 2025, are undated and include a recruitment ad marked "process closed".

Meanwhile the board emptied. The Official Gazette of the Mercantile Register (BORME) published the resignation of a corporate director in November 2024, of a second director in June 2025, and of Daniel Suárez as director, chairman and managing director in July 2025. Two more resignations followed in January 2026 and, the last one, in May 2026. DatosCif now lists only a non-director secretary and three proxy holders as current officers. Why the directors left, and whether the shareholders plan to appoint new ones, sell the company or dissolve it, is not public. Because the register still shows filings in 2026 and no closure, this article rates the company's status as unknown rather than dormant or closed.

The Technology: A Chatbot That Asks a Colleague

Corporate knowledge usually sits in two places: in documents and databases, and in the heads of staff. Learning management systems and intranets handle the first. Zapiens tried to capture the second. According to the project summary on CORDIS, its chatbot answers a question if it can; if not, it finds "someone in the company's network to answer back", stores the reply and serves it directly to the next person who asks something similar. The company described this as "collaborative intelligence" in which people and AI learn from each other, and its proposal put the AI work at technology readiness level 7, with the training and peer-to-peer tool at level 8.

The second half of the product was microlearning. Zapiens' 2025 website sold gamified question-and-answer training in sessions of "10 minutos de aprendizaje al día", plus learning analytics showing which questions staff got wrong most often. Founder Daniel Suárez told Emprendedores in 2018 that the idea came from consulting work for a retailer whose sales staff turned over too fast to keep up with product knowledge. The routing of open questions to human experts is what set Zapiens apart from standard training platforms; whether the AI behind it went beyond the state of the art, as the proposal claimed, was never shown in any public paper, patent or benchmark found for this article.

What the EU Paid For

The grant agreement was signed on 21 May 2019, the project ran from 1 May 2019 to 31 August 2021, and CORDIS lists it as closed. The final periodic report, covering May 2020 to August 2021, sets out two objectives: automate the tool so that any company could buy it on the website and set it up "with minimal effort", and improve the bot with new conversation flows and multilingual support.

The report says that before the project Zapiens sold mostly mobile training to large corporations in Spain, and that by month 28 it had built "the beta version of its scalable knowledge management system", tested with customers in retail, telecoms and industry. Most of the listed work is product polish for self-service: an online sales platform, onboarding help for administrators and app users, warnings before content is deleted, a reworked statistics dashboard and a billing section with a 30-day plan, 100 free users, later changed to "20 free users forever". The company also offered the product free to non-profits and schools during the pandemic. An archived project page on the company site recruited firms with more than 20 employees to test the tool for a month in exchange for a free Premium licence and a 20% discount afterwards.

1. Self-service product sold onlineDeliveredOnline sales platform and paid plans described in the final report; free trial offered on the 2024 site.
2. Improved, multilingual chatbotPartly deliveredReport claims a beta covering all three planned advances; the 2024 site had an English version, but no independent test of the bot is public.
3. Integration with Slack, Teams, SAP, SalesforceUnverifiedNamed as a possibility in the summary; no integration is described in the report or on the archived site.
4. €24M revenue by 2021Not achievedTurnover below €500,000 per Empresia.

The report is candid that the result was a beta, not a finished market product. It also says the project revealed two new opportunities: the automatic training of the system, and using the tool for customer support and sales rather than only internal knowledge. No later public evidence shows Zapiens selling into those markets.

The Company Since the Grant

Before the EU award, Zapiens had collected regional backing and startup prizes. The Asturian development agency SRP invested in 2017 to fund the app and its national and international expansion, and in May 2020 Zapiens finished second in the education category of the Virtual South Summit, according to Capital Riesgo, which named Vodafone, Sacyr, ArcelorMittal, IE, Complutense University and the University of Oviedo as users. Emprendedores had reported in October 2018 that the team had grown from 9 to more than 25 people, that customers included Vodafone, Santander, Telefónica, Siemens and NH Hotels, that Enrique Penichet of Bbooster was among its investors, that the company was raising a €1 million pre-Series A round with a Series A planned for 2019, and that it planned a Miami office. Neither round nor the Miami office could be confirmed in any later source.

The register suggests little new money came in after the grant. The BORME acts listed by Empresia show a capital reduction in September 2020, followed by two small increases of nominal capital, €42 in March 2021 and €69.81 in May 2022; the share premium paid in those increases is not shown. CB Insights puts total funding at $110K, mostly accelerator and competition money, a figure no second source confirms. The company moved its registered office twice, from C/ de las Estrellas, the address on CORDIS, to Avenida de la Argentina in July 2021 and to C/ Lastres in January 2024, both in Gijón. Some startup databases place the company in Oviedo; every register entry places it in Gijón.

Why It Mattered to Europe

Workplace training and the spread of AI inside ordinary companies are both EU policy goals. The Digital Decade programme sets 2030 targets for basic digital skills among adults and for the share of EU companies using AI, cloud or big data. A Spanish-built tool that keeps knowledge inside a company and spreads it across its staff fits that agenda. Whether Zapiens' customers kept using it, and what became of its software and data after the website went dark, could not be established from public sources.

The Verdict

Zapiens and its former directors were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.