mexico-city
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Francisco Oliveros and the price of trust
He helped turn around RSA’s Mexican operation, then challenged insurers to look harder at their own failures. Francisco Oliveros’s career follows a stubborn question: what makes a promise worth buying?
Mauricio Curts and the run that became an invitation
A 90-kilometer journey through the Sonoran Desert helped Mauricio Curts turn a private love of running into Aire Libre. His work asks what happens when a route leads to people, rather than simply to a finish line.
Daniel Martínez-Valle and the question that follows him from company to company
From Mexichem’s reinvention as Orbia to the leadership of Grupo Proeza, Daniel Martínez-Valle keeps returning to a deceptively difficult question: what should a business make possible for other people?
Juan Pablo Sánchez Gnecchi and the art of getting giants to listen
From Morelia to corporate boardrooms across Latin America, the Bluebox co-founder has built a career around a practical question: what happens when a young company gets a chance to solve a big company’s problem?
Manuel Rodríguez Arregui and the work after the ribbon is cut
From Mexico’s transport ministry to AINDA, Manuel Rodríguez Arregui has built a career around the systems people use every day. His argument for responsible investment begins with what happens after the opening ceremony.
Wenyi Cai and the question that took her to Colombia
After helping run a Silicon Valley startup acquired by eBay, Wenyi Cai went to Colombia to listen. Her work at Polymath Ventures grew from a question about what technology could do for Latin America’s emerging middle class.
500 LatAm puts $300,000 behind the founders others overlook
A developer community became a venture fund. Now 500 LatAm is betting that Latin American startups need more time, sharper feedback, and a bigger first check.
Carlos García Ottati and the price of a promise
A difficult car sale gave the Kavak founder an idea. Building a business around trust would require workshops, credit, software, and a reckoning with his own promises.
Daniel Vogel and the last mile of money
A failed remittance startup taught Daniel Vogel where digital money gets stuck. At Bitso, the Mexican engineer has spent the years since building the connections that let it move.
Alexis Patjane and the business hidden inside the delivery
He opened an online store promising delivery in 99 minutes. Then Alexis Patjane closed the store and built a company around the part his customers actually wanted.
Héctor Cárdenas and the sale that could not happen
He returned to Mexico with an engineering degree and a plan to build. Two pivots later, Héctor Cárdenas found his business in the gap between an online shop and a customer who could actually pay.
Emiliano Musalem Learned to Read the Shop Before Writing the Loan
A backpacking business graduate, an analytics dashboard and a recurring inventory problem led to Creizer. Now Musalem is trying to make credit move at the rhythm of an online shop's sales.
Andrea Campos Is Teaching an App to Speak Human
The Yana founder turned a hand-built chat experiment into a multilingual consumer platform. Now, from San Francisco, she is working on the harder problem: making artificial intelligence feel useful, culturally fluent and responsibly constrained.
The Coder Who Built a Best Friend for 15 Million People Because She Couldn't Afford Therapy
Andrea Campos taught herself to code to fight her own depression. The chatbot she built now fields billions of late-night messages across Latin America - and is quietly testing where an app should stop and a doctor should start.
Steve Albarran
Steve Albarran is the co-founder and CEO of Confident Cannabis (now Confident LIMS), the laboratory information management software that quietly runs testing for more than 60% of the legal cannabis industry in the United States. A Mexico City native from a family of business owners, he traded a New York finance career - M&A banking at Lehman Brothers and Sawaya Partners, then his own growth-equity firm Left Lane Capital - for Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he met his co-founding team. Motivated partly by a wish to move money away from Mexican cartels and toward legal, ethical operators, he built the data backbone that lets labs, growers and buyers trust what is in a cannabis product. He is a member of the National Cannabis Laboratory Council.
Deepak Chhugani
Deepak Chhugani is the founder and CEO of Nuvocargo, an AI-powered platform for cross-border truckload freight between the United States and Mexico. Born in Kenya to Indian parents and raised in Ecuador, he worked on Latin America M&A deals at Bank of America Merrill Lynch before starting Nuvocargo in 2019. The company has raised more than $75 million from investors including Y Combinator, Tiger Global, QED, and NFX, and combines freight forwarding, customs brokerage, cargo insurance, and financing on one platform. Chhugani was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for enterprise technology in 2023 and is an Endeavor Entrepreneur.
Ricardo Alba
Ricardo Garcia de Alba is the President and CEO of Meiogenix, an agriculture biotech company whose chromosome-editing platform speeds up the way crops naturally reshuffle their own DNA. A chemical engineer from Mexico City turned global ag executive, he spent 15 years at Corteva Agriscience helping build and launch the Enlist weed-control system before taking the helm at Meiogenix in 2024. He pairs hard science and commercial scale with a long habit of community and STEM service - and keeps bees on the side.
Amet Alvirde
Amet Alvirde is a founder and software engineer based in Mexico City, associated with Render - the cloud deployment platform that hit a $1.5 billion valuation after its $100 million Series C extension in February 2026. A long-time Linux advocate, TypeScript developer, and Fullscreen content creator since 2012, he maintains a public digital garden of philosophical writing in Spanish, shoots street photography on a Sony a7iv, and plays guitar. His GitHub projects span fitness data tooling, trading system analysis, and personal infrastructure - a practitioner who builds for himself as readily as for the platform serving 4.5 million developers.
Santiago Rodriguez Lebrija
Santiago Rodriguez Lebrija is a Deal Partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on fintech, consumer, and crypto technology companies. A Stanford chemical engineering graduate originally from Mexico City, he cut his teeth as an Investment Analyst at Stanford Management Company and a Business Analyst at PEMEX before joining Bain Capital's global private equity division. Since joining a16z in August 2022, he has co-led investments in companies like Kavak - Latin America's leading used-car marketplace reimagined around AI - and hyperexponential, a London-based insurtech modernizing how insurers price risk. He brings an unusual combination of deep operational instinct and cross-cultural fluency to growth-stage bets, with a particular eye for operationally complex businesses being rebuilt around AI.