Adcities raises €3 million+ to scale its OOH AdTech after powering 25+ brand campaigns with the likes of Telefónica and Decathlon

Spain’s Adcities, an AdTech company innovating out-of-home (OOH) advertising into a fully digital channel, has announced the closing of its Seed investment round of more than €3 million.

The round was led by Adara Ventures. European funds PlusPartners and Bynd also participated in the round, as well as business angels Albert Nieto (co-founder of Seedtag) and Scott Painter (global mobility leader and founder of TrueCar and Fair).

“Seventy percent of our time is spent outside the home, yet only 7% of global marketing budgets are allocated to outdoor media. Why? Until now, no CMO could confidently prove the real impact of a campaign on the street: there were no credible metrics, no actionable business data, and no connection to digital. Out-of-home has always lived on an isolated island. Adcities was created precisely to close this gap,” says Manuel Ferreira Lorenzo, co-founder and CEO of Adcities.

Within the wider digital-advertising landscape investors are continuing to back data-centric media technologies, illustrated by France’s Vibe.co, which raised €42 million to scale its AI-powered connected-TV advertising.

With no other OOH-specific funding rounds registered by EU-Startups so far in 2025, Adcities’ raise stands out as one of the few publicly reported investments targeting the digital transformation of outdoor media.

All of this is delivered through a network of ad assets that includes digital billboards, bus station marquees, urban vehicles, and retail points, offering real-time analytics.

“For years, measuring the real impact of a street campaign was practically impossible. It was an act of faith based on surveys and other offline data sources. Advertisers invested without knowing how many people saw their ads, under what context, or what effect it had on consumer behavior,” says Jacobo Peleteiro Lumbreras, co-founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer of Adcities.

“On top of that, planning, buying, and measuring OOH campaigns have historically been managed with separate, disconnected tools, preventing agencies from working efficiently and precisely,” he adds.

So far in 2025, the company has already activated campaigns with more than 25 leading brands, including Telefónica, Decathlon and Mapfre, which have received data on how OMI measures in real time how many people were reached by their campaigns, which ad assets were most effective, and, for retailers, how many consumers ultimately visited one of their stores.

“This transformation is global and arrives at exactly the right moment,” adds Ferreira. “As purely digital campaigns become saturated and traditional media lose influence, out-of-home remains a channel with strong, genuine attention. That’s why we’re digitising it and integrating it for the first time into digital media plans as a native digital channel. There has never been a better time to invest in a medium that combines massive reach, efficiency, and real impact on audiences.”

Peleteiro explains the business model: “Adcities sits between two worlds. On one side, we work with brands and agencies, who see us as a partner to activate outdoor campaigns with the same efficiency and digital connectivity as any online channel like Google or Meta.

“On the other side are the publishers, the owners of the ad assets on the street, who gain access to a new channel to increase revenue and tap into digital budgets they previously couldn’t reach. OMI acts as the bridge between both sides: connecting each campaign to the most effective ad assets, in the exact right place and moment.”

The company is also strengthening its role in the ecosystem through initiatives such as AdLab, its video-podcast produced with Spotify’s advertising team, which has already featured marketing leaders from L’Oréal, IKEA, MediaMarkt and Lidl.

“The vision and execution skills of the founders of Adcities have convinced us that we have found a team and the technology capable of building a scalable project with the potential for global disruption,” said Nico Goulet, Founding Partner at Adara Ventures.

This new investment will go towards helping Adcities:

• Strengthen its OMI tech stack with new data sources and more powerful segmentation and attribution models, multiplying its ability to turn data into actionable business insights.

• Boost its commercial strategy in Spain, investing in senior talent to scale campaign activations with brands and agencies while expanding the variety of formats available within its ad-asset network.

• Accelerate international expansion, beginning with Mexico as the entry point to Latin America, followed by further growth in other key European markets.

“Our mission is simple: to build the infrastructure that enables outdoor advertising to operate with the same precision and agility as digital. A future where any brand, big or small, can activate advertising on a street, a bus shelter, or a vehicle with a single click, just as Google made possible on the Internet,” Ferreira concludes.