miami-startup
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Guillermo Garcia
Guillermo Garcia is the co-founder and CEO of SmartHop, a Miami-based platform that acts as an autonomous dispatcher and 'business-in-a-box' for small trucking companies and owner-operators. A Venezuelan industrial engineer who started out delivering pet food, he built a bootstrapped ~500-employee logistics company back home before political and economic instability pushed him to the U.S. After studying at Columbia and running an over-the-road fleet in Miami, he founded SmartHop in 2017-2018 to give independent truckers the software, load recommendations, and financial tools that big carriers take for granted. SmartHop has raised over $56M, including a $30M+ Series B in 2022.
Jean Pierre Azañedo
Jean Pierre Azañedo is the CEO and co-founder of Zero Waste Co. (ZWC) and CoreZero, a Miami-based climate-tech venture that turns food waste and other discarded material into tradable carbon credits. A second-time founder from Peru, he previously built Kanay into that country's leading waste-management company before it was acquired by France's Séché Group. In 2023 CoreZero serialized the world's first carbon credits generated from food-waste diversion, working with the Mexican food-banking network. Azañedo's thesis is simple and stubborn: waste has boundless value, and nobody makes something just to throw it away.
Juan Camilo Meisel
Juan Camilo Meisel is the founder and CEO of Grip, a Miami-based cold-chain logistics platform built to keep perishables cold and on-time from warehouse to doorstep. Before Grip, he spent six years running logistics at ButcherBox, helping scale frozen-meat delivery from zero to roughly $600 million in annual revenue. Colombian-born, Boston-trained, Miami-based, he now runs a network of refrigerated fulfillment hubs across the U.S. and was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 Miami in 2023.
Bora Hamamcioglu
Bora Hamamcioglu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mascotte Health, a Miami-based, tech-enabled support company that gives veterinary practices virtual triage, client communications, front-desk help, after-hours care and scribing so vets can focus on medicine instead of phones. A Turkish-American entrepreneur, he previously built and ran CarHopper, a luxury and exotic car-rental marketplace acquired by Turo in 2020, and worked as a Principal at Dubai's BECO Capital. Mascotte emerged from stealth in 2023 with an oversubscribed $1.2M pre-seed round led by Nuwa Capital, with angels from Uber, Turo and Airbnb.
Paul Benigeri
Paul Benigeri is the co-founder and CEO of Archive, an AI-powered influencer and user-generated-content marketing platform he launched with Geoffrey Woo in 2021. A Stanford computer-science graduate raised in Paris, he spent his early career writing code at First Round Capital and RockMelt before scaling growth and engineering at the nutrition company HVMN. Archive grew from a Shopify app that auto-captured Instagram Stories into a platform used by brands like Quest, Allbirds and Hexclad, raising roughly $12M-plus and reaching a reported $100M valuation in about 18 months while staying lean and remote-first.
Thibault Le Conte
Thibault Le Conte is the founder, CEO and CTO of OrderOut, a Miami-based software company that funnels orders from UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhub and other delivery apps straight into a restaurant's existing point-of-sale system, killing the tablet pileup that clutters kitchen counters. A computer-science engineer trained at EPITECH and UC Berkeley, he built roughly eight or nine companies before OrderOut, reusing the same core technology each time. OrderOut is deliberately bootstrapped, grown on a single $250,000 partner investment made during COVID and organic revenue since, and now runs a lean distributed team across Miami, Brazil, India, China, Ecuador and Mexico. His latest push moves OrderOut beyond integrations into restaurant finance, with same-day UberEats payouts and a delivery API that lets any business shop for the cheapest or fastest courier.
Alexander Kates
Alexander Kates is the cofounder and CEO of Vetcove, the free ordering platform that lets veterinary practices, zoos, aquariums and animal welfare groups shop every supplier at once - think Kayak, but for the stuff that keeps animals healthy. He built it with his brother Mitch after watching the inventory manager at their father's equine veterinary practice juggle 30-40 vendor tabs by hand. Before veterinary supply chains, Kates was a digital strategist who advised Fortune 500 companies, taught executives on four continents, and co-wrote a bestselling marketing textbook. Vetcove now employs hundreds and serves a large slice of US veterinary hospitals.
Andrew Kassian
Andrew Kassian is the CEO of Scalify, an AI-powered advertising platform that helps e-commerce brands plan, launch, optimize, and scale paid campaigns across Meta and TikTok from a single dashboard. Scalify's pitch is blunt: you should not need to become a media buyer to run profitable ads. Its tooling generates ad creative from product images, builds lookalike and interest audiences automatically, applies rule-based optimization that pauses losers and scales winners around the clock, and consolidates cross-platform performance data so founders can make spending decisions without exporting spreadsheets. Based in Miami with company operations tied to London, Kassian sits at the intersection of small e-commerce operators and the increasingly automated, AI-driven future of digital advertising.