Copenhagen Optimization: EIC Accelerator Money in Airport Planning

Airports earn money from gates, counters and security lanes they already own, and every new aircraft stand costs between €5 million and €15 million to build, according to the project summary on CORDIS. Copenhagen Optimization sells software that squeezes more out of the existing infrastructure. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 5 June 2019, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, it won an EU contribution of €2,153,900.88 for BA-AC, a project to finish the aircraft stand and gate module of its Better Airport platform and pilot it at three major airports. The company is listed under its own name in the European Commission's list of June 2019 winners, with no partner companies.

Seven years later the funded module is on sale and in use, the company employs more than twice as many people, and in January 2025 a Paris-based private equity fund, InfraVia Capital Partners, entered the register with 50% of the votes after announcing the purchase of a majority stake. What the record does not show is whether the company met the commercial targets in its grant proposal.

Where Copenhagen Optimization Stands Now

The company is active and growing, under new ownership. On 3 December 2024 InfraVia announced a purchase agreement for a majority stake through its InfraVia Growth Fund 1, a deal also reported by InfraVia's lawyers at DLA Piper. The acquisition was registered on 15 January 2025, when InfraVia Growth Fund I SLP entered the Danish register with 50% of the votes, the two founders' holding companies kept 15% each, and InfraVia partner Nicolas Slim became chairman, according to North Data and FirmaAPI. The price was not disclosed. The founders stayed on as co-CEOs.

The 2025 accounts, filed with the Danish Business Authority in April 2026, record a capital increase of DKK 15,000,075 linked to the new investor and say that 11 airport clients were added in 2025, naming Brussels, Munich, Dallas Fort Worth, Brisbane and Melbourne. Those five client wins could not be confirmed in any announcement by the airports. In mid-2026 the company held its sixth Better Airport Summit in Copenhagen with 32 airports attending, according to Regional Gateway. The register at ownr lists 54 employees and 50 full-time equivalents in July 2026.

The Technology: One Plan for the Whole Airport

Large airports traditionally plan each area in its own tool or spreadsheet: one team decides how many check-in counters to open, another schedules security lanes, a third allocates aircraft to stands and gates. Better Airport forecasts passenger and baggage flows from the flight schedule and then optimises each area against that forecast, in one cloud system that all stakeholders can see. Its website lists modules for forecasting, check-in, security, shifts, deployment, baggage, border control, virtual queuing and stands and gates. The CORDIS summary describes the method as "advanced mathematical models" built on "years of consultancy within airport operations".

The stand and gate module was the piece BA-AC paid for. Assigning aircraft to stands and gates is a large scheduling problem with airline preferences, aircraft sizes and turnaround times as constraints, and it decides whether an airport needs to pour concrete for new stands. Stand and gate allocation is a standard task of airport resource management systems, the category in which the company places Better Airport; its CORDIS report calls it the "first holistic next-generation RMS", because the module shares one plan with the passenger-side modules. That claim comes from the company, and no independent comparison of its optimisation results with competing systems could be found.

What BA-AC Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

BA-AC ran from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2021, on time, with a total cost of €3,077,001.25. The grant agreement was signed on 30 September 2019, the day before the start. The company was not a newcomer: London Heathrow had selected Better Airport in November 2018, after a one-month trial of its security, check-in and baggage modules, and the deal was also listed in Airport Technology's deals round-up of December 2018.

The project's final report says Better Stand & Gate was integrated into Better Airport, refined with "positive feedback from our pilot airports", and had "received enough maturation to become a key component of Better Airport, reaching commercialization" by the end of summer 2021, with licences sold that year. It does not name the three pilot airports. The pandemic hit in the middle of the project, and the report describes Heathrow, Copenhagen, Stansted and Singapore Changi using Better Airport to plan check-in counters and baggage belts around physical distancing.

Independent evidence that the module reached customers came later. In January 2025 Kelowna International Airport in Canada bought five modules including Better Stand & Gate, according to Future Travel Experience. In April 2025 the operator of JFK Terminal 4, a customer since 2018, added Better Stand & Gate for automated stand and gate allocation and seasonal capacity planning, as reported by AviationPros and Airport Technology.

1. Integrate the stand and gate module into Better AirportDeliveredCommercialised in 2021 per CORDIS; on sale and in use at Kelowna and JFK Terminal 4 in 2025.
2. Pilot at three major airports, TRL7 to TRL9Partly verifiableThe report says pilots ran and licences were sold, but names no pilot airport.
3. 89 client airports five years after the projectOpenMore than 40 airports in December 2024 per InfraVia, plus 11 added in 2025 per the accounts; the deadline runs to 2026.
4. €20M annual recurring revenueNot publicRevenue is not disclosed; gross profit was DKK 57.1M (about €7.7M) in 2025.
5. 47 new full-time jobsPartly metAverage full-time staff up by 27 from 2019 to 2025; 60 people at the end of 2025.

The company itself lowered the bar during the project. The original objective on CORDIS foresaw 89 client airports, €20 million of annual recurring revenue, €65.78 million of accumulated revenue and 47 new jobs five years after the project. The final report changed this to 102 client airports, €10 million of annual recurring revenue and 20 new jobs.

What the Company Achieved Since the Award

Growth after the grant came mostly from selling software into more airports and more countries. InfraVia's announcement put the customer count at "more than 40 airports" in December 2024, named Heathrow, Changi and JFK Terminal 4, and gave the company's compound annual growth from 2019 to 2023 as about 50%, with more than half of 2023 annual recurring revenue earned outside Europe. The company opened a Boston office in 2022, which had five staff in 2023 and 2024, and won its first South American client in 2024, according to its annual reports.

Staff numbers differ by source. The accounts report an average of 19 full-time employees in 2019 and 46 in 2025; North Data, which uses the register's headcounts, shows 21 in 2019 and 47 in 2025. Both point the same way.

The Money

Copenhagen Optimization files accounts in reporting class B and does not publish revenue, only gross profit. That figure rose more than fourfold between 2019 and 2025. Profit did not follow: the company has swung between small profits and small losses, with losses of DKK 4.25 million in 2024, which it put down to costs of bringing in the new majority investor, and DKK 3.09 million in 2025, which it put down to a larger sales organisation. Equity rose to DKK 25.97 million at the end of 2025 after the capital increase. Before InfraVia, development was funded by the EU grant, a loan from Vækstfonden, Denmark's state investment fund, the InnoBooster programme and private investors, the 2019 to 2022 annual reports say.

Copenhagen Optimization is not in the EIC Fund portfolio: a search of all 16 pages of the official list found no entry, which matches a grant-only award. CORDIS lists no other EU research project for the company.

Why Europe Should Care

Airport capacity is a recurring bottleneck in EU transport policy. The Commission's Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy pushes the digitalisation of transport, and the BA-AC proposal tied its pitch to the Single European Sky, the EU's effort to modernise air traffic management. Software that lets an airport handle more passengers on existing stands and terminals can delay costly construction, the argument at the heart of the BA-AC proposal. A Danish supplier now plans operations at airports in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.

Ownership is the other side of that story. The company that the EU helped finish its product is now controlled by a private equity fund, InfraVia, which is itself European and headquartered in Paris. The software stays under European ownership.

The Verdict

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