Second Year at the VigoEmprende Gala: A City Backing Its Founders
LiveGalicia, one of the projects VigoEmprende has accompanied, returned to the MARCO for the fourth gala. Here is who won, and what we are asking.
On Tuesday evening, September 29, the MARCO in Vigo filled for the fourth Gala VigoEmprende, and LiveGalicia was in the room for the second year in a row. The gala is the annual moment when the Concello recognizes businesses that grew with the help of its free municipal program for entrepreneurs, self-employed workers and new projects. Since June 2020 the program has registered 1,401 projects, accompanied 1,579 people and delivered 7,277 advisory sessions, figures Atlántico reported through August 2026. Between January and August of this year it registered 155 projects and attended 162 people.
Isabel Álvarez, who coordinates the program’s technical team, hosted the evening. The awards came in five categories, and creativity joined them this year as a category of its own after years inside innovation. Mayor Abel Caballero presented the prizes, with music from Antía Pinal, winner of La Voz 2025, and BetoZzz. In his closing speech he said the program costs roughly a quarter of a million euros a year and called it money well spent.
The social impact prize went to Mia Creativa, the studio of Ainoa Domínguez Fernández, which builds visual, cognitive and tactile accessibility into each design, from color to code to textured printed identities. Domínguez has been at this a while. In 2023, as a student at IES Montecelo, she won first prize among higher-level vocational projects in the Diputación de Pontevedra’s Depoemprende school contest with the same idea. Abomakika, a finalist, turns local fruit into artisanal products and gives rural families an income. Its founder said in her video that she started in November 2021, the month she turned 57. Tegra, a pest-control company founded by Víctor Julio Torres, rounded out that category and later took the overall VigoEmprende 2026 prize.
Innovation went to Idearia Soluciones, a Galician worker cooperative founded in 2022 by Irene Oubiña and Fran Otero. It now has five members and builds software for sectors that are rarely digitized, such as mussel farming, along with custom work for maritime services companies. Its Cruise Navigator combines ocean and weather data into efficient navigation recommendations. AC8 Arquitectura placed second. Alexandre Cameselle Vila, a Galicia-registered architect, founded it in 2022 to specialize in converting commercial premises into housing. The studio says on its website that it is the only one in Galicia focused on this work, and cites Vigo’s urban planning office for the scale of the trend: 20 licences in the first five months of 2025 against 28 in all of 2024. In the gala video the studio said it had analyzed more than 200 premises across 24 Galician municipalities. The third finalist, A Modo Estudio, designs with industrialized timber.
The creativity prize went to Las coordenadas de Vigo, the project of the photographer Sabela Valbuena. It is a vending machine that sells a small printed photograph of a Vigo corner for one euro, with the GPS coordinates of the spot where it was shot. The machine travels between local businesses. Atlántico covered its Christmas edition last December, and Metropolitano reported it was a finalist at the 2025 gala. This year it won. Kaox, the specialty coffee shop Valbuena opened in June with Dani Villar on Rúa Illas Baleares, took second. It serves coffee from the Ourense roaster Astro and opens its walls to local artists. Third place went to As Peaky Branders, directed by Iria Otero Fernández. The agency describes itself as a model for conscious, brave brands, and it is known in Vigo for street campaigns such as slope-adapted posters for the magazine A Movida and a campaign against fatphobia for the meal-delivery service Outro Conto. At the gala it showed a campaign that made deliberate Galician mistakes to ease the fear of speaking the language, which caught our attention because we work with newcomers learning to live in Galicia.
RodriDesign, Rodrigo García’s design and web agency, won the consolidated project award. Webflow lists it as a Premium Partner since February 2024, and García said in the video that about 80 percent of its clients are in the United States. Tatarina, which has offered educational leisure for children in Vigo’s Bouzas neighborhood for more than seventeen years, was also a finalist in that category.
We keep going back to this gala because the room shows what entrepreneurship with purpose looks like in practice. There is a gap in the picture that we would like to see filled. In 2025, all of the net growth in Galicia’s RETA self-employment registrations came from people of foreign origin, according to UPTA España and AGTAMAR. The gala coverage does not say how many of the people VigoEmprende has accompanied are newcomers, or how many reached the finalist stage. That is something wr are curious about and will follow up on…. We also intended to be in the room next year.
Our presence at the gala carries a particular weight, because LiveGalicia is one of the projects VigoEmprende has accompanied. We sat in that room as part of the program’s own history, among the 1,401 projects the opening video celebrated, and we know the program from the inside. LiveGalicia works with foreigners, newcomers and returnees who are already living in Galicia and building a life here, many of them as self-employed workers and founders, so a municipal service that guides new businesses through their first decisions sits close to the center of what we do. Being there in person tells the people we work with that those who arrive from elsewhere belong in the city’s conversation about entrepreneurship, and that a business started by a newcomer is a Vigo business like any other. It also gives us standing to ask the questions that follow as participants, and not as bystanders.
Bibliography
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Redacción. “VigoEmprende celebra su cuarta gala tras impulsar 1.401 proyectos empresariales desde 2020.” VigoHoy, September 29, 2026.
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Author: Ángela-Jo Touza-Medina, M.A., LL.M., is a consultant, speaker, author and founder with more than twenty-five years of work across social impact, nonprofit leadership, migration and organizational change. Galician by origin and by return, she founded LiveGalicia in 2017 as a platform for foreigners, newcomers and returnees who decide to build a life in Galicia, and she leads it still, along with its entrepreneurship program, Galipreneur. Her frameworks, the Integration Continuum and the Strategic Alignment Architecture, shape her consulting and her keynotes. She is also a bilingual poet, the author of Sin Tregua | Without Respite, and the author of A Single Mother by Choice: A Journal for Solo Moms. More at byangelajotm.com.
