Ariel Gesto’s early sales problem was awkwardly reasonable. He had made software to help companies understand their computers. A railway company’s IT director liked the demonstration. But a product from a business consisting of one person presented another question: could an organization entrust its operations to someone who was, effectively, the entire organization?
It is an excellent objection, and an inconvenient one to receive after years of development. The meeting still mattered. The director introduced Gesto to other IT leaders. A potential buyer became a route to more conversations. The software could begin proving itself outside its creator’s machine.
Today, Gesto is the co-founder and CEO of InvGate, based in Buenos Aires. The company’s customers have included NASA, Toyota, KPMG, and the US Army. Its first institutional funding round came in 2023, fourteen years after its formal establishment. The distance between those facts is the interesting part: an engineer had to learn how to make something people could trust, buy, and keep using.
Before the sales calls, an operator
Gesto’s interest in useful software preceded the company. As a teenager, he persuaded his parents to buy computers and let him build systems for the family business. He was already looking for work that a computer could take off someone’s hands. The customer was close enough to provide prompt feedback.
He studied Computer Engineering at UADE, the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa. While at university, he joined Gillette’s young-professionals program and proposed automation projects. Later came systems administration at the Argentine newspaper La Nación, alongside a career that included IT consulting and operations roles at NCR.
Those jobs supplied a particular kind of education. An IT operator has to know what is connected, who is using it, and whether the software licenses add up. Gesto encountered tools he found cumbersome and expensive. InvGate’s own account of its origins places that frustration at the center of the business. He wanted enterprise software that an enterprise could afford and its employees could comfortably use.
A product meets a purchasing department
His first target was asset management: identifying the technology an organization owns and making that inventory useful. He spent years developing the initial product and put his savings into the work. InvGate became a formal company in 2009, after the earlier development period.
The next job required a different vocabulary. Gesto recalled spending six months calling company toll-free numbers, moving between telephone operators in search of someone willing to see a demonstration. He had no sales background. A working product had given him something to show; it had not given him a meeting.
The railway encounter illustrates the difficulty. A buyer can recognize that software solves a problem and still hesitate to buy it. The organization needs confidence in the business behind the screen. For a founder doing everything, the sales conversation exposes how much remains to be built around the code.
What do we own?
Who uses it?
What does it cost?
A company needs more than a programmer
InvGate’s founding team includes Liliana Gary and Gonzalo Sainz-Trápaga. Gary helped professionalize operations; Sainz-Trápaga worked on the service-desk product. Their presence broadened what the business could do, both in its software and in the organization supporting it.
Gesto has pushed back against the appealing picture of a founder succeeding alone. That is a useful correction in his own case. The initial stretch of solitary development makes a tidy opening scene. A lasting enterprise needs more people, more kinds of judgment, and someone other than the original programmer who can answer the difficult questions.
International expansion also involved other people opening doors. An inquiry from Mexico’s intellectual-property institute led to introductions to potential local partners. By 2013, InvGate had opened US offices and sold its asset-management solution to the US Department of State for its embassies worldwide.
The subject remained wonderfully earthbound. Even institutions with international responsibilities need to know where their equipment is. An embassy’s computer may have an interesting address; somebody still has to manage its software.
The money arrived after the business
In July 2023, Gesto announced a $35 million growth round led by Riverwood Capital, with Endeavor Catalyst participating. It was InvGate’s first institutional financing. By then, the company had moved from its initial asset-management tool to a platform spanning IT assets and service management.
The announcement described money for international expansion and further investment in products, service, and teams. It also described a deliberate search for a partner. The capital arrived after years of selling software and learning from the organizations using it.
Formal establishment
in Buenos Aires
US office and
State Department sale
$35M first
institutional round
That sequence helps explain Gesto’s preoccupations. His public writing spends considerable time on how software behaves after purchase: whether workflows can change, whether an update will break a carefully adjusted system, and whether the measurements tell managers anything useful. These are the questions that survive the launch party. They also tend to arrive without catering.
A workflow should belong to its users
In his writing on no-code tools, Gesto argues that the people closest to a process should be able to help improve it. A visual workflow builder can let teams describe recurring tasks and approvals without first becoming programmers. He connects this to enterprise service management, extending methods associated with IT support into other departments.
There is a familiar ambition underneath: reduce the distance between recognizing a problem and doing something about it. A person should not need an engineering project every time a routine changes.
His March 2025 essay on configuration adds a caution. Extensive custom coding can make a system fit the present so tightly that future updates become difficult. He favors built-in ways to adapt workflows and interfaces. His concern is the maintenance burden: specialist dependencies, fragile changes, and software that becomes expensive to keep current. The first demonstration rarely shows you the bill for year five.
When a better service desk looks slower
Gesto’s interest in practical consequences also produces a useful puzzle about measurement. Suppose AI resolves the straightforward requests before they become tickets. Human agents are left with the complicated cases. Their average time to resolution may rise, even though users are getting more of their routine problems solved automatically.
In a September 2024 essay, he argued that conventional service-management metrics could misread that change. A number designed around humans handling every request becomes harder to interpret when automation removes part of the workload. He proposed looking more closely at user satisfaction and the performance of the AI itself.
It is a revealing choice of subject for a software CEO. Selling automation is one task. Explaining why a customer’s dashboard might look worse afterward requires attention to the customer’s actual operation. The improvement and the measurement have to be understood together.
A familiar argument, now with AI
Gesto’s AI commentary ranges from the interface to the rules around it. In December 2024, he described a progression from text assistance to richer interactions within enterprise applications and, eventually, actions across different systems. Natural language, he suggested, would change how people ask software to do things.
He presented that as a direction of travel, with obstacles including how systems share context. It belongs to the same concern that animated the original asset product: making organizational information accessible enough to act on.
In his November 2024 conversation with Matt Beran on Ticket Volume, Gesto discussed matching AI models to specific tasks and the caution customers bring to adoption. Governance, reliable information, and useful results occupied the conversation. For an IT team, the consequences of an incorrect answer can extend beyond an awkward paragraph.
At ENVISION’26 in Buenos Aires on September 24, 2026, he returned to the environment around the model. His opening remarks emphasized the risks of bad data and the work required to turn experiments into dependable operations.
“Complexity multiplies on its own. Simplicity has to be designed.”
Ariel Gesto · ENVISION’26
The room gets bigger
There is another development in Gesto’s story: the conversations have become part of the product’s surroundings. Reflecting on ENVISION’25, he described the user summit as a place for customers to learn from one another and for InvGate to hear how its tools fit into daily work.
His ambition included connecting information to action and creating a community where experience travels between organizations. A customer in one industry may have already worked through a problem another is just encountering. The value lies in the details people can exchange.
That is a considerable change from a founder trying to get through a switchboard. Yet the underlying activity is recognizable. Someone has a problem. Someone else needs to understand it well enough to help. Gesto began with an inventory and a piece of software. Years later, he is still concerned with what happens when the person on the other end starts using it.