On February 25, 2026, at Barcelona's MediaTIC building, the INDPULS AI Adoption Program 2025-2026 held its closing event. Ten startups and technology SMEs had spent months working on real AI use cases posed by some of the most demanding industrial companies in the ecosystem. At the end of the program, the Evaluation Committee selected two winners - and Wicely was one of them.
The recognition was based on three criteria: responsiveness, agility in pilot deployment, and industrial applicability. These aren't abstract qualities. They reflect what it actually takes to bring AI into manufacturing environments where the stakes are real, the timelines are tight, and the tolerance for theoretical solutions is low.
The INDPULS AI Adoption Program, funded by the European Union's Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan through NextGenerationEU, was designed with a specific philosophy: start from real use cases, not from technology looking for a problem. The program connected startups with INDPULS partner companies - leading manufacturers across sectors - and asked them to solve genuine industrial challenges through AI.
This meant working directly with companies like Celsa Group, Fluidra, Roca Group, Frit Ravich, and others that deal daily with the complexity of industrial R&D, production, and strategic decision-making. The ten participating startups - Bybusiness-AI, Connecthink, Dribia, Foviatech, FoxBase, Intemic, LaMagnetica, Muutech, Setesca, and Wicely - each brought different capabilities to the table. The overall quality, as Anna Casals, Secretary of the INDPULS Board and Innovation Director at Celsa, noted, was outstanding.
What set this program apart from typical accelerators or innovation challenges was the emphasis on deployment. The question wasn't whether a technology could work in theory - it was whether it could be deployed with the speed and adaptability that industrial environments require.
Wicely's platform connects manufacturers' internal R&D needs with external market opportunities. It's built to help industrial organizations systematically identify, evaluate, and act on technology opportunities - turning fragmented knowledge into strategic intelligence that drives decisions.
In the context of the AI Adoption Program, this meant proving that our approach works not just in controlled environments, but in the messy reality of industrial operations. Real R&D teams with real constraints, working on real strategic questions about where their next competitive advantage will come from.
The pilot work during the program tested what we believe is Wicely's core strength: the ability to rapidly adapt to different industrial contexts while delivering intelligence that's actionable, not just interesting. When the Evaluation Committee highlighted responsiveness and agility in pilot deployment, that resonated with what we hear from R&D teams across the industry - they need tools that can keep pace with how quickly their landscape is changing.
Being selected alongside FoxBase as a winner of this program is meaningful for a specific reason: it's validation through practice, not through pitching. The assessment came from working with industrial partners on their actual challenges, not from presenting slides about what our technology could theoretically do.
For Wicely, this confirms that the approach we've built - connecting internal R&D knowledge with external opportunities through AI-powered intelligence - translates into real value in industrial settings. It's one thing to build a platform that works well in demonstrations. It's another to deploy it in an environment where manufacturing companies need answers they can act on.
The closing event at MediaTIC wasn't just an ending - it was, as INDPULS described it, the beginning of a new phase. The program is now moving toward deploying real, measurable, and scalable pilots in productive environments.
For us, this is exactly the trajectory we want. The work done during the AI Adoption Program demonstrated that our technology can deliver in industrial settings. The next step is proving it can scale - across more use cases, more industrial contexts, and more R&D teams that need to make faster, better-informed decisions about technology and innovation.
The gap between technology intelligence and organizational action is where most R&D insight value gets lost. Programs like the INDPULS AI Adoption Program are valuable precisely because they force startups to close that gap - to move from insight to impact in environments where impact is the only metric that matters.
Learn more about how Wicely's platform helps industrial R&D teams transform knowledge into strategic opportunities.
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