He learned to find patterns in the flicker of distant stars. Then Karim Pichara pointed the same discipline at mayonnaise - and built the intelligence now powering NotCo's second act.

A homemade particle detector in Chiguayante led to Stanford, Harvard and a hard turn into software. Now the Velum Labs co-founder is running startup experiments with the habits of a physicist.

He left a family office after seeing a worm-filled filter at his father’s house. Fifteen years later, BioFiltro is turning that unlikely encounter into water infrastructure financed by long contracts, carbon credits and a $35 million investment.