In Ciudad Juárez, a former U.S. consulate now rents offices, teaches digital skills and helps local suppliers reach industrial buyers. The interesting business is what happens between those services.
A risky Austin expansion lost its launch clients almost immediately. The El Paso agency answered by learning to pitch harder, research deeper, and turn cultural fluency into national work.
Ricardo Flores is the co-founder and CEO of MiChamba, a startup that turns WhatsApp into an AI-powered management platform for deskless teams in construction, logistics, hospitality, and industrial services across Latin America. A kid who worked scorching El Paso roofs before heading to Georgetown and Wall Street, he left finance and an early seat at fintech Wealth.com to build software for the blue-collar workforce he came from. Less than a year after launch, MiChamba raised a $2.25M pre-seed led by Wollef and signed names like Pemex, Hilton, and Repsol, betting that for the 3 billion people who run their work lives on WhatsApp, management should live there too.
Carlos Garcia is the founder and CEO of Finhabits, a bilingual money app built to close the wealth gap for U.S. Latinos. An MIT-trained engineer who spent nearly two decades on Wall Street, he turned the realization that he once had no idea what a 401(k) was into a platform that lets people start investing for as little as $5 a week. Finhabits has grown to more than 800,000 members and earned recognition from Goldman Sachs and Fast Company.
Jane Garcia has run La Clínica de La Raza since 1982, growing a scrappy storefront clinic in Oakland's Fruitvale into a $150M federally qualified health center serving more than 86,000 patients across Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. She walked in as a Berkeley public health intern in 1978 and never left, building a Bay Area institution while suing two federal administrations over immigrant care.