CDTI Innovacion

CDTI Innovación is the Spanish state's main way of putting public money into business research. Founded in 1977 and run out of Madrid under the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, it spent most of its life handing companies grants and cheap loans for risky R&D. Since 2013 it has also done something a grant agency normally does not: it takes equity, becoming a part-owner of the startups it funds. That equity arm is a programme called Innvierte, and it is the reason CDTI shows up in a database of water investors at all.

Innvierte is built as a co-investor, which is the key to reading this page. CDTI does not write a cheque alone. It only comes in alongside a private venture fund it has vetted, putting public money next to that fund's money in the same round. That design is why CDTI leads almost none of the rounds it joins on (don't) Waste Water's data: its job is not to pick the deal but to make a Spanish deeptech round bigger and safer, so private capital that would otherwise hesitate decides to commit. Patient public money as a confidence signal, not a lead.

CDTI's water bets are a small, telling slice of that machine. All three are Spanish, all three are about measuring or cleaning water: Captoplastic pulls microplastics out of wastewater, Geodesic Innovation builds modular treatment units for disinfection and reuse, and Néboda runs water-efficient vertical farming in Galicia. CDTI came into each one beside a private fund, including BeAble Capital and Moira Capital, the textbook Innvierte shape of public and private money arriving together. Water is not a thesis here; it is what surfaces when a generalist deeptech mandate meets a country worried about drought.

CDTI Innovación keeps growing the equity side, which is what makes the water bets credible. As of June 2026, the freshest move from the Innvierte programme is the Innvierte Deep-Tech and Tech Transfer fund, a 353 million euro vehicle launched in May 2025 with the European Investment Fund to push university and lab spinouts into the market. Most of that firepower will go to health, AI and hard engineering, with water a quiet line near the bottom of the deck. But for a Spanish founder turning a water sensor or a treatment rig into a company, CDTI Innovación is often the anchor that lets the first real round close.