Jordi Romero, co-founder of Factorial, Pau Sarsanedas, co-founder and CEO of GPAInnova, and Josep Dosta, founder and CEO of WOODYS, are the three candidates who are running to win the 32nd Young Entrepreneur Award. AIJEC, the Association of Young Entrepreneurs of Catalonia, announces the finalists of a very special edition of the Young Entrepreneur Award as it coincides with the 40th anniversary of the reference entity in the Catalan entrepreneurial ecosystem. This year, the jury of the Young Entrepreneur Award has taken another step in its task of highlighting talent and entrepreneurial spirit and the finalists have been chosen from a selection of outstanding candidates in previous editions, with the aim of highlighting those trajectories that have consolidated their impact over time.
In the category of Best Business Initiative for the most innovative business idea with future prospects, the three finalist projects in this 32nd edition of the Young Entrepreneur Award are Madequa, Pets and Vets and Truecold.
The AIJEC will live this 2025 a very special year, the entity celebrates its forty years of history alongside the country’s young entrepreneurs. To commemorate this, on October 16, the Hotel Casa Fuster (Passeig de Gràcia, 132, Barcelona) will host a double gala, the celebration of the entity’s 40th anniversary and the awarding of the 32nd edition of the Young Entrepreneur Award, consolidated as one of the most important entrepreneurship awards held in Catalonia. With these recognitions, the AIJEC wants to distinguish the work, effort and perseverance of young entrepreneurs capable of generating jobs and promoting business projects.
The finalists for the Young Entrepreneur Award
Jordi Romero co-founded Factorial in 2016. The Catalan technology company offers a comprehensive business management platform that serves more than 14,000 companies in more than 10 countries, helping them optimize processes and make better decisions. In 2025, it exceeded $100 million in recurring revenue and, since 2022, it has been valued at more than $1 billion, at which point it became a unicorn. The company currently has 1,400 employees and has hired more than 500 in the last year.
Pau Sarsanedas i Millet is co-founder and CEO of GPAINNOVA, a multinational group in the technology sector founded in 2013 in Barcelona, made up of several companies and with multiple lines of business (metal surface treatment solutions, marine engineering, New Space, medical devices, power electronics and industrial adhesives). Currently, the activity revolves around mechanical and electronic engineering.
Josep Dosta founded WOODYS at just 23 years old after spotting a business opportunity in the world of optics with the design and manufacture of wooden glasses. Dosta was European champion in wakeskating, a water sport in which a wooden board is used to surf the waves produced by a boat. During his training, his glasses would always fall into the water until one day he had the idea of creating glasses that floated. After researching, he found that the key was in the sheets of wakeboards. And so Woodys began, manufacturing wooden glasses from recycled wakeskating boards. Currently, the company run by Dosta no longer works with wood, but offers designer glasses made with high-quality materials such as acetate, titanium or metal, and is present in 75 countries with more than 15,000 points of sale.
The finalists for Best Business Initiative
Madequa Health is a company founded by three Catalan entrepreneurs that wants to improve the health of women in menopause with natural treatments backed by scientific evidence. Its mission is to lead innovation in women’s health and break the taboo that has historically surrounded this stage. Despite developing food supplements, Madequa applies standards specific to the pharmaceutical sector – selection of molecules, formulation protocols, quality and clinical validation -, which allows them to offer safer and more effective solutions than most current products on the market. With the collaboration of more than 50 professionals from different medical specialties, the company has identified three distinct stages of menopause (Premenopause, Perimenopause and Postmenopause) and has created the first comprehensive and specific treatments for each phase, designed to relieve visible symptoms and prevent silent complications that affect women’s health in the long term.
Pets & Vets is the first all-in-one platform in Spain for animal health and well-being, connecting veterinary clinics, guardians and specialized service providers. Its mission is to digitize and simplify veterinary management, optimizing professionals’ time and improving the guardians’ experience. The platform allows, in a single place, to book appointments with veterinarians and other animal health professionals, digitize the card and medical history to have everything safely in the cloud, and receive reminders of vaccinations and treatments. It also offers access to thousands of professionals in the same space, valuable resources on its health blog and a marketplace section with exclusive discounts on more than 100 leading brands in the pet care sector, such as insurance, GPS, natural cosmetics, among others. Since its creation, the company has achieved coverage in more than 40 provinces in Spain and continues to grow with the aim of making life easier for professionals and animal lovers.
Truecold was born with the aim of becoming the global hub for cold chain data, optimizing temperature-controlled logistics to prevent the waste of 35 billion dollars a year in medicines and more than 500 million tons of food. Its platform is based on internationally benchmarked IoT devices that guarantee real-time traceability and process large volumes of data using artificial intelligence algorithms to detect anomalies and assess risks dynamically. In this way, it facilitates the exchange of information between all supply chain agents and consolidates itself as an intelligent temperature data ecosystem. This innovative solution has allowed Truecold to obtain funding and recognition in national and international forums such as Logistics 4.0, Ports 4.0, Vaccine Industry Excellence, Farmaforum or IoTWC, while also boosting the growth of the team and the scalability of the project with top-level collaborators.
The leading awards for entrepreneurship in Catalonia
The finalists for the Young Entrepreneur Award and the Best Business Initiative will defend their projects before a jury made up of representatives of the country’s main public and private institutions linked to the business world, as well as various media outlets.
This year, for the first time, the jury’s deliberations and the awards gala will be held on the same day, Thursday, October 16, and in the same space, the Hotel Casa Fuster in Barcelona. In the morning, the finalist projects will be presented to the jury and, in the afternoon, the AIJEC 40th anniversary gala and the award ceremony for the 32nd edition of the Young Entrepreneur Award will be held.
During the event, the AIJEC will present the different recognitions that complement the main prizes. The best blue economy project or company will be distinguished with the Blue Entrepreneurship Recognition, which aims to reward initiatives that promote sustainability, innovation, the economy, equality, diversity and other values of public interest in relation to this area.
In addition, the Social Entrepreneurship Recognition will be awarded, aimed at companies with a social objective; the Business Linguistic Quality Recognition, to positively promote the use of the Catalan language in the company; the Best Business Career Recognition, aimed at an experienced entrepreneur with a consolidated project; and the Future Entrepreneur Recognition, which rewards an entrepreneurial project developed by children under the age of eighteen.
A special edition under a new presidency
This edition of the Awards will also be the first under the presidency of Vicenç Del Mar Mullor, who took office last July with the desire to promote a more rejuvenated, digital and open AIJEC to the world. “Celebrating forty years encourages us to renew our commitment to innovative entrepreneurship with a positive impact,” highlights Del Mar.