Founder Profile • San Francisco, CA
The guy who found a $700B blind spot - and built the cure
Co-Founder & CEO of COR - the AI platform that tells agencies exactly where their money goes, before it's gone.
Cover Story
He was thirteen years old, selling milkshakes on Argentine beaches when a resort manager shut him down. It was his first encounter with distribution risk. He took notes.
Twenty years later, Santi Bibiloni runs COR out of San Francisco - an AI platform that tells the world's biggest advertising and consulting networks exactly which of their projects are making money and which are quietly draining it. The clients include Ogilvy, BBDO, McCann, Saatchi & Saatchi, Havas, and Dentsu. The insight that made it possible came from running an agency himself and discovering that nobody - not even the biggest firms in the world - had a clean answer to a simple question: are we actually profitable on this client?
"Nobody cares about project management. Project management is not the problem. The problem is project profitability."
- Santi BibiloniBibiloni studied communications at university in Buenos Aires and somewhere along the way, before he finished, he started a blog called "No tenemos techo" - Spanish for "We have no roof." It drew 30,000 unique visitors and got picked up by international newspapers. That was his first real proof of concept: an idea, properly articulated, could scale without capital.
Around age twenty-one or twenty-two, he founded Balloon Group - a WordPress-based digital agency that grew, entirely bootstrapped, to 400 clients across 12 countries by 2014. Argentina named it the country's fastest-growing e-commerce agency that year. He built it without a single dollar of outside investment, working in a windowless storage room that had just enough space for a computer and a desk.
The pivot came from pain. Running Balloon Group, Bibiloni started watching hours disappear - project estimates that didn't match reality, fee negotiations that went nowhere because there was no data behind them, creative professionals being underpaid because nobody could prove what their time was actually worth. He looked for a solution. Nothing adequate existed. "Very deep problem that hurts people a lot" became his north star for whether an idea was worth building.
He co-founded COR in 2015 with Jose Gettas, who serves as COO/CFO. Their first funding came from an unlikely source: Marcos Galperin, the founder of MercadoLibre - Latin America's largest e-commerce platform - who wrote a $325,000 angel check. It was validation from someone who'd built the continent's defining tech company that this was a real problem.
When COR applied to 500 Startups and got rejected, Bibiloni moved to San Francisco anyway. No US credit history. Landlords turning him down. Accelerator saying no. He proved the EB-1 extraordinary ability visa - which requires demonstrating that the United States specifically needs your presence - and kept knocking on doors until 500 Startups let him in. He then used the program to transform COR's model entirely: from SMB customers on free trials to enterprise clients on three-to-five year contracts, paid annually upfront.
That shift is what separated COR from every other project management tool competing on features. The sales strategy became ruthlessly focused: target CFOs at creative agencies with 50 to 200 employees. Cold email campaigns over Facebook ads. Scalable enterprise SDR-to-AE pipelines from day one. Within three to four months of the pivot, COR closed its first Fortune 500 contracts.
The $6 million round that followed in 2021 - closed in two tranches over just 45 days - brought in ScOp Ventures, Global Founders Capital, and State48 Ventures alongside a roster of angel investors that reads like a tech history lesson: Kevin O'Connor, who built DoubleClick and sold it to Google for more than $3 billion, joined as board member. Ed Castro Wright, former global CEO of Walmart. Doug Smith, co-founder of Anaplan. Tom Chavez, who sold Krux to Salesforce for $1 billion. David Sable, Global CEO of Young & Rubicam. Industry advisors spanning the top of advertising, consulting, and enterprise software.
COR's product is built on a specific thesis: people hate filling out timesheets because it feels like surveillance, but every hour they don't log is profit the agency can't see or recover. The platform uses AI and machine learning to automate time tracking, forecast project costs in real time, flag when a project is heading over budget before it gets there, and generate the kind of data that lets agencies walk into fee renegotiations with actual proof of their value. The result is 114% net revenue retention - clients spend more over time - and a 4% annual dollar churn rate in a market that rarely sees numbers like that.
Serving the world's largest agency networks across WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis Group, Havas, and Dentsu - with Fortune 100 brands using the Client Access panel.
Career Arc
In His Words
"Nobody cares about project management. Project management is not the problem. The problem is project profitability."
"Everyone wants to buy, but no one wants to be sold."
"There are only two kinds of entrepreneurs - the ones who quit and the ones who don't."
"Selling is not about pitching your company. It's about understanding where their pains are."
"People hate logging hours because it feels controlling, yet time spent directly impacts project cost."
"It is our mission to empower them. And that's why we're here."
"In the billable hours market, Project Profitability is what needs tackling."
"Think big, take risks, be resilient."
Track Record
Bootstrapped Balloon Group to 400 clients across 12 countries with zero external funding - Argentina's fastest-growing e-commerce agency in 2014.
Obtained US EB-1 extraordinary ability green card, demonstrating the United States specifically benefits from his presence.
Moved to San Francisco after a 500 Startups rejection, persisted, and eventually gained acceptance - then transformed COR's entire business model inside the program.
Raised $7.9M total for COR, including a $6M round closed in 45 days from Silicon Valley institutional investors and unicorn founders.
Achieved 9% month-over-month growth and 114% net revenue retention - metrics that put COR among the top performers in enterprise SaaS.
Recruited Kevin O'Connor (DoubleClick founder, $3B+ Google exit) as board member alongside angels from Walmart, Anaplan, Salesforce, and Verizon.
COR now serves clients across WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis Group, Havas, and Dentsu networks in 38 countries, with Fortune 100 brands on the platform.
Mentors on sales and fundraising at 500 Startups. Serves as speaker and jury member at major technology and advertising events globally.
Backers & Advisors
The Long Game
Bibiloni's stated ambition is to build COR into a top-10 global SaaS company. That may or may not happen on the timeline he prefers. What's already true is the harder thing: he identified a problem that billion-dollar holding companies had normalized and failed to solve, built a company to fix it, navigated immigration paperwork and landlord rejections and accelerator gatekeepers, and assembled a cap table that includes the people behind some of the most valuable software acquisitions in the last twenty years.
The business model insight - eliminate free trials, move to annual contracts, sell to CFOs not creative directors, focus on profitability not project management - is the kind of thing that sounds obvious in retrospect. That's usually the sign you're looking at a real insight.
"It is the innovative, creative and dreamers who will make us fly. We have to make them stay authentic, thinking differently, encouraging the new."
- COR ManifestoOutside the office, he scuba dives and works on social impact initiatives in developing countries - which tracks. Someone who proves their worth via an extraordinary ability visa and builds a company on the premise that creative workers deserve to be paid fairly for what they actually produce is probably not spending their weekends doing nothing.
The milkshake stand got shut down in 2002. Everything since has been proving that early rejection wrong.
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