A replacement part has a talent for looking obvious after it arrives. Before that, it is a riddle with a barcode. Which brand, which model, which year, which engine, which side, which seller, which warehouse? In the automotive aftermarket, a missing attribute is not a typographical nuisance. It can send the wrong object across a country. Gaston Zelerteins built his second company inside that ambiguity.
The Argentine programmer turned entrepreneur is the co-founder and CEO of Alephee, a platform that helps automotive brands and distributors organize catalogs, supply reseller networks and manage sales across online marketplaces. Its real product is coordination. Manufacturers know what they make. Wholesalers know what they carry. Sellers know where customers are looking. Alephee tries to make those separate facts behave like one system.
It is the sort of business that becomes interesting precisely where a glossy ecommerce demo ends. Checkout is tidy. The supply chain behind it is an argument conducted in spreadsheets, PDFs, photographs, price lists and inventory feeds. Zelerteins saw the argument and decided software could translate.
First, learn the cloud
Zelerteins began in software in 1999, first as a developer and later as a solutions architect. At 24, in 2005, he co-founded Perception Group with Jonathan Saiegh. The company built and implemented software across Latin America and the eastern United States. It became a Microsoft Gold Partner and an early regional participant in Microsoft's cloud ecosystem, working with products including Office 365, Azure, SharePoint and Dynamics.
That first company supplied more than technical experience. It taught Zelerteins a durable strategic habit: stand close to a large platform, study the problems its reach reveals, and build the missing layer. Perception Group grew beside Microsoft as enterprise computing moved toward the cloud. Zelerteins learned how a smaller company could use a large partner's ecosystem without surrendering the difficult work of product, service and sales.
He also learned to enjoy complicated work. Years later, describing his CEO role, he called the task of aligning market needs, product teams, sales and support “complex, but fun.” The line is revealing. Some founders advertise simplicity. Zelerteins appears to collect complexity, provided it can eventually be made useful.
- 1999Begins working in software, moving from programming into solutions architecture.
- 2005Co-founds Perception Group and builds around Microsoft's emerging cloud stack.
- 2017Co-founds Alephee after investigating automotive catalog problems with Mercado Libre.
- 2021Alephee joins Y Combinator's Summer batch.
- 2024Receives Universidad de Palermo's professional achievement award for technological entrepreneurship.
- 2026Sets out an AI-native direction for Alephee after an AWS founder program in Silicon Valley.
A company hiding in the catalog
The Alephee opportunity arrived through another large platform. While Zelerteins and his future co-founders examined the automotive sector with Mercado Libre, the marketplace explained a stubborn constraint. Industries with huge product ranges and thousands of resellers could not scale online if every seller had to assemble the same intricate catalog from scratch. The team proposed a technical answer. Mercado Libre became an early investor.
A car part is unusually demanding digital merchandise. A shirt can be medium and blue. A component may fit one model, one version and a run of specific years, while appearing almost identical to the part beside it. Every listing needs structured attributes, images, compatibility, current price and available stock. Brands want their existing reseller networks involved, but marketplaces do not automatically give brands and resellers a shared operating system.
Alephee's answer grew into a suite. Brands create and distribute product information. Wholesalers provide digital purchasing. Sellers connect inventory to channels such as Mercado Libre, Amazon and, more recently, Shopee in Brazil. A communities product helps participants find one another. Analytics returns a view of what is selling and where. What began as catalog plumbing becomes a commercial network.
Those were the figures Zelerteins shared in October 2025. The numbers matter, but the more useful insight sits underneath them. Every structured product record is a small treaty. The brand, seller and marketplace agree that this object has these properties and belongs in these searches. Ecommerce looks like movement. Before anything moves, somebody has to establish a shared truth.
Brazil refuses the copy button
Alephee began in Buenos Aires with a regional ambition. Argentina, Zelerteins has said, naturally encourages founders to think beyond one national market. It is receptive to new technology and useful for testing products, but the domestic ceiling is visible early. The founders knew Brazil would be the consequential next move. A year after starting, they went to São Paulo to work with Mercado Libre and find the first local brands and distributors.
The move was more immersion than launch plan. Zelerteins later described the challenge as localizing, listening, understanding the culture and creating a local team with the same passion for the project. He relocated and started from zero. Investors thought the decision was crazy. The stubbornness paid in education: Brazil taught Alephee that regional scale is not the multiplication of an Argentine template.
Once the company had learned that lesson, expansion across Spanish-speaking markets became less mysterious. Alephee established local operations in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico and served additional markets including Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. The software could remain connected. The approach to a customer had to acquire a local accent.
Do not hire a flag on an org chart and call it a market. Go close enough to be corrected.
The founder as translator
Zelerteins's public description of his role is strikingly broad. He guides vision, marketing and communications, sales and product; he handles institutional relationships and new alliances. In his own telling, the job is to understand the players, their problems and their challenges, then align the people building, selling and supporting products around a common future.
This helps explain his affection for partnerships. Microsoft, Mercado Libre, Y Combinator and AWS are not decorative names in the company history. Each supplied a different grammar. Microsoft taught cloud distribution. Mercado Libre exposed marketplace constraints. Y Combinator widened the fundraising and scaling context. AWS now sits inside Alephee's infrastructure and AI plans. Zelerteins's contribution has been translating what those ecosystems make possible into something an auto-parts distributor can use on Monday morning.
He is equally direct about what founders should build: a business based on an examined, existing problem that people will pay to solve; a team that works with passion; a product that evolves with customers. At Universidad de Palermo, where he earned his informatics degree, he advised entrepreneurs to be curious and daring, to put knowledge into practice and to dream larger than feels comfortable.
An award, and an unusual pause
In 2024, Universidad de Palermo gave Zelerteins its Premio Logro Profesional in technological entrepreneurship. His reaction was not a victory lap. The award surprised him. Daily work, he said, rarely leaves time to think. Recognition made him remember earlier steps and notice how professional and personal life had traveled together.
That pause adds texture to an otherwise relentless chronology. Zelerteins is married to Gabriela and is the father of three daughters, Nina, Amelie and Ambar. His Y Combinator biography calls him a proud father and a dreamer who wants to change the world with software that helps societies evolve. Ambition can become weightless in a founder biography. Here it sits beside school visits, family and the admission that remembering where one came from is useful.
At ORT Argentina, he once returned to speak with 60 computing students. He traced the path from programmer and architect through Perception Group, Alephee and Y Combinator, then took a photograph with his favorite student: his niece Vicky. It is a charmingly domestic ending to a talk about cloud platforms and venture accelerators. The future had come back to the classroom that helped him enter software.
AI arrives after the boring work
By 2024, Zelerteins was already talking about using artificial intelligence to anticipate stock shortages and move the correct parts where they would be needed. In 2026, after joining an AWS program for Latin American startups in Silicon Valley, he made the direction more explicit. Alephee was building an AI-native platform for the aftermarket supply chain, with attention to security, data protection and governance as well as models.
The sequencing is important. Alephee did not wake up with a language model and go hunting for an industry. It spent years organizing product data, connecting inventory, building integrations and learning how commercial networks miscommunicate. That history gives AI something more useful than novelty: context. A model may help match parts, flag bad records, forecast a gap or execute a workflow, but only because the system beneath it knows what a part, seller and stock position mean.
Zelerteins has said that the engineering process changed in less than a year and that builders who do not adapt are falling behind. Yet his larger story offers a friendly correction to technological impatience. The new layer compounds the old one. Clean catalogs remain necessary. Local trust remains slow. Customers still pay to solve real problems. The future may arrive quickly; the present still needs excellent bookkeeping.
The heart is a network
Zelerteins has called Alephee's ambition “the heart of ecommerce” for the automotive aftermarket. The metaphor is revealing. A heart is not the whole body and does not pretend to be. It makes circulation possible. Alephee wants brands, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and workshops to find one another, exchange reliable information and keep products moving through a fragmented continental market.
The company story can be read as a sequence of technologies - enterprise software, cloud, marketplaces, AI. It is more coherent as a sequence of connections. Zelerteins and Saiegh built beside Microsoft. They joined with former Microsoft executive Javier Neumann to start Alephee. Mercado Libre became an investor and distribution partner. Y Combinator connected the founders to global capital. AWS became an infrastructure and learning partner. Each new relationship enlarged the problem the company could responsibly attempt.
And the problem remains satisfyingly physical. Somewhere, a vehicle needs a specific piece of metal, rubber or plastic. Somewhere else, that piece sits on a shelf. Between them lies a catalog, a distributor, a seller, a marketplace and several opportunities to be wrong. Gaston Zelerteins has spent his second act teaching those layers to understand one another. When they do, the correct part becomes findable. The internet, for once, has learned exactly what it is looking at.