Runecast After the EIC Accelerator: Security AI Sold to Dynatrace

Runecast Solutions Limited, company number 09248268 at Companies House, is the London-registered parent of the Runecast software group and the company Dynatrace bought. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 cut-off of 3 April 2019, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, the group won a grant-only award for RAIKA, a project to add artificial intelligence to its product Runecast Analyzer, which checks servers and cloud accounts against vendor manuals, security advisories and compliance rules. The European Commission's list of winners gives the project three rows: Runecast Solutions ltd. in London, with the website www.runecast.biz, Runecast Czech Republic in Brno and Runecast Solutions Netherlands in Hilversum. The other two companies are covered in our articles on Runecast's Czech arm, which took 87% of the money, and on the Dutch coordinator, which has since been closed. This one follows the UK company.

On paper the UK company was a minor partner. CORDIS gives it €127,575 of the €1,899,254 EU contribution, 6.7%, against a budget of €182,250. In practice it was the company that owned everything else: the Brno developers, the US patent behind the product and, by its own accounts, the customer contracts. On 1 March 2024 the US software group Dynatrace acquired 100% of Runecast Solutions Limited, for $26.1 million in cash at closing and $2.3 million in deferred payments, according to Dynatrace's annual report for the year to March 2024. The UK company's confirmation statement of August 2024 shows every one of its nine shareholders transferring their shares on that date.

Where the UK Company Stands Now

Runecast Solutions Limited is active, and it is a Dynatrace subsidiary. Its Companies House record lists it as active, with its last confirmation statement made on 13 August 2026 and accounts for the 15 months to 31 March 2025 filed on 10 April 2026. Since February 2025 its registered office has been Quantum, 60 Norden Road in Maidenhead, the same address as Dynatrace Limited, the other UK company in the Dynatrace group. Dynatrace's list of subsidiaries filed with its May 2026 annual report still names Runecast Solutions Ltd. in the United Kingdom and Runecast Solutions, Inc. in Delaware.

The ownership chain has moved twice. The accounts to March 2025 name Dynatrace International LLC in the United States as the immediate parent at the balance sheet date and say that "in November 2025, the immediate parent company changed to Dynatrace Global Technology GmbH following an intra-group restructuring". The confirmation statement of August 2026 lists the Swiss company as holder of all 436,068 ordinary and 130,754 preference shares, and Dynatrace's subsidiary list confirms that Dynatrace Global Technology GmbH is incorporated in Switzerland. One record has not followed: the company's register of people with significant control still shows only a statement notified on 16 April 2021 that the company knows of no registrable person or entity.

The product the grant helped build is still sold. Runecast.com and runecast.biz both forward to Dynatrace, which markets Runecast Analyzer for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Windows, Linux and VMware and says it validates "against 14+ regulatory frameworks". Dynatrace announced the deal on 29 January 2024 in a press release quoting Runecast's chief executive Stanimir Markov: "We are excited to join Dynatrace, the leader in observability and application security."

The Technology, and Who Owned It

RAIKA's premise, set out on CORDIS, was that "90% of all issues affecting ICT infrastructures are known and documented issues, that could have been avoided". Monitoring tools usually raise the alarm once a fault has happened. Runecast instead reads vendor knowledge bases, best-practice guides and security advisories, turns them into machine-readable rules and checks a customer's live configuration against them, so known problems can be fixed before they cause an outage or a breach. RAIKA was meant to automate that reading with AI, so the company could cover new platforms faster than by writing rules by hand.

The legal owner of that idea was the UK company. US patent 10,621,234, "Method for discovering a group of interdependent computing objects within undirected graph structure", was filed on 6 April 2018, granted on 14 April 2020 and is assigned to Runecast Solutions Limited, according to Google Patents; Runecast announced the grant from London on 29 June 2020, according to its archived blog. Its five inventors, Konstantin Ivanov, Marek Ďuriš, Aylin Sali, Stanimir Markov and Ionut Radu, were also shareholders of the UK company, and between them held 282,000 of its 418,000 ordinary shares before the sale.

What RAIKA Promised, and What the Record Shows

RAIKA ran from 1 October 2019 to 31 January 2022 with a total cost of €2,713,220, according to CORDIS. The Commission's EIC project page still gives the original end date of 30 September 2021, so the project ran four months longer than first published. The final periodic report says the collectors, parsers and "knowledge dictionaries" were developed as planned for AWS, Kubernetes and Dell VxRail, and that the work went further, to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Windows and Linux, vulnerability management based on published CVE advisories, and compliance checks for GDPR, ISO 27001, Germany's BSI IT-Grundschutz and the UK's Cyber Essentials. The report speaks for "Runecast" as one team and does not say which of the three companies did which work.

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 is 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 UK company's own part of the workNot publicThe report does not split tasks by partner.

The UK company's role can be read from its filings instead. Its 2024/25 directors' report describes its principal activity as "the selling of computer software systems and solutions", and its 2023 accounts show trade debtors of €1,014,550 against an average of three staff. The Brno company billed its development and support work to the UK parent under a cost reimbursement contract, as described in our article on the Czech arm. The press releases Runecast issued in January 2023 and October 2023 describe Runecast Solutions Ltd. as "headquartered in London, U.K." and name Avast, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Merck/MSD as customers. Runecast's contact page in April 2022 gave the London address as "2164 R - Kemp House, 152 City Road", and the company reported at most five average staff in any year from 2018 to March 2025.

During the project Runecast also gave hospitals free full licences for six months from March 2020, which "helped 75 hospitals, clinics, universities and public schools in 14 countries", according to the periodic report. The EIC project page names two UK users among them, NHS Lothian and the University of Edinburgh.

The Money in the London Accounts

The UK company filed micro-entity balance sheets up to 2019 and, for 2020 to 2023, accounts that left out the profit and loss statement, all in euros, according to its filing history. Equity stood at €835,889 at the end of 2017, after the seed round, and was negative from 2018 onwards: minus €200,313 at the end of 2019, the year of the award, minus €411,846 at the end of 2021, when RAIKA was almost over, then minus €2,777,112 in 2022 and minus €4,486,109 in 2023. Accumulated losses grew by €2,365,266 in 2022 and €1,708,997 in 2023. Most of the liabilities were "other creditors", €4,216,424 due within a year and €1,452,394 due later at the end of 2023, which the accounts do not explain. Dynatrace's purchase price allocation for the group shows $5.13 million of deferred revenue among the liabilities it took on, but the UK accounts do not say whether their creditors are prepaid customer subscriptions.

The first profit and loss account came after the sale. The accounts for the 15 months to 31 March 2025, audited by Baverstocks and presented in sterling to align with "group requirements for its UK companies", show turnover of £3,380,609 and a loss of £1,482,384 for 2023, and turnover of £3,949,807 and a profit of £696,260 for the longer period, which includes a tax credit of £221,641. Equity was minus £3,195,004 at the end of March 2025, and the company reported no employees in the period. The filings disagree on one point: the 2023 accounts call the euro the company's functional currency, while the 2025 accounts call it sterling and say the accounting records "were previously held in Pound Sterling".

The grant itself cannot be traced in these filings: the euro accounts mention government grants only in their accounting policy, and give no figure. What can be traced is the outside money. A €1.6 million seed round from Credo Ventures and the Bratislava fund manager Limerock was announced in March 2017, according to Tech.eu; the share premium of €1,585,449 and preference share capital of €14,545 on the UK balance sheet add up to the same €1.6 million. The preference shares were held by Credo Stage II L.P. and JEREMIE Co-Investment Fund, s.r.o., in equal parts, according to the confirmation statements of 2020, 2022 and 2024. The JEREMIE fund is a Slovak vehicle of the EU's JEREMIE initiative, which channels EU structural funds into small companies; Limerock has managed it since 2014, according to Startitup and the European Investment Bank. Limerock partner Roman Čmelík sat on the UK company's board from December 2017 until the sale.

In November 2021 the company bought back 82,000 ordinary and 14,700 preference shares for a total of €1.00, according to its SH03 return; the confirmation statements show Aylin Sali's holding falling from 172,000 to 90,000 ordinary shares and each fund's from 72,727 to 65,377 preference shares, and Sali ceased to be registered as a person with significant control on 19 November 2021. At the sale, 18,068 new ordinary shares were allotted on 1 March 2024 at prices of €0.10, €11.00 and €17.30, according to a return filed on 10 March 2026, two years later. SiliconANGLE listed "EIC Fund Management LLC" among Runecast's investors. That is not borne out: no EIC Fund entity appears among the shareholders in any of the UK company's confirmation statements, the 2019 award was grant only, and no Runecast company appears in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked on all 16 pages. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company.

A Parent That Shrank as the Group Was Absorbed

After the takeover the group around the UK company was folded into Dynatrace. Its Slovak subsidiary, Runecast Solutions s.r.o., owned 100% by the UK company with €5,000 of capital, went into liquidation on 1 September 2024 and was deleted from the register on 6 August 2025 at its own request, according to the Slovak business register; North Data also shows the link to the Slovak company ending in August 2025. The Brno subsidiary, still 100% owned by the UK company, was renamed Dynatrace Czech Republic s.r.o. and has Marc Gold as one of its two managing directors, according to the Czech commercial register. The founders Stanimir Markov and Aylin Sali left the UK board on 20 December 2024, and the three directors appointed in December 2017, when the seed investors came in, left on the day of the sale. Its remaining computer equipment was disposed of, and it ended March 2025 with £58,881 in cash.

Why Europe Should Care

Automated checks against published vulnerabilities and compliance rules fit the EU's NIS2 Directive, which requires entities in critical sectors to "take appropriate cybersecurity risk-management measures and notify relevant national authorities of significant incidents". The UK company also shows how Horizon 2020 money reached a firm outside the EU: the UK left the EU in 2020, but the withdrawal terms let UK participants keep EU funding "for the entire lifetime" of their projects, as Innovate UK Business Connect summarised them.

The ownership trail is the more telling point. An EU grant, and an EU structural-fund vehicle among its shareholders, backed a group whose development team sat in Brno and whose holding company sat in London. Since 2024 that holding company, the patent it owns and the Brno team below it have belonged to a NYSE-listed US group, held through a Swiss subsidiary. Nothing in the record suggests a rule was broken, and the grant funded a product that is still on sale. It did not keep the business European.

The Verdict

Dynatrace, the former Runecast shareholders and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.