€500k · Pre-Seed · AI · Barcelona, Spain
ELEVA AI has closed a €500,000 pre-seed round led by Encomenda Capital Partners, with participation from Unitatea, business angels and advisers linked to Spain's technology and physical-venue sectors. The Barcelona startup builds AI agents for shopping centres, airports, stadiums and other high-traffic spaces.
Turning conversations into operating data
ELEVA's platform gives each venue a conversational layer across channels including websites, WhatsApp and physical QR codes. Visitors can ask for stores, services, opening hours or directions; behind that interface, the company says its software combines conversation data with venue systems such as CRM, loyalty, footfall and leasing tools. The intended customer is the venue operator, which can use the same interaction data across visitor experience, marketing, asset management and operations.
That creates a commercial mechanism beyond automating front-desk questions. A shopping centre usually sees aggregate footfall but not why an individual visitor arrived, what they could not find or which recommendation changed their route. ELEVA aims to capture that intent inside the conversation and turn it into measurable store visits, loyalty sign-ups and demand signals. On its live-deployments page, the company says 25% of conversations end in a route to a store and 20% end in a loyalty sign-up, based on client-confirmed figures dated 26 August 2026. Those are company-reported metrics, but they show the product's sales proposition: one interface can serve visitors while producing first-party operational data for the operator.
From pilots to portfolio rollouts
At the time of the round, ELEVA said its agents were deployed with shopping-centre groups including Westfield, Klépierre and Carmila. It also reported projects in Dubai, Italy and Iceland, and planned to reach more than 90 centres in Spain over the following 12 months. Encomenda's Javier Darriba said high-traffic venues lack a knowledge layer about their visitors and that ELEVA's pilots were already demonstrating the potential impact.
The funding gives ELEVA more room to build the product and pursue those rollouts, according to co-founder and CEO Xavi Pin. The execution test is whether it can turn individual pilots into repeatable deployments across multi-venue operators. Its website lists integrations with systems including Salesforce, Yardi, Mappedin, Situm and ShopperTrak; that matters because expansion depends not only on a convincing conversational agent, but on connecting it to each operator's existing data and workflows without creating another isolated interface.
Sources checked:
El Referente · ELEVA AI website · ELEVA AI live agents · Encomenda portfolio · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
