Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.
Maite Muniz Telleria is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Truora Inc., a San Francisco- and Colombia-based startup that helps Latin American businesses verify identities, run background checks, and automate customer engagement via WhatsApp. A former McKinsey consultant turned startup builder, she left corporate strategy to co-found Truora in 2018 alongside Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Cesar Pino. Under her product leadership, Truora scaled from a single-country MVP to a multi-country platform serving clients like Bancolombia, Didi, Mercado Libre, and Rappi, raising $15M in a Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022. Maite is also an angel investor focused on women-led ventures and a board member of The F Code.
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that turns telephone networks, SMS, email, and messaging apps into a few lines of code. Through programmable APIs for voice, messaging, email, and identity verification, plus a customer data platform built on its Segment acquisition, Twilio lets developers and enterprises embed communication and customer engagement directly into their software. More than 400,000 active customer accounts, including roughly 90% of the Fortune 500, build on it.
Félix (Félix Pago) is a Miami-based fintech that lets Latin Americans in the U.S. send money home through a WhatsApp chat. Under the hood, it routes transfers over stablecoin rails (USDC) and uses AI to handle compliance and customer service in Spanish. Founded in 2020 by Manuel Godoy and Bernardo García, the company has moved more than $1 billion across nine LatAm corridors and raised a $75M Series B led by QED Investors in April 2025.
Bernardo Garcia is the Co-Founder and COO of Félix Pago, a Miami-based fintech startup that lets Latino immigrants in the US send money home via WhatsApp in roughly 40 seconds. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Garcia built his career across consulting and Uber before earning his MBA at Wharton, where he met co-founder Manuel Godoy. Together they launched Félix in 2020, growing it to process over $1 billion in remittances in 2024 and raising a $75 million Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.
Cesar Pino is the co-founder of Truora Inc., a Y Combinator-backed identity verification and fraud prevention platform built for Latin America. An electronic engineer with a specialization in cryptography from Universidad del Valle in Colombia, Pino previously worked as a fullstack engineer at Twilio before co-founding Truora in 2018 with Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Maite Muniz Telleria. Truora helps companies across 9+ Latin American countries onboard users digitally through background checks, facial recognition, KYC/AML compliance, and WhatsApp-powered customer engagement - serving clients like Rappi, Bancolombia, Mercado Libre, and Uber. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by BBVA's Propel fund and Accel.
Daniel Bilbao is the co-founder and CEO of Truora Inc., a San Francisco-based identity verification and digital onboarding platform serving Latin America. Born in Cali, Colombia, Bilbao studied electronic engineering at Universidad de los Andes and earned an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth before stints at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Silicon Valley startups. He founded Truora in 2018 alongside David Cuadrado, Maite Muniz Telleria, and Cesar Pino, solving a problem he knew firsthand: background checks in Latin America took up to three weeks. Truora compresses that to under 20 seconds. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022, grew revenue to $32.1M in 2024, reached break-even, and expanded to seven countries. Beyond Truora, Bilbao co-founded Colombia Tech Week and the B2 Founders seed fund with his brother Andres Bilbao, co-founder of Rappi.
Pieter de Villiers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clickatell, the company that invented the world's first SMS API in 2000 with four lines of code and went on to pioneer chat banking and chat commerce globally. Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, he led Clickatell to become the first African startup backed by Sequoia Capital, raised over $118 million in total funding, and built a platform that processes roughly 9 billion messages monthly for more than 10,000 enterprise clients across 220+ countries. He also chairs SiMODiSA, a non-profit focused on digital skills development and startup acceleration in Africa.
Truora is a Latin America-focused identity and customer engagement platform that helps companies verify users, run background checks, and onboard customers - largely through WhatsApp. Founded in 2018 by Twilio and McKinsey alumni and backed by Y Combinator, Accel, and Propel, it powers KYC and fraud prevention for Rappi, Bancolombia, Mercado Libre, Didi, and hundreds of other LatAm businesses.
Fedor Pak is the CEO of Chatfuel, the no-code AI chatbot platform trusted by 7 million businesses for over a billion monthly conversations on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. A serial entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Russian oil and gas before founding coin-machine networks, ride-hailing operations in Pakistan, and e-commerce ventures, Pak joined Chatfuel in October 2022 and has since steered the company from a chatbot builder into a full AI sales and engagement engine - Meta's top automation partner and a platform that saves clinic owners 30+ hours of admin per month.
Stefanos Loukakos is the Co-founder and CEO of Connectly.ai, a San Francisco-based AI conversational commerce platform that raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024, bringing total funding to $37.2M at ~$100M valuation. A native of Greece, he previously served as Head of Facebook Messenger Business and Director of Blockchain at Meta, and as Country Director of Google Greece. He built Connectly to let retailers sell through WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and web chat - turning customer messages into revenue.
Trevor Perrin is an applied cryptographer who co-created the Signal Protocol with Moxie Marlinspike - the encryption backbone now protecting conversations for over a billion people across Signal, WhatsApp, and beyond. He also designed the Noise Protocol Framework, a foundational cryptographic framework deployed in WireGuard, WhatsApp's client-server layer, and the Lightning Network. A 2017 Levchin Prize winner, Perrin works as an independent consultant on quantum readiness and cryptographic systems design.
Jim Goetz is a legendary venture capitalist and former partner at Sequoia Capital who became one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors by backing WhatsApp — the only outside investor in the company — delivering a $3.5 billion return when Facebook acquired it for $19 billion in 2014. A five-time consecutive Forbes Midas List #1 (2013-2017) and TechCrunch VC of the Year (2015), Goetz also nurtured Palo Alto Networks from inception and led investments in HubSpot, GitHub, and AdMob. A Strongsville, Ohio native who described himself as a 'scattered and ill-prepared freshman' at the University of Cincinnati, he now runs Casimir Holdings (family office) and Mae Philanthropies, having donated $25 million to UC in honor of his transformative professor mentor.
Brian Acton is the co-founder of WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, and the founder of Signal Foundation, where he champions privacy-focused communication. After walking away from $850 million in unvested Facebook stock over ethical disagreements about user privacy, he invested $50 million to build Signal, an encrypted messaging platform designed to put users first. A Stanford computer science graduate who was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton has given over $1 billion to charitable causes with his wife Tegan, focusing on low-income families, reproductive rights, and internet privacy.
Jan Koum is the Ukrainian-born co-founder of WhatsApp who built one of the world's most-used messaging platforms on a foundation of radical privacy and zero advertising — then sold it to Facebook for $19.3 billion in 2014. A self-taught programmer who arrived in the US at 16 on food stamps, Koum's journey from a Soviet surveillance state to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley is one of the most unlikely origin stories in tech. He left WhatsApp in 2018 rather than compromise its privacy principles, and now runs Newlands, a secretive investment firm, while giving billions through the Koum Family Foundation.