According to EU-Startups, AdTech startup Adcities has raised a funding round of over €3 million led by Adara Ventures. Founded just last year in 2024, the company specializes in out-of-home (OOH) advertising with its AI-powered platform called OMI (Outdoor Media Intelligence). OMI uses geocontextual data to activate a network of physical ad assets like digital billboards and bus shelters, aiming to make audience targeting and measurement as precise as digital ads. So far in 2025, Adcities has already run campaigns for more than 25 major brands, including Telefónica, Decathlon, and Mapfre. Co-founder Jacobo Peleteiro Lumbreras stated that the funding will help build the infrastructure to let brands activate outdoor ads with a single click.
The big idea and the bigger challenge
Here’s the thing: making billboards and bus ads as measurable as a Google click is a holy grail for the advertising industry. It’s been talked about for a decade. The promise is huge—tap into the massive, unavoidable reach of the physical world but with the cool, analytical dashboard of a digital campaign. Adcities, with its OMI platform, is pitching itself as the bridge. They want to sit between brands who crave that accountability and the publishers (the folks who own the billboards) who want a piece of digital ad budgets. On paper, it’s a perfect solution to a very old problem.
But let’s be skeptical for a second. The road to digitizing OOH is littered with startups that promised real-time analytics and ended up delivering… well, slightly better estimates. The core challenge is the environment. You’re dealing with weather, traffic patterns, the literal direction people are facing, and the messy reality of human attention. Can an AI model truly know if someone *actually* looked at an ad on a moving vehicle or just stood next to it staring at their phone? The company says it provides data on store visits, which is a strong metric, but correlating a physical ad exposure to a physical sale is incredibly complex. It’s a step forward, no doubt, but the “digital precision” claim probably needs a few asterisks.
Why this might actually work now
So, is this time different? Maybe. The market timing, as co-founder Ferreira points out, is interesting. Digital ad space is brutally saturated and expensive, and the cookiepocalypse is making online targeting harder. Meanwhile, traditional TV and print are fading. OOH is one of the last mediums that can guarantee a real, un-skipped impression. The technology stack is also better now—better cellular data, more digital screens in the wild, and more sophisticated location analytics. If Adcities can truly be the single platform for planning, buying, and measuring, they solve a genuine pain point for media agencies tired of juggling a dozen disconnected tools.
Their early client list with names like Decathlon and Telefónica is a strong signal. These are savvy brands that don’t throw money around for acts of faith. They’re getting a dashboard, they’re getting some form of attribution, and they’re coming back. That’s the real proof of concept. The initiative like AdLab, their podcast with Spotify, is also smart—it’s not just selling tech, it’s building credibility and community with the marketing decision-makers they need to win over.
The risks and the road ahead
Now, the risks. This is a two-sided marketplace play, and those are notoriously hard to scale. You need to onboard enough premium ad inventory (the billboards) to attract big brands, and you need the big brands to attract the inventory owners. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem that €3 million can help with, but won’t solve globally. There’s also the question of competition. This isn’t a blue ocean. Major players like BroadSign and Strands are already deep in the digital OOH software game, and media giants have their own units. Adcities is positioning itself as the agnostic, AI-native connector, but they’ll need to move fast.
Basically, Adcities is betting that the OOH industry is finally ready for its digital transformation moment. The funding gives them fuel. Their early traction shows promise. But the real test is scaling that infrastructure and proving, unequivocally, that their measurement is more than just advanced guesswork. If they can do that, they’re not just selling ads—they’re fundamentally changing how billions of euros are spent. That’s a big if, but it’s certainly a story worth watching.
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