María González Manso and the future hiding in an ordinary phone

The telephone had a useful advantage over the other candidates: people already knew what to do when it rang. María González Manso and her co-founder had tried wearables and sensors while developing Tucuvi. After testing, they chose something simpler. An ordinary mobile or landline could carry the conversation. The unfamiliar technology would sit behind a familiar act.

There is an enjoyable lack of ceremony in that decision. A company working with artificial intelligence had found its way to an object with decades of experience on the kitchen table. No new device needed to be introduced to the household. No installation needed to become a small family project. Picking up was enough.

González Manso is Tucuvi’s CEO and co-founder, a Spanish engineer whose public biography now includes a European innovation prize and a company funding round of $20 million. The milestones are easy to arrange into a neat upward line. Her earlier choices tell a more interesting story: a student discovering entrepreneurship in Brazil, an engineer learning the business side of industry, and a founder willing to simplify what reached the user.

The telephone gets the part

The original idea had a family connection. González Manso’s two grandmothers lived alone in their village. Their circumstances helped inspire the project she described in 2019. It was a starting point close enough to make the question concrete. What would work in an actual home, for an actual person, without demanding a new set of technical habits?

Testing wearables and sensors gave the founders an answer they could act on. They moved toward the telephone. Their intention was to let people use something they already understood. That decision placed a limit on the product’s appetite for novelty. The engineering could advance without requiring the person at the other end to advance along with it.

“Hay que adaptar la tecnología a los mayores.”

María González Manso, 2019
“Technology has to adapt to older people.”

A telephone call also has a recognisable beginning. It rings; someone answers; a conversation follows. Software companies can spend considerable effort teaching people where to click. González Manso’s choice started with an interaction that had already been learned. The phone had done its onboarding years earlier.

That helps explain her interest in user experience and voice interface design, both named on her personal website. Voice is the visible choice here, even if it has nothing to show on a screen. The question of how a person encounters technology runs through the company’s beginnings.

A year in Brazil, then a business to learn

González Manso studied engineering at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and completed her studies in 2017. Her final university year took her to Brazil, where she studied and worked on research at Universidade de São Paulo. She identifies that period as the beginning of her relationship with entrepreneurship.

The distinction matters. A degree can provide the tools for a career without deciding what shape the career will take. Her year abroad gave her experience of creating a project and entering competitions. Returning to Spain, she expected that she would eventually start a company. Eventually, however, still leaves a great deal to organise.

She worked at Medtronic in marketing and business innovation. Her early career therefore included the commercial side of technology as well as an engineering education. The work asked her to consider how a product travels beyond its technical development, toward the people and organisations expected to use it.

Her subsequent education included usability and user experience at Escuela de Organización Industrial, and decision-making and innovation at Universidad de Alcalá. These are revealing additions to an engineering background. They concern the encounter with the user, the choices a business makes, and the work of turning an idea into a practical undertaking.

She also passed through Bankinter’s Akademia innovation programme. The accumulation is less tidy than a founder origin myth and more useful: university, research abroad, industry, and further learning. Her 2020 biography records Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Brazil remained part of her story in a language she could continue to use.

Two founders and the first yes

In 2019, she co-founded Tucuvi with Marcos Rubio. Both had engineering backgrounds. Their industry experience had taken them in different directions: Rubio toward technical work, González Manso toward business. The partnership brought those experiences into the same company.

Both were first-time entrepreneurs. González Manso has described an early problem that rarely survives into the celebratory version of a company’s history: where to begin. Finding the first customer followed. Someone had to decide that this young business deserved a chance.

There were programmes to help with the parts neither founder could simply wish into existence. Through Citizen Bootcamp, they learned from specialists in legal matters, finance, and digital marketing. González Manso described gaining a broader understanding of what creating a company involved. A working idea still needed a working business around it.

In a later account of another early programme, she emphasised planning, prioritising, and defining strategy. Those verbs are modest enough to escape the souvenir T-shirt. They are also specific. A founder needs to decide what receives attention now, what can wait, and which assumptions require a test.

Her Product Hackers conversation returned to the role of reputation, awards, and competitions in earning customer confidence. The episode also explored the difficulty of developing voice products and managing a growing technical team. The public-facing company was expanding; so was the job she had to learn to do.

A prize with a precise name

In December 2020, Spain’s Instituto de la Juventud announced González Manso as the recipient of its National Youth Award in Science and Technology. The award recognised a young engineer who had already become a company founder. It provided an early public marker for work still near its beginning.

That same year, she was selected among the 100 Leaders of Tomorrow associated with GapSummit. By June 2023, Forbes was describing her as a member of its 30 Under 30 list. Different institutions were now placing her work before different audiences.

On March 18, 2024, the European Prize for Women Innovators ceremony in Brussels added another marker. She won Rising Innovators, the category for women innovators under 35. The award carried €50,000. Naming the category matters: it tells us exactly what she won, without inflating a specific recognition into a grander claim.

The award also placed her within a wider community of women founders. Recognition can be read as an individual achievement, but these programmes give people a chance to meet peers as well. González Manso had already benefited from international support, including a programme that helped Tucuvi establish a foothold in the United States.

The girls building a recycling app

There is another kind of result in González Manso’s biography: an application designed to improve recycling. It belonged to a Technovation team she mentored. Her LinkedIn profile records mentoring two senior teams, one of which won nationally and became a global finalist.

The mentoring covered more than the mechanics of making an app. Participants identified a problem, developed a response, learned to communicate their idea, and considered a commercial strategy. The shape resembles the work of a startup in miniature, with younger people doing the building.

González Manso has also spoken about girls who hesitate to choose technical study because they have been told it is too difficult, or because they cannot name a woman who has done it before. Her response has been to help make those examples visible. A possible future is easier to picture when it has a person in it.

The recycling project makes that work tangible. It gives the mentoring a particular subject and a particular outcome. Rather than leaving encouragement as a kind sentiment, a team made something, entered it, and took it beyond the national stage. The founder who had learned through projects and competitions was helping others get a turn.

A watch, a voice, and a question of function

Her 2023 discussion of watchmaking offered an unexpected window into her approach. Asked about the relationship between technology and traditional craftsmanship, she returned to function. A watch has a purpose. New design should remain answerable to that purpose and to the person using it.

It is an unusually apt subject for a founder whose product work began with an ordinary phone. Both objects allow the complicated engineering to live behind a simple encounter. You can appreciate the mechanism without being asked to operate every part of it.

She also discussed the founders’ role in a company’s vision and culture, particularly in its early years. At the time, she expressed an intention to remain involved in Tucuvi. The comment gives ambition a longer horizon than the next announcement. Building something includes deciding what should survive as it changes.

Twenty million dollars, still the same interface

On January 8, 2026, Tucuvi announced a $20 million Series A. Cathay Innovation and Leadwind led the round, with participation from Frontline Ventures, Seaya Ventures, and Shilling. The stated plans included commercial expansion and continued product development.

For González Manso, this was a new scale of company-building. More capital gives a business resources to pursue its plans; it also gives the founder more work to organise. The announcement belongs to Tucuvi, and its significance here is the next stage of the enterprise she helped start.

The thread connecting that stage to the beginning remains easy to recognise. She studied how to build technology, learned about bringing it into a market, sought help with the business, and chose an interface people could approach without instruction. Along the way, she helped younger teams learn to make and explain their own ideas.

The ordinary phone earns its place in this story. It was familiar enough to be overlooked, useful enough to keep. González Manso’s future arrived with a sound people already recognised. They could simply pick up.