Woodflow® Wins Chile’s Avonni National Innovation Award

On November 3, 2026, Woodflow® received the Premio Nacional de Innovación Avonni in the Housing and City of the Future category, presented by the Cámara Chilena de la Construcción (CChC). The award is granted by ForoInnovación together with El Mercurio, TVN and Chile’s Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation. This 20th edition drew 1,042 applications, from which expert panels selected 36 finalists across 12 categories. CTO and co-founder Daniel del Río, Head of Business Development Diego Lyon and Business Development & Brand Manager Catalina Véliz received the award at the ceremony held at TVN in Santiago.

Woodflow® shapes wood into computationally optimized three-dimensional geometries, getting more performance out of less material. In construction, the technology is applied through Woodflow-core, a structural slab weighing around 10% of an equivalent reinforced concrete slab. A full-scale 10,000 mm prototype passed a three-month creep test under office loads in Germany, with a deformation of 12 mm against the 32 mm recommended by the European standard. According to a life cycle assessment by an independent engineering firm, a 10,000 × 2,500 mm Woodflow-core slab stores around 2.2 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent, while a reinforced concrete slab of the same dimensions emits around 1.9 tonnes in production.

“We are not proposing wooden buildings. We propose that builders keep building as they do and replace only the slab, the heaviest and most concrete-intensive element of the structure,” said Andrés Mitnik, CEO of Strong by Form. Following the €5.8 million first closing of its Series A, the company is preparing its pilot plant in Spain and its first pilot buildings with European construction companies.

Although most of Woodflow’s development and manufacturing takes place in Santiago, its main markets are in Europe and the United States, where Woodflow-skin 3D wall panels are already sold. “Winning the Avonni Award is a way of showing that deep tech in materials can be developed from Chile, a field where the country has every condition thanks to its forest base and human capital, but where few companies have managed to bring that technology to global markets,” Mitnik added. Strong by Form was the first investment of CMPC Ventures and, in 2020, won the first edition of El Mercurio’s Startup of the Year award. We thank Avonni, the CChC and the jury for this recognition.

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