I’m happy to share that Mafalda SFU has been recognised as “Best Scalable Real-Time Media Platform 2026” at the Spanish Business Awards organised by EU Business News.

You can find the official listing at https://www.eubusinessnews.com/winners/mafalda-sfu/, and the announcement published on the project website.

It’s always nice when a side project receives some external recognition, especially one that started mostly as an experiment.

How Mafalda SFU started

Mafalda SFU originally started in early 2021 as a way to learn about scaling Mediasoup infrastructures. At that time I was contacted twice within two weeks to help companies solve scalability issues around Mediasoup deployments. That made me curious enough to start experimenting with architectures and tooling around that problem, in case a third one came along.

At some point, I casually mentioned on Twitter that I was working on this kind of Mediasoup scalability technology…. and thanks to that tweet, within less than a month later nine different companies contacted me asking me for help about the same topic.

That was the moment when Mafalda SFU stopped being just an experiment and started to look like something that could become a proper product.

Real-time media is heating up again

After the pandemic many real-time media projects slowed down. The industry had gone through an enormous acceleration during those years, and things naturally cooled down afterwards.

Interestingly, over the last two years interest in WebRTC and real-time streaming seems to be picking up again, mostly driven during 2025 by new use cases around generative AI regarding audio and video assistants. During that time, I’ve worked as Fractional CTO of some startups on that fast-paced area, although my current projects are more related to Deep Tech and infrastructure projects, like satellite VoIP communication, Bluetooth-based audio streaming, or optimisation of large-scale video surveillance systems, so it’s nice to see that real-time media space is heating up again.

A small milestone

Mafalda SFU has always been a relatively small project, but it was able to make itself a name in the WebRTC ecosystem, and I was recognised as a WebRTC expert thanks to it, which is something I’m really proud of. Mafalda SFU has also opened me the door to work with some really interesting companies and projects, starting by Dyte that was the first one to contact me after I published that tweet, and after joining them for two years it became one of the best companies I’ve ever worked for (and I’m really grateful for that), but also because thanks to that WebRTC expertise recognition, I was invited to join Avrioc in Abu Dhabi as Comera WebRTC Architect, and it has been one of the greatest professional achievements of my career… and made me to desire to go back to UAE as soon I have another opportunity like that.

Receiving this award is a nice milestone for the project, and another small brick in a longer journey working on real-time communication systems and distributed architectures. Let’s continue and go for the next one.