Terradot is a San Francisco and Stanford-born climate company turning Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW) - one of nature's slowest permanent carbon-removal processes - into a measurable, global-scale climate solution. By spreading finely crushed basalt across tropical farmland, Terradot accelerates the natural reaction in which silicate rock binds atmospheric CO2 and locks it away for thousands of years, while improving soil health for farmers. The company pairs field deployment with rigorous biogeochemical measurement, and has signed landmark carbon-removal agreements with Google, Microsoft and Frontier totaling nearly 300,000 tonnes of CO2.
Alessio Alionco is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Pipefy, a San Francisco-based AI-driven process automation platform he built from scratch in 2015. A Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Harvard OPM alumnus, and Endeavor Entrepreneur, he turned a front-row view of chaotic enterprise workflows into a company with 4,700+ deployed AI agents, partnerships with Accenture, and over $225M in total funding. His prior venture, Acessozero, grew to 1 million users before being acquired by Brazilian local-search giant Apontador in 2012 - a deal that planted the seeds for Pipefy.
Andre Ferraz is the co-founder and CEO of Incognia, a Palo Alto-based privacy-first location identity company that uses passive behavioral signals - where your phone goes, how it moves, what Wi-Fi networks it trusts - to verify users without passwords or biometric friction. Before Incognia, Ferraz co-founded In Loco Media in 2011 at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, building it into a company that mapped 6 million indoor venues and captured 250 billion location data points monthly, before selling it to Brazilian retail giant Magazine Luiza in 2020. With Incognia, he pivoted that location intelligence from advertising into fraud prevention, raising $46.5M total (including a $31M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2024), deploying technology on over 200 million smartphones, and pioneering what he calls zero-factor authentication - security that works without the user doing anything at all.
Joyce Salas is a Founder at Deel, the San Francisco-based global HR and payroll platform that has redefined how companies hire, pay, and manage international teams. Based in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, she brings a finance and accounting lens to one of the fastest-growing HR tech companies in the world - a company that has raised over $1.27 billion in funding, crossed $1 billion in annual revenue, and employs more than 8,400 people serving businesses in 150+ countries.
Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Pipefy is an AI-powered, no-code business process automation platform that lets non-developers in finance, HR, procurement, IT and customer service design, run and govern complex workflows. Founded in 2015 by Alessio Alionco in Curitiba, Brazil and now headquartered in San Francisco, it serves thousands of corporate customers in 150+ countries.
Enrico Carbone is a Brazilian-born General Partner at Reaction, a Palo Alto-based impact venture fund co-founded by 150+ Stanford alumni across 45 countries, focused on improving one billion lives within a decade through health technology and climate innovation. After a 22-year career in global investment banking at firms including Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, and BR Partners, he transitioned to venture capital and now also serves as Founding Managing Partner of Irukandji Capital (IKJ Capital), an early-stage healthcare technology fund. He is a Stanford Executive Program (SEP '18) graduate, a recognized GSB Centennial Alumni Catalyst, and a board member of Health in Harmony, an NGO serving indigenous communities in Indonesia, Madagascar, and Brazil.
Henrique Andrade is the CEO and co-founder of CEFIS, Brazil's largest corporate education platform for accounting, tax, and labor law professionals. Founded in Goiânia in 2013 and launched in 2014, CEFIS has scaled to over 400,000 students and 5,000+ courses, reaching its first million reais in revenue within 14 months. Under Andrade's leadership, CEFIS expanded internationally to Redwood City, California in 2018, inspired by Silicon Valley's best practices in e-learning and talent management. Based in San Francisco, Andrade blends a meritocracy-driven culture - drawing inspiration from Goldman Sachs and the 3G Group - with a Google-style workplace designed to attract top engineering talent.
Julia Vasconcelos is Sr. Director of Strategy & Operations and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Typeface, the enterprise generative AI platform backed by Lightspeed, GV, and Salesforce Ventures. A Brazilian attorney-turned-operator who pivoted from M&A law to fintech at Stone (where she helped drive the company's Nasdaq IPO), then earned an MS at Stanford GSB before landing at one of AI's hottest unicorns. She co-led Brazil at Silicon Valley, built a community of 200k in two months, and now sits at the intersection of AI strategy and executive operations in Palo Alto.
Rafael Umann is the Founder and CEO of Azion Technologies, a global edge computing platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. A serial entrepreneur who founded his first company - an ISP - at age 13, he went on to build and exit multiple startups before founding Azion in 2011. Under his leadership, Azion has grown into a recognized leader in edge computing, serving 45 of the top 50 Latin American e-commerces, processing over 10 billion monthly financial transactions, and winning awards from Santander X, Frost & Sullivan, and GigaOm. A Forbes Technology Council member and open-source contributor whose Linux kernel work powered the world's largest point-to-point wireless network, Umann is one of the most prominent voices on edge computing's role in the future of the internet.
Gabriel Bayomi Tinoco Kalejaiye is a Brazilian-born engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Openlayer, a San Francisco-based AI governance and observability platform. After earning his MS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple - where he contributed to both Siri and the secretive Vision Pro project - he left with two colleagues to solve the problem that haunted every AI team: models that look great in testing but fail in the real world. Openlayer provides enterprises with evaluation, monitoring, and compliance tooling across the full AI lifecycle, from prototype to production. The company raised a $14.5M Series A in May 2025, grew nearly 5x in 2024, and is now a recognized vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for AI Evaluation and Observability Platforms.
Dr. Eduardo Pontes Reis, MD is Vice President of Strategy in the Office of the CEO at Hippocratic AI, a Palo Alto-based generative AI healthcare company with $439M in total funding. A neuroradiologist and AI researcher, he bridges clinical medicine and artificial intelligence through leadership roles at Stanford's Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Imaging (AIMI) and Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in Brazil, where he initiated the Health Story medical timeline platform and led AI development for diseases including tuberculosis, COVID-19, melanoma, and head CT analysis. He co-authored the BRAX Brazilian Chest X-ray Dataset published in Nature Scientific Data, built open-source tools for integrating AI plugins into LLMs (plugnplai, 228+ GitHub stars), and served as Founding Radiologist at Cognita Imaging — a Stanford AIMI spinoff acquired by Radiology Partners for $80M — before joining Hippocratic AI in early 2026.
Henrique Dubugras is the Brazilian co-founder of Brex, the corporate card and spend management company he built from a Y Combinator pivot at age 21 into a $12.3B peak-valuation fintech unicorn - ultimately acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion in 2026. He taught himself to code at 12 to avoid paying for a Korean MMO, sold his first payments company (Pagar.me) at 20 while processing $1.5B annually, dropped out of Stanford after 8 months, and found his billion-dollar idea by simply failing to get a credit card for his own startup. Now operating in stealth, he has said he found his 'calling' again.
Pedro Franceschi is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, the corporate credit card company valued at over $10 billion and acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion in 2026. A Brazilian programming prodigy who jailbroke the iPhone 3G at 13 and co-founded payments processor Pagar.me at 16, Franceschi dropped out of Stanford after one year to build Brex with co-founder Henrique Dubugras. Under his leadership, Brex grew from a Y Combinator startup in 2017 to serving thousands of high-growth companies including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Carta, fundamentally transforming how startups access corporate credit.
Michel Krieger is a Brazilian-American engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Instagram in 2010 and scaled it from zero to 1 billion users as CTO before its $1 billion acquisition by Facebook. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he co-launched Rt.live (a COVID-19 tracker) and Artifact (an AI news app acquired by Yahoo), and now co-leads Anthropic Labs, where he's building experimental AI products at the frontier of Claude's capabilities.
David Pereira is a Brazilian-born product leader, author, and keynote speaker based in Munich, Germany. He is the creator of the 'Untrapping Product Teams' newsletter (23,000+ subscribers) and the author of the Pearson/Addison-Wesley book of the same name. With 10+ million readers reached since 2020 and 88,000+ LinkedIn followers, he is one of the most prominent voices in modern product management. His philosophy centers on cutting through 'bullshit management' to enable teams to create real value for customers and businesses.
Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former constitutional lawyer who broke the world's most consequential surveillance story - Edward Snowden's NSA revelations - earning a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar-winning documentary. After co-founding The Intercept and exposing judicial corruption in Brazil, he now runs 'System Update,' an independent nightly show on Rumble, where he delivers unfiltered political commentary captive to no institutional master. He lives in Rio de Janeiro with his two adopted sons and 20+ rescue dogs.