mexico-city
(7)
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.