The Eixample Engineer Who Built a €4M Climate-Tech Startup Without Leaving Barcelona

Mireia Solà closed her Series A round on June 27, pulling in €4.1 million from a consortium that includes the Barcelona-based venture fund Samaipata and the European Innovation Council's Accelerator programme. Her company, Terracycle Analytics, uses machine-learning models to map urban heat islands at street level — block by block, building by building — and sells the data to city governments and real estate developers trying to retrofit neighbourhoods before the next heatwave kills their residents or their tenants.

The timing is not coincidental. France logged more than 2,000 excess deaths during a single peak week this summer, and climate adaptation has lurched from long-term planning document to immediate political priority across southern Europe. Municipal buyers who once moved slowly are now moving fast, and Solà has spent three years positioning Terracycle to be exactly what they need when they finally reach for the phone.

Solà, 34, runs a team of 19 from a workspace on Carrer de Pallars in the Poblenou 22@ district — the former industrial block that Barcelona's city hall has spent two decades converting into a technology and creative cluster. Her office sits two minutes' walk from the Mobile World Congress venue at Fira Gran Via's northern annexe spaces, a proximity she describes as deliberate. Trade-show proximity generates client meetings that cold emails rarely do. She originally applied to the Barcelona Activa startup acceleration programme in 2022, used the mentoring network to land her first pilot contract with the Ajuntament de Barcelona's Urban Ecology department, and never looked back.

Heat Maps That Cities Are Actually Using

The core product is not a dashboard. It is an API that plugs into urban planning software already used by municipalities — specifically the Esri ArcGIS environment that roughly 80 percent of Spanish city governments run. Terracycle's models ingest satellite thermal data, street-level sensor readings, building permit records and pedestrian-flow statistics, then generate hourly heat risk indices at five-metre resolution. Barcelona's own Urban Ecology office has been running a pilot across the Gràcia neighbourhood since March 2025, using the outputs to prioritise which streets get emergency shade structures and emergency cooling points ahead of summer peaks.

Competitors exist. The Madrid-based firm CityOS offers overlapping capabilities, and several German university spin-outs have entered the market. Solà's edge, according to the pitch materials reviewed by The Daily Barcelona, is the Catalan-language data pipeline built specifically for Spanish and Catalan municipal record formats — a technical detail that sounds mundane until you've spent six months debugging why a Valencian council's permit database uses a non-standard date encoding that breaks every generic model trained on English-language urban data.

What the €4.1 Million Buys

The new capital breaks down roughly as follows: €1.8 million goes toward hiring eight additional engineers and one head of sales before the end of Q3 2026, €1.2 million funds expansion into three new markets — Marseille, Lisbon and Milan — and the remaining €1.1 million covers infrastructure costs, primarily cloud computing contracts with AWS's Frankfurt region. Samaipata, which previously backed the Barcelona logistics startup Paack, takes a 12 percent equity stake. The EIC Accelerator grant component is non-dilutive, worth €500,000 of the total.

Barcelona's startup ecosystem generated €1.3 billion in venture capital investment in the first half of 2026, according to figures published by South Summit Barcelona in its mid-year report released last month — the highest H1 figure the city has recorded, beating the previous record of €1.1 billion set in 2023. Climate tech accounted for roughly 18 percent of that total, up from 9 percent in the same period two years ago.

Solà's next public appearance is at the Pier01 tech campus in Barceloneta on September 10, where she is scheduled to present at the autumn edition of the 4YFN founders forum. For city planners, developers or municipal procurement officers watching this space, that presentation will likely be the first opportunity to see the Lisbon dataset in live demonstration. Given how this summer is unfolding across the Mediterranean, the room will probably be full.