Françoise Lavertu Stevens and the things that get stuck

In 2014, Françoise Lavertu Stevens was asked about her clothes. She was directing communications and advertising at El Palacio de Hierro, the Mexican department store whose business includes persuading people to care very much about clothes. The question was reasonable. Her answer suggested she would rather get back to work.

She acknowledged that the glamorous version of her life could feel distant from her own experience. People close to her, she said, knew an entrepreneurial, committed businesswoman. Asked to define her style, she supplied two Spanish words: “¡Sin complicaciones!” Without complications. An excellent ambition for a wardrobe, and a rather demanding one for a career.

Her subsequent jobs have offered complications in generous quantities. At Tesla, she helped establish the Mexican market and took on responsibilities across Latin America and the southeastern United States. At Desteia, which she co-founded with Diego Solorzano and Austin Poore, she is applying AI to the information scattered through international trade. The route from a department store to a customs document looks less peculiar when you consider how much of business consists of getting something promised to become something delivered.

Her working life has repeatedly put her between an international organization and the people expected to make it function locally. That position gives a person an education in details. A campaign needs an audience. A car needs a market. A shipment needs documents that agree with one another. The beautiful presentation eventually encounters someone with a very practical question.

A market is made of people

Lavertu Stevens was born in Canada and became a Mexican citizen. By the time of that 2014 conversation, she was explaining her decision to settle in Mexico through a combination of family and professional understanding. Her three daughters were Mexican. She knew international brands and had learned how to read the particular expectations of the Mexican market.

Her earlier employers included L’Oréal, Louis Vuitton and Walmart. Those businesses give very different meanings to the word value. A cosmetics counter, a luxury boutique and a large retailer each require decisions about products, presentation, purchasing and customers. Moving among them means meeting several versions of the same deceptively small question: what will make this work here?

At Palacio, her answers reached beyond advertising. Discussing Mexican fashion, she talked about materials, manufacturing quality and designers becoming capable businesspeople. A creative idea had to survive the whole journey to retail. This was an executive discussing the less photogenic necessities behind a photogenic industry.

There is a useful clue in that old wardrobe question. Lavertu Stevens was already resisting a description that made the surface more interesting than the work. Years later, her company would be occupied with another surface problem: information can appear perfectly present in an inbox while remaining painfully difficult to use.

Tesla, beyond the showroom

She joined Tesla in 2015. Her responsibilities expanded from Mexico to a broader region encompassing Latin America and the southeastern United States. The work included vehicle launches, energy products and responsibility for the financial performance of her markets. Selling the promise was accompanied by the obligation to build a business around it.

A country manager has to connect functions that are often discussed separately: sales, policy, operations and financing. Each can look sensible on its own. Customers experience the combination. The title sounds tidy; the daily coordination implied by it is considerably less so.

Two former colleagues describe a leader who made time for people. Joao Fernandes remembers being able to speak with her directly despite not reporting to her. Cale Brock, who supported training for Tesla teams, recalls her attention to individuals across levels of seniority. Their accounts emphasize accessibility and respect, the ordinary behaviors through which a large organization becomes bearable to the people inside it.

These recollections matter because her later product decisions would also place weight on the operator’s experience. Employees and customers notice where a process breaks. Listening to them is a way of discovering work that an organizational chart cannot show.

The detour that stayed on course

After Tesla, she helped build two advisory businesses. South View Studio worked on strategic and creative brand building. Utelias brought operating experience to private equity funds and their portfolio companies. Both extended her work across businesses rather than keeping her within a single corporate department.

Her education also crosses familiar boundaries. She earned a commerce degree at McGill University and a master’s degree in statistics at HEC, and completed a top management program at ITAM. Commercial judgment and quantitative training sit comfortably together in a company concerned with making operational information usable.

She also joined the Mexican selection committee and international jury of the Clean Energy Challenge. The assignment connected two interests she had explicitly named: creative enterprise and sustainability. Her advice there was compact: “Work on something significant: if not, your work will become much more difficult.”

That is a practical test for choosing a project. Difficulty is going to arrive anyway. A reason to care gives it somewhere to go. The jury role also fits her willingness to work alongside people whose expertise differs from hers: designers, investors, operators and, eventually, software engineers.

“Work on something significant: if not, your work will become much more difficult”

Françoise Lavertu Stevens · Clean Energy Challenge

A founder goes through the inbox

Desteia was founded in 2023, initially under the name Auba. Lavertu Stevens and Solorzano became co-CEOs, with Poore as CTO. The combination brought her operating background together with two Stanford-trained engineers. Their subject was the fragmented information involved in moving goods across borders.

In February 2025, the company announced an $8 million seed round, bringing total funding to $11.5 million. Autotech Ventures, Nazca and Village Global led the round. The financing was directed toward a business focused on U.S.-Mexico trade, where coordination across companies, transport modes and documents offers plenty of opportunities for a small mistake to acquire a large itinerary.

Her reason for building the company came from problems she had encountered as an operator. Businesses could obtain assessments of risk yet struggle to connect those assessments to particular shipments and decisions. Meanwhile, information essential to daily work remained dispersed across messages and attachments.

The product reads that material and connects it. The conceptual attraction is straightforward: use the communications a business already has, then make the relevant information easier to find and act upon. A person should be able to spend less time reconstructing the situation before deciding what to do about it.

What the operators told her

When Lavertu Stevens describes the development of Desteia, she distinguishes between speaking with directors and speaking with operators. She did both. The operators described repeated searches for context, documents to collect, fields to complete and the pressure of getting each operation right. Their answers shaped the product.

By May 2026, she was explaining a more specific application: Auto-MVE, built around the preparation of Mexico’s electronic customs value declaration. Customers had noticed that Desteia was already collecting documents they also needed for compliance. They asked the company to put that capability to work in the adjacent process.

It is an unusually clear account of product development. Customers recognized a connection between something the software already did and something they still had to do themselves. Lavertu Stevens described the tool as having been built the previous fall. The idea had arrived through the customer’s unfinished work.

Her own account emphasizes gathering documents from email, interpreting different formats, checking information and assembling a file for approval. The final approval remains with a person. It is a revealing design choice: the software takes on preparation, while the user retains a deliberate decision at the end.

Desteia says its preparation process can bring work that took over an hour below five minutes per operation. That is the company’s performance claim. The more personal insight lies in the question she chose to pursue: why should someone repeatedly search for information their company has already received? Even a very modern business can spend an embarrassing amount of time looking for an attachment.

The next room to learn in

In July 2024, Lavertu Stevens joined the board of Logistic Properties of the Americas as an independent director. She brought supply chain AI experience to a business developing and managing logistics real estate. Her career had placed her on both sides of another connection: the physical places where goods sit and the information that explains where those goods should go next.

Her public conversations have also returned to career change itself. In 2024, she joined Karla Berman and Ben & Frank co-founder Mariana Castillo on Oso Trava’s Cracks Summit stage. The discussion covered professional transitions, breadth versus specialization, and the influence people have on those around them. Those subjects are legible in her own sequence of jobs.

Looking ahead to hosting a logistics AI summit in Mexico City in October 2025, she described entering the field with curiosity and some fear. She wanted to participate in a change affecting industries she had operated in. The admission gives the transition a human scale. Prior experience can help someone enter a new field without making that field feel familiar.

She has also spoken about wanting her daughters to see women in leadership and understand that they can pursue their own interests. It adds a personal audience to a career conducted across markets, teams and boardrooms. Someone close to her is watching what a working life can include.

The clothes question now seems like a small preview of the larger story. Lavertu Stevens keeps returning attention to the work behind appearances: the business behind fashion, the organization behind a vehicle launch, the documents behind a shipment. “Without complications” remains an appealing ambition. At Desteia, she has made some of those complications her business.