Over the next nine months the company will work with CDL's mentors on a set of concrete objectives: validating the next capability gate of its ETR engine, converting its industrial pilots into annual licences and completing its current funding round.
An objectives-based program, not a classroom
Creative Destruction Lab is a nonprofit organization founded at the Rotman School of Management (University of Toronto) that supports massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies. Its program is built around intensive full-day sessions every eight weeks, in which mentors — exited entrepreneurs, angel investors and leading scientists — assess progress and set the venture's next short-term objectives. Companies that fail to make progress leave the program; those that do gain access to a global network of founders, researchers and investors across CDL's sixteen locations on four continents.
CDL-San Sebastián, located in the Euskadi Technology Park in Miramón (Donostia-San Sebastián), is delivered in partnership with BIC Gipuzkoa and IESE Business School and runs two streams, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum. The AI stream is aimed at founders building applied and frontier AI technologies with strong technical differentiation and clear paths to real-world impact, including edge AI and embedded systems, AI security and reliability, and green, efficient AI — three areas where ETR is designed to compete.
What The Mindkind brings to the program
ETR (Emotional Theory of Rationality) is a CELL-based emergent cognitive architecture that combines adaptability, resource efficiency and native traceability. Rather than a single large model trained on big data, ETR is built from small adaptive units that process bounded information locally and interact through a shared knowledge graph, where events, relations, decisions and their consequences are stored in an inspectable space. Traceability is a property of the architecture, not a report reconstructed afterwards.
That property is about to become a purchasing requirement. Under the EU AI Act, standalone high-risk systems must meet traceability, logging, documentation and human-oversight obligations from 2 December 2027, and AI embedded in regulated products from 2 August 2028. The Mindkind's beachhead is precisely there: critical industrial systems — quality inspection, process control, predictive maintenance — in Spain and the EU, entering through the industrial network of ITA, the Technological Institute of Aragon and the company's technology partner since 2020.
The company reaches CDL with its first paying customer, three industrial pilots in the pipeline, €1.4M in public funding secured (NEOTEC–CDTI, ITA public-private collaboration, NextGenerationEU and the Government of Aragon), Step 2 of the EIC Accelerator, ENISA certification as an emerging company and the "Faro AI" award at ICEX Desafía Day 2026. It is currently raising a €5M round, 49% of which is committed by SETT, the Spanish state deep-tech investment vehicle.
"CDL is the kind of program we were looking for: no lectures, just objectives, mentors who have built and sold science-based companies, and a network that reaches the investors and industrial partners we need," said Mario Garcés, CEO of The Mindkind. "Our next milestone is BEE, operational causal learning: a system that learns action–consequence relationships, adapts when conditions change and keeps an explicit decision trail under real-world compute constraints. That is what we will be measured on in Donostia."
Next steps
The program runs from autumn 2026 to mid-2027 with sessions every eight weeks. The Mindkind's objectives for the cohort are the BEE validation gate (release ETR 0.6), the conversion of at least three pilots into annual engine licences, and the closing of the current round alongside SETT.
About The Mindkind
The Mindkind (Castejón de Sos, Huesca, Spain) develops ETR, a cognitive architecture for traceable, adaptive and efficient intelligence. The ETR engine ships as B2B software integrated into third-party systems through SaaS, on-premise or edge deployments, complementing statistical and generative AI components where decisions must remain auditable and controllable. The company's roadmap is organized as evolution-inspired capability levels — from reactive regulation to general cognition — each defined by a measurable benchmark and a commercial use case.
About Creative Destruction Lab
Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is a nonprofit organization that delivers an objectives-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies. Founded in 2012 at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, CDL operates sixteen sites, including Toronto, Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Milan, Melbourne and San Sebastián. CDL-San Sebastián is delivered in partnership with BIC Gipuzkoa and IESE Business School.
Links
- CDL-San Sebastián: https://creativedestructionlab.com/locations/san-sebastian/
- CDL-San Sebastián Artificial Intelligence stream: https://creativedestructionlab.com/streams/ai/san-sebastian/
- BIC Gipuzkoa: https://www.bicgipuzkoa.eus/
