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.
Paul Monasterio is the CEO and co-founder of Kalepa, a New York AI company building decision-support software for commercial insurance underwriters. A Venezuelan-born nuclear physicist with a PhD from MIT, he traded particle research for big-data analytics at Applied Predictive Technologies (acquired by Mastercard for $600M) and Facebook before launching Kalepa in 2018. Its Copilot platform helps underwriters 'bind with confidence,' and the company raised a $14M Series A from Inspired Capital in 2021.
Manuel Godoy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Félix, a WhatsApp-native remittance platform that uses USDC stablecoins and AI to let Latino immigrants send money home in minutes for a fraction of traditional costs. Born in Venezuela and educated at Caltech and Wharton, Godoy turned his own immigrant experience into a company that has processed over $1 billion in remittances, serves 400,000+ active users across nine countries, and raised $90.5M including a $75M Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.