The first version of Emi Labs did something modest and slightly radical: it listened. A person looking for work could answer questions in a familiar chat interface, and the software would turn those answers into a résumé. No gleaming career portal was required. No talent for describing oneself in the dialect of human resources. A conversation would do.
Mateo Cavasotto arrived at that idea by a route that makes its simplicity feel earned. In 2016, already intent on becoming an entrepreneur, he volunteered with Programa Semillas, a Buenos Aires nonprofit that provides microcredit access to women. The assignment was exploratory. He wanted to understand the problems faced by people who had little margin for bureaucratic friction.
One problem kept showing itself. People had useful experience but struggled to package that experience into the document an employer expected. Cavasotto and Andrés Arslanian, a former colleague from Quasar Ventures, began testing ways to gather a work history through messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The machine asked; the person answered; an employment story took shape.
The résumé was only the opening clue
A curious founder eventually discovers that a visible problem has an invisible neighbor. Job seekers had trouble entering the process. Employers, especially those hiring hundreds or thousands of people for stores, factories, warehouses, and restaurants, had trouble running it. Recruiters were buried under repetitive screening, scheduling, and follow-up. Candidates waited. Vacancies remained open. Everyone became intimately acquainted with the spinning wheel.
The founders changed the business around that second problem. Emi became a conversational layer between candidates and recruiters, designed to screen applicants, coordinate interviews, collect information, and connect with the systems large employers already used. The candidate still saw a chat. The employer saw a hiring workflow that could move at the speed of operations.
We were obsessed with the challenge people encountered with trying to grow professionally, how to find jobs and grow their skills.Mateo Cavasotto, 2022
That word, “obsessed,” does useful work. Cavasotto’s background is Industrial Engineering, studied at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires from 2008 to 2013. Before Emi, he helped entrepreneurs develop ideas, business models, and fundraising plans at Quasar Ventures. He then served as country manager for Trocafone, opening the used-electronics marketplace in Argentina. The sequence trained both halves of a founder: the part that sees systems and the part that has to make one operate on Tuesday morning.
The social purpose did not evaporate when the buyer became an enterprise. It became the reason to make enterprise machinery usable. Emi’s stated mission is to increase frontline workers’ access to professional opportunities. The commercial product pursues it through a practical bargain: make high-volume hiring faster for the company while making the application clearer and more responsive for the candidate.
One problem, four useful forms
Four applications, not four copies
Emi Labs applied to Y Combinator four times before earning a place in the Winter 2019 batch. Persistence is the obvious moral, and therefore the less interesting one. The better lesson is that a repeated attempt should contain new evidence. Between applications, the team had refined who used the product, who paid for it, and why the two groups belonged in the same system.
In 2017, the founders put nearly $10,000 into the company and ran early pilots with businesses in Argentina. After YC, a $2 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures gave the company room to hire and expand in Mexico. By 2019, Emi worked with more than 50 businesses in Argentina, while its founders aimed much of the next phase at a Mexican labor market where rapid turnover made delays costly.
The scale arrived in layers. In 2022, Merus Capital and Khosla Ventures led an $11 million Series A, bringing reported funding to $13.3 million. Emi’s public customer list came to include Walmart, Danone, 7-Eleven, Starbucks, Burger King, and Cemex. During 2021, customers filled more than 20,000 jobs through the system, while enabled hires grew 20 percent month over month and recurring revenue tripled.
Cavasotto’s 2025 update supplied a different kind of scale: more than 2,708,824 frontline workers had spoken with Emi during the year. The figure is dramatic because the interaction is ordinary. A message appears. Someone answers. The company has built an enterprise platform around millions of moments that should feel small enough to trust.
Sell the empty checkout lane
By 2026, Cavasotto was speaking publicly about another system he had learned to engineer: enterprise sales in Mexico. His argument begins with translation. Recruiting software can be presented as efficiency, but an unfilled frontline job produces consequences outside HR. A store without cashiers loses sales. A facility without enough staff cannot run as intended. The purchase becomes relevant to a chief executive or finance leader when the vacancy is expressed in the language of the business.
His sales playbook is physical rather than mystical. Study the employer’s application process. Map the people affected by a decision. Find a champion with both urgency and credibility. Use the channels that actually receive answers, which in Mexico can include WhatsApp. Be wary of pilots that have no internal owner and no pressure to succeed. Price against the value created, not the elegance of the feature list.
This is the operator’s contribution to the founder mythology. Cavasotto does not need the buyer to admire artificial intelligence in the abstract. He needs the buyer to recognize an expensive queue and decide to remove it. The product’s intelligence matters, but consequence creates motion.
There is also a pleasing symmetry between how Emi found its market and how it now finds customers. Both begin by entering someone else’s process and paying attention. The founders watched workers wrestle with résumés. They watched recruiters wrestle with volume. Later, the sales team learned to apply for a prospective customer’s vacancies to understand the journey from inside. Empathy, in this version, comes with a clipboard.
A global company with a Latin American accent
Cavasotto has described an ambition to build a global solution from Latin America with local talent. Asked how founders could strengthen the region’s technology ecosystem, he answered that they should create teams that generate future entrepreneurs. It is an aspiration larger than a product roadmap and more concrete than a slogan. Companies teach people what ambitious work feels like. Those people eventually carry the lesson elsewhere.
His own connections trace that circuit. Quasar Ventures introduced him to company-building and to Arslanian. Trocafone supplied the pressure of opening a market. Programa Semillas provided a problem worthy of attention. Y Combinator supplied a network and a forcing function. Investors including Merus Capital and Khosla Ventures supplied capital; enterprise clients supplied harder tests. Emi is the sum of those rooms, joined by a chat window.
Cavasotto has argued in his writing that artificial intelligence can make selection processes more human. The claim deserves a precise reading. Automation is not humane by default. In Emi’s case, the proposed gain comes from responsiveness and access: speaking to every applicant, meeting people on mobile channels they use, moving qualified candidates forward, and returning human recruiters to decisions that require judgment.
His public work moves comfortably between Spanish and English, with Italian also listed among his professional languages. That fluency mirrors Emi’s geography: founded in Buenos Aires, tested in Argentina, expanded through Mexico, and sold to employers in the United States. It also explains why his writing toggles between the intimate detail of a candidate’s phone and the managerial vocabulary of conversion, retention, and time to hire. Cavasotto treats those scales as parts of one design problem. A missed message is personal for the applicant and operational for the employer. A scheduled interview is equally double-sided: a small moment of progress for one person and one fewer gap in a hiring pipeline. The founder’s job is to keep both columns visible.
As founders, build teams that generate future entrepreneurs in the region.Mateo Cavasotto, translated from Spanish
The telling detail in Emi’s story remains the first one. A résumé is a compressed account of a life, written according to rules that reward familiarity with the rules. Cavasotto saw that the document could be produced by conversation, then saw that the conversation could repair a much larger workflow. He kept the front door familiar while rebuilding the corridor behind it.
There is no need to romanticize a chatbot. The more interesting achievement is disciplined attention. Millions of frontline workers do not require a ceremony when they apply for work. They require a reply, a fair route through the process, and a system awake when they are. Emi began by asking a question in the right place. Cavasotto has spent the years since arranging for the answer to go somewhere.
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