Valencia Innovation Capital

One-liner: the Ajuntament de València's innovation strategy and delivery arm (rebranded from Las Naves) — the single largest municipal hub of startup support in the city, running a nine-tool stack spanning testbeds, grants, accelerators, procurement, labs, public-private partnerships and international connections across eight priority sectors. Ratified 2026 as València's candidacy for European Capital of Innovation 2027.

What a founder gets

VIC organizes support into a nine-tool stack — deliberately access-first, not just funding:

• Valencia Urban Sandbox (program page) — free real-world testing rights over 100+ city resources/infrastructure, with a facilitator and municipal technical staff assigned.
• Proyectos Europeos — connects local startups/institutions into EU innovation projects and consortia.
• Retos de ciudad (City Challenges) — open municipal problem statements startups can pitch solutions against.
• Programas de aceleración — sector accelerators: VIC Gaming Accelerator, Defense Tech Accelerator, the planned Valencia Chip Boost (semiconductor talent, 2026).
• Laboratorios de innovación (Innovation Labs) — turns ideas into piloted solutions with municipal backing.
• CPI - Compra Publica Innovadora — Public Procurement of Innovation: the city itself becomes an innovation customer, buying pre-commercial solutions.
• Convenios público-privados — structured public-private partnership agreements for larger joint initiatives.
• Eventos y misiones inversas — reverse missions and events connecting global talent/investors to the city; the Valencia International Alliance is the flagship of this tool.
• Programas de inversión — VIC Startup Grants / VIC Innovation Grants 2026, direct grant funding up to €50k for strategic-growth projects.
• Talento y Formación — digital-talent training programmes (e.g. AI Skills for Employability, free with official certification).
• Physical home base at La Harinera (C/ Juan Verdeguer 30) for hub tenants including Valencia Game City; administrative HQ at the Edificio Las Naves (C/ Juan Verdeguer 16).

Who it's for

• Any phase, any sector in principle, but VIC organizes its sector work around eight priority verticals: govtech / public innovation & digital services, agrotech, immersive tech & gaming/XR, semiconductors, emergency/security/defence, sustainable tourism, urban tech (smart cities), and digital health & wellbeing.
• Idea-stage founders benefit most from the Sandbox (free real-world validation); growth/scale founders benefit most from the Investment Programmes and International Alliance reverse missions.

How to engage

• Open calls ("Convocatorias"): published on valenciainnovationcapital.com/convocatorias — live examples include PEIC 2026 (Port Entrepreneurship International Congress) and VDS+2026 startup delegation calls.
• General contact: hola@valenciainnovationcapital.com · +34 963 910 477.
• Two addresses: Edificio Las Naves, C/ Joan Verdeguer 16, 46024 València (admin HQ) — and Edificio La Harinera, C/ Joan Verdeguer 30, València (hub/coworking, hosts Valencia Game City and other tenants).
• Newsletter + Agenda on the site track upcoming events/trainings (e.g. WATERGRID workshop, Sales to Scale, ClimateLaunchpad 2026 National Final, EducAI Summer Bootcamp).

Key facts

• Formerly "Las Naves" (301-redirect per CLAUDE.md domain memory) — rebranded as Valencia Innovation Capital, the innovation strategy of the Ajuntament de València.
• 8 priority sectors (as listed above); 9-tool support stack (Sandbox, European Projects, City Challenges, Acceleration Programmes, Innovation Labs, CPI, Public-Private Partnerships, Events & Reverse Missions, Investment Programmes) plus Talent & Training and the International Alliance.
• 2 July 2026: the Ayuntamiento's Pleno unanimously ratified València's candidacy for European Capital of Innovation 2027 — a significant recent validation of VIC's strategy.
• 2 July 2026: news of VIC's tech-specialisation push around AI, photonics, space, and new international connections; a Silicon Valley mission (29 Jun 2026) presented the city's AI + tech-entrepreneurship strategy to leading AI companies, alongside adoption of València's first AI decálogo (ethical-use charter).
• 25 June 2026: Sandbox Urbano extended into the port environment via a "strategic alliance" with the port authority — evidence of the Sandbox's active expansion (relevant context for Valenciaport Sandbox).
• 3 July 2026: VIC announced completion of four GovTech pilots improving public services (news item live on the homepage as of 2026-07-05; no dedicated GovTech program page yet — #status/verify for specifics).
• "Programación 2026" PDF (downloaded 2026-07-05, raw/documents/valencia-innovation-capital-programacion-2026.pdf) is now the authoritative source for VIC's full 2026 roster: 10 acceleration tracks (Seed Startup, Early Stage, Agro·lab, Ciberseguridad, GovTech/Gobe, Impacto Inclusivo e IA, Semiconductores, Emergencias y Tecnologías Duales, Financiación y Publishing en Videojuegos, The Break), 10 TALENT training tracks, the International Alliance 8-stop global roadshow (4YFN, Latitude59, South Summit, Vivatech, F'talks, Smart City Barcelona, Web Summit, Slush), a Women in Tech pillar, >€3M in 2026 subvenciones across 5 lines (Eventos Concurrencia Competitiva €500k, Eventos Estratégicos €650k, Startups Growth €1M, VLC Startup Awards €60k, Proyectos de Innovación €1M — the last is VIC Innovation Grants 2026; the other four are not yet individually wiki-ingested), and Open Innovation programs (Techstars Startup Weekend, ClimateLaunchpad, Hackathon de Movilidad, Hackathon de Defensa).
• Contact re-verification (2026-07-05): a live event page (14 May 2026 semiconductor breakfast) confirms both known contacts current: Paula Llobet Vilarrasa — "Concejala de Turismo, Innovación, Tecnología, Agenda Digital y Captación de Inversiones" (title match). Arturo Castelló García — titled "Subdirector general de València Innovation Capital" on this source, vs. the wiki's prior "Managing Director (Director-Gerente)"; same person, senior VIC leadership confirmed live either way, but exact title should be reconciled (#status/verify). The "Quiénes somos" page itself lists no team member names or titles — VIC does not publish a staff directory; contact confirmations must come from event/news pages instead.
• Runs recurring flagship events: OWN Festival (esports/gaming, 20,000+ attendees), ClimateLaunchpad national final, and multiple sector agrotech initiatives (Agro·lab ToNoWaste, València Food Lab — launched 15 Jun 2026 to position the city as a European food-innovation reference).
• Contact channels: hola@valenciainnovationcapital.com · +34 963 910 477 · C/ Joan Verdeguer 16-24 & 30, 46024 València.

Pipeline — programmes VIC has announced for 2026 #status/verify

(Recorded 2026-09-08 from Valencia Plaza's write-up of VIC's 2026 plan. These are announced intent, not open calls — none had a published convocatoria at the time of capture. Their value is forward notice: a founder in these verticals should be positioning now, and the scan should watch for the convocatorias landing.)

• Infrastructure: the València Semiconductor Hub, housed at the 46 Mediterranean Tech Hub, is the physical pole these semiconductor lines hang off.
• Budget signal: a total annual allocation of €7.9M, of which €3M is personnel — so roughly €4.9M of programme money across the slate. Treat as indicative.
• This slate explains the VLC Startup Awards 2026 category list — GovTech, Agrotech, Digital Health, Semiconductors, Emergency/Security/Defence, Immersive Tech & Gaming, Urban Tech and Sustainable Tourism are the same strategic areas. The prize categories are a preview of where the city intends to put programme money.
• ⚠️ Do not take personnel details from this source — its named-roles block pre-dates the 17 June 2026 leadership change and is stale. The current holder and predecessor are recorded on the relevant private person page; date the article before letting it touch any personnel record.

2026-09-15 scan — convocatorias index checked

VIC's /convocatorias index carried three items only: the Concurso de fotografía «Calor, Cámara…¡Acción!», the VLC Startup Awards and an educational-videogame wellbeing pilot.

• 🔴 Still no Defense Tech Accelerator convocatoria — third consecutive check (09-08, 09-11, 09-15). VIC's own 2026 roster places it in a Sept–Dec 2026 window that is now half gone. This remains the highest-value thing to watch in the defense vertical; see Defense and Dual-Use in Valencia.
• ⚠️ Correction to how this trap was described. A full-text capture on 2026-09-16 shows the index renders each card as the label "Convocatoria" plus a single date, which is the publication date — it publishes no closing date at all, and no open/closed badge appears in the page text. The 2026-09-08 note described a "Closed" badge; that is not what the markup shows, and the 2026-09-15 pass repeated the claim from a summarised fetch rather than the raw page. The real and verifiable hazard is simpler: the only date shown for VLC Startup Awards 2026 is 12.08.2026, its opening, while the call actually closes 25.10.2026 — a date that exists only on the programme page. Never take a date of any kind from this index.
• Newly paged from VIC's instrument stack: Startup Island Valencia Web Summit Lisboa 2026 — the city's Web Summit Lisbon stand slots, €1,100 in-kind for up to 24 startups, closed 6 Sep 2026, recurring. It is a pure access instrument with no money attached, which is precisely why it was invisible to earlier funding-shaped scans.

2026-09-16 — index diff against the 2026-09-06 capture

Comparing full-text captures a fortnight apart (raw/scrapes/valenciainnovationcapital.com__convocatorias.txt):

• Dropped off the index (both now closed): the City Resilience Hack (published 13.07.2026) and Lleva tu startup a Web Summit Lisboa 2026 (published 25.07.2026, closed 06.09.2026). Note the consequence for monitoring: this index silently drops closed calls rather than marking them closed, so a call that vanishes has not been cancelled — it has expired. Both are now paged.

• New on the index (11.09.2026): València impulsa en colegios un piloto pionero de bienestar emocional infantil a través de videojuegos educativos, window 11–30 September 2026, areas Salud digital y bienestar / Tecnologías inmersivas y videojuegos. ⚠️ It is a call for schools, not for startups — applicants are the city's Infantil and Primaria centres, and it is therefore not a founder-applicable instrument and gets no programme page.

  It is worth recording for a different reason: it is VIC's urban-pilot route visible in action. VIC pairs with a local company — here Kokoro Kids, a Valencian adaptive-videogame learning platform — and supplies institutional backing, connection to the education ecosystem, and dissemination of results, while the city's schools supply the test environment. A twelve-month pilot spanning methodological design, technical development, in-school implementation and evaluation. For a founder, the transferable insight is that VIC will co-run a real municipal pilot with an ecosystem company — closer in kind to Valencia Urban Sandbox than to a grant. Kokoro Kids is backed by research with the Universitat Jaume I and UPV, and by The LEGO Foundation's Play for All programme. Not yet indexed as an organization.

• Newly paged from VIC's stack this run: Startup Island Valencia Digital Summit 2026 — the VDS+2026 stand slots (€500 × 24, closed 16 Jul 2026). It had been sitting captured in raw/scrapes/ since 2026-09-06 without ever being ingested; an ingest gap, now closed.

2026-09-23 — index diff against the 2026-09-16 capture

Four new items on /convocatorias, all published after the last scan (the index still shows only publication dates, never closing dates):

• 17.09.2026 — Demostrador de IA Valencia 2026: VIC's GovTech AI demonstrator. Startups with an AI/automation/analytics product already on the market are trained in B2G sales and procurement, then demo directly to the city's departments — possible pilot, contrato menor or tender after. Open to any Spanish fiscal domicile. Closes 5 Oct 2026 23:55. 25 pre-selected → 10 in.
• 18.09.2026 — Coworking Tecnologias Duales Valencia 2026: an EOI FSE+-funded pre-incubation coworking at La Harinera for city residents with early dual-use/emergency/ security/aerospace/5G-6G ideas; ~20 places, 13 Oct – Feb. Tagged Emergencia, seguridad y defensa. ⚠️ This is the first defense-line item to appear after four empty checks — but it is not the promised accelerator; see Defense Tech Accelerator (Program).
• 21.09.2026 — VDS 2026 Ecosystem Pass: 75 free VDS+ 2026 passes, first-come, form closes 12 Oct 23:59.
• 21.09.2026 — Inscripciones STEM Talent Girl: VIC amplifying Fundación ASTI's STEM programme for schoolgirls and students (ESO → university), 21–30 Sep. Not a founder instrument — no programme page.
• Nothing dropped off since 09-16. VIC's 18 Sep monthly roundup also surfaced two partner calls now paged: Nealis Innovation Challenge 2026 (urban-sandbox pilots with Nealis) and, via Enisa, Startups por el Clima Retos 2026.

Relations

• Runs: Startup Island Valencia Digital Summit 2026
• Partners with: Valencia Semicon Startup Lab
• Runs: València Music City
• Runs: València Music City Ayudas
• Runs: Valencia Urban Sandbox
• Runs: Valencia Urban Sandbox (Program)
• Runs: VIC Startup Grants
• Runs: VIC Innovation Grants 2026
• Runs: VIC Innovation Prizes 2026
• Runs: VLC Startup Awards 2026
• Runs: VIC Gaming Accelerator
• Runs: VIC Gaming Accelerator (Program)
• Runs: Valencia Chip Boost
• Runs: Valencia Chip Boost (Program)
• Runs: Defense Tech Accelerator
• Runs: Defense Tech Accelerator (Program)
• Runs: CPI - Compra Publica Innovadora
• Runs: CPI - Compra Publica Innovadora (Program)
• Runs: Valencia International Alliance
• Runs: Valencia International Alliance (Program)
• Runs: Invest in Valencia
• Runs: La Harinera
• Runs: La Harinera (VIC)
• Runs: Valencia Game City
• Runs: VLCi Open Data Valencia
• Partners with: Cybersecurity Startup Program
• Partners with: Cybersecurity Startup Program (Program)
• Partners with: GSIC
• Partners with: 4iCV
• Partners with: Womenalia
• Partners with: Proyecto FUTURA
• See also: Estrategia Urbana Valencia 2030
• See also: Ayuntamiento de Valencia
• See also: Tourism (niche)
• See also: Valenciaport Sandbox
• Runs: Demostrador de IA Valencia 2026
• Runs: VDS 2026 Ecosystem Pass
• Partners with: Coworking Tecnologias Duales Valencia 2026
• Partners with: Nealis Innovation Challenge 2026
• Partners with: The Break Valencia 2026
• Runs: SportCities 2026 (VIC Stand)
• Runs: Premios al Emprendimiento Social de Valencia 2026