Xavier de Gracia and the small bet before the big round

A casino chip is a peculiar thing to bring to a sales meeting. It suggests that somebody, somewhere, is prepared to lose money. Xavier de Gracia and his co-founder, Josep Mingot, gave theirs a more practical assignment: persuade a stranger to try the product.

The setting was a Las Vegas conference with about 3,000 attendees. The founders had hundreds of chips made with Prosper’s logo on one side and a QR code on the other. The code led to an AI agent and a raffle. They left chips around the conference rooms, chairs, lunch area and exhibition hall. In the company’s telling, the campaign generated more than 100 leads and helped bring in its first customers.

There is an agreeable lack of ceremony here. No appointment was necessary. Someone could pick up a chip, scan it and have a conversation with the software. The sales pitch had been reduced to an object small enough to lose in a pocket.

The education after the education

De Gracia’s route to that conference passed through institutions associated with rather more formal introductions. He studied business administration at Esade, graduating in 2012, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School between 2015 and 2017. Before Harvard came consulting at Bain & Company. His career also included investment banking experience at J.P. Morgan in London.

Those names make a tidy professional biography. His geography makes it less tidy, and more interesting. The consulting work took him through Madrid, London and Dubai. Harvard brought him to Boston. The next substantial chapter was New York, where he joined Handy, the home-services marketplace, and moved through strategy and operations into general management.

The progression matters because the distance between recommending a change and being responsible for it can be considerable. A strategy has an elegant life on a slide. A service business has customers, schedules and people waiting for an answer. At Handy, de Gracia moved into jobs where those moving parts belonged to his working day.

What the phone room teaches

By 2019, he was Handy’s director of operations. Vice president and general manager roles followed, including responsibility for its direct-to-consumer and high-skill services businesses. From 2021 to 2023, he was a vice president and general manager at Angi. The work accumulated across several titles before he left to start Prosper.

His previous responsibilities put numbers beside that experience: a $120 million business unit, more than 800 customer service agents, 300 phone sales representatives and over 30 operations staff. These describe an earlier operating responsibility. They are useful because they give scale to a résumé line that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

A business of that size makes customer support a management problem as well as a conversation. The person answering needs information; the information lives somewhere; another team may have to finish the task. A pleasant exchange can still leave work unfinished. De Gracia’s background helps explain his interest in software that participates in operations.

In a June 2026 conversation, he connected his decision to leave employment with the arrival of ChatGPT and the possibility of changing how operations and support teams run. He had spent years overseeing the work. In 2023, he decided to build a company around a new way of doing it.

Seen in sequence, the titles describe an apprenticeship in how service companies function. Strategy, operations and general management ask for related skills, but put the responsibility in different places. A founder eventually has to bring those questions together: what to build, how to deliver it and whether the business can sustain the effort. De Gracia had occupied several of those seats before starting Prosper.

Barcelona was still on the line

New York did not erase Barcelona from the story. De Gracia grew up in Barcelona and has remained interested in what international experience can contribute back to Spain. As early as 2018, while working at Handy, he was advising Spanish startups on growing marketplaces. He described them as businesses moving through stages he and his colleagues had already encountered.

His view of working abroad had a practical condition: the experience should benefit the place people came from. Knowledge could return through advice and relationships, even while the person remained overseas. That is a more useful account of an international career than treating departure as the end of the relationship.

There is a pleasing continuity between those conversations and Prosper’s later connection between New York and Barcelona. Years before he had a company of his own, de Gracia was already thinking about how experience could travel between the two ecosystems. Founding gave that relationship another form.

An argument he made before AI

In March 2019, de Gracia published a Catalan-language essay called Reprendre l’esperit innovador, about renewing the spirit of innovation. He was then an operations executive at Handy. His subject was technological change in Catalonia, including the dispute over app-based transport services and regulation.

He supported innovation while giving explicit attention to the workers and businesses it could hurt. His proposed responses included retraining, help moving into new jobs and financial support where changing occupations would be difficult. Protecting people and allowing new technology to develop were, in his argument, compatible responsibilities.

The essay supplies an earlier piece of his thinking, before Prosper existed and before his present job required an explanation of AI. It also complicates the usual shorthand of the impatient technology founder. Here was someone arguing for change while spelling out the obligations that follow it. The position had details, rather than merely a preference for the future.

He used the history of electric lighting to make the argument tangible. A technological advance could benefit society while damaging the businesses it displaced. The question then became how to help the people affected adapt. His examples included training and measures to compensate those facing difficult transitions. Read alongside his later career, the essay shows a longstanding interest in the practical consequences of introducing technology into service industries.

Two résumés, one company

De Gracia met Mingot in Boston while they were at Harvard and MIT. Their eventual partnership brought together different kinds of experience. Mingot had been an MIT computer-vision researcher and a product leader at CoverWallet, the insurance software company acquired by Aon. De Gracia brought the service operations and general management background.

Prosper was founded in 2023 and joined Y Combinator’s summer batch that year. The founders initially set out to automate customer support across email, text and telephone. The business subsequently became more specialized as they learned from early customers. Choosing a narrower market was part of the company’s development.

There is a recognizable operator’s question underneath that sequence: which work can this team take responsibility for? An AI demonstration can show a conversation. A customer has to decide whether to make it part of a business. That decision brings the founders back to their previous experience of organizations, software and the consequences of an unfinished task.

“Done is better than perfect.”Xavier de Gracia, on getting things done

That partnership also makes the career story less solitary. The work at Handy and Angi explains part of the founding decision; Mingot’s research and product experience explains another part. Their account starts with meeting during their Boston years, before the company had a name or a funding announcement. The eventual business brought those separate professional histories into the same undertaking. An individual profile can easily hurry past the co-founder. In this case, doing so would leave out a central relationship.

A bigger number, a familiar test

A $5 million seed round led by Emergence Capital was announced in September 2025, with participation from Y Combinator, CRV and Company Ventures. In June 2026, Prosper announced a $30 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Base10 and existing investors participating. The new financing was intended to support engineering, customer-facing teams and further product development.

The two announcements mark different stages of the business. They also give the story a tempting shortcut: jump from the founding date to the large number and declare the intervening years explained. But money raised says little about what de Gracia was doing when the company still needed people to notice its name.

His public advice to aspiring entrepreneurs emphasizes speed and recruiting strong talent. He has summed up one preference with the familiar instruction that done beats perfect. The conference campaign gives that sentiment a specific shape: something people could pick up and use, with an immediate way to respond.

People who work with him add another view. Nina Willdorf has publicly described him as demanding, kind, thoughtful and competitive. Such descriptions are most useful when attached to the person making them. They suggest how one colleague experiences his leadership, alongside the decisions and responsibilities visible in his career.

The chips remain a good place to leave him. They were a small piece of a much longer effort, made by founders who still needed a customer to try something unfamiliar. De Gracia had arrived there with business degrees and years of operating experience. He still had to earn the next conversation. In Las Vegas, he gave it a QR code.