On September 10, close to fifty people who usually only cross paths on LinkedIn sat in the same room at our Madrid HQ. No booths. No pitches. No one scanning your badge for a follow-up email you never asked for. Just the composites, advanced materials and mobility ecosystem, doing what it does best once nobody is trying to sell it anything: talking.
Cercle de Composites Madrid invitation
That was the first Cercle de Composites Madrid, hosted by Managing Composites together with Catalysium and Dassault Systèmes. First edition outside Paris. First time we tried this format at home. Here is what actually happened, and why we think this is only the beginning.
Ten years in the making, one first for Madrid
The Cercle de Composites is not a new idea, and that is exactly the point. Ten years ago, Yannick Willemin and Ginger Gardiner started a small, curated gathering in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris: bring interesting people from across the composites world together, keep the format personal, and create the conditions for conversations that would not happen anywhere else. No stage full of logos. No hard sell. Just the right people in the same room.
A decade later, the format finally left Paris for the first time, and it landed in Madrid, hosted by Managing Composites and co-organized with Dassault Systèmes as a founding partner. Same spirit, new postcode: composites, innovation and advanced manufacturing, in motion.
Two parts, one day: Guest in Residence + The Cercle
We split the day in two, on purpose.
- Guest in Residence (from 12:00): before the wider community arrived, a select group of travelling guests sat down for curated, pre-matched 1:1 meetings in private rooms at our HQ. Twenty minutes each. No hunting, no awkward hovering. Matches only happened when both sides said yes.
- The Cercle (from 19:00): the room opened up for everyone. A handful of short talks designed to spark discussion, not deliver a keynote, followed by an apéro dînatoire that did the rest. Managing Composites talked about doing cool sh*t (and meaning it), Dassault Systèmes and Catalysium each brought their own angle on where the ecosystem is heading.
No exhibition booths. No sales pitches. That was the whole philosophy, and it is the reason the format has survived a decade unchanged: the right people, having the right conversations, in a room small enough that it actually works.
Óscar Puente from Dassault Systèmes , Lluc MartÍ CEO of Managing Composites & Yannick Willemin from Catalysium.
Who was actually in the room
This is where it got interesting. The guest list crossed sectors most events never quite manage to mix in one room: Aernnova Composites, Airbus, Acciona and Gonvarri sat next to founders like Reinforce3D, MOOEVO, Biofibix, Zyon Helmets and Prenso. Saertex and Astar, the people who actually make the material, next to Backfund and Inveready, the people who fund what gets built with it. Sports Dynamic Lab and Liux next to the Audi F1 Team’s Head of R&D. And, because the Cercle has never been just about composites on paper, we also welcomed Bjørn Dunkerbeck: 42-time windsurfing world champion, and living proof that lightweight materials and high performance are the same conversation, whichever industry you come from.
Startups next to corporates. Investors next to the engineers building the thing they might fund. Spanish composites next to a genuinely international crowd. That mix was not an accident, it was the entire design brief.
Why we did it this way
Ahead of the event, every guest received a full breakdown of who else would be in the room, written honestly. Then a simple rule: pick who you want to meet, we only make the introduction if the interest is mutual. A wish, not a booking.
But the real payoff showed up later, once the room opened up for everyone at 19:00. Half the 1:1s from the afternoon picked back up at the Cercle, only this time with reinforcements: a colleague, a supplier, an investor who’d been half-listening from across the room got pulled into the conversation. A technical question raised over coffee at noon turned into an introduction to a materials supplier by the bar that evening. A pitch one founder had rehearsed for a single investor ended up being told, informally, three more times before the night was over.
That is the actual design: Guest in Residence sets the table, the Cercle is where the meal happens. One without the other is just a meeting, or just a party. Together, they are the only version of «networking» worth doing.
The room at Cercle de Composites Madrid 2026
What this means for the Madrid ecosystem
Hosting the first Cercle de Composites outside Paris in our own HQ was not just a nice afternoon. It signals something we have been saying for a while: Madrid, and Spain more broadly, has the density of composites talent, industrial demand and capital to hold its own high-level ecosystem gathering, not just attend one abroad. Bringing Dassault Systèmes and Catalysium along for a first edition on Spanish soil is the clearest vote of confidence we could ask for.
Conversations at Cercle de Composites Madrid 2026
Several conversations that started in that room on September 10 are already continuing. Some will likely turn into partnerships, investments or projects over the coming months, which is really the entire point of an ecosystem event like this one: not selling in the room, but building outside it.
The right people. The right conversations. One evening. See you at the next Cercle!