The contractor's software, built from a marketplace that didn't work

The complaint never changed. A contractor in Sao Paulo, an architect in Belo Horizonte, an engineer running a renovation crew - they were all saying the same thing, in the same tired voice. Building the estimate takes forever. Chasing the payments takes longer. And the whole thing lives in a spreadsheet that only one person understands. Ythalo Silva heard it once. Then he heard it a hundred more times. By the end of 2020, he had stopped treating it as noise and started treating it as a blueprint.

At the time, Silva was running HomeHero, a marketplace meant to connect homeowners with construction professionals. It was a reasonable idea and it was not working the way a marketplace needs to work. But sitting inside a failing marketplace turned out to be the best seat in the house. He had a front-row view of the professionals on the supply side, and they kept handing him the same problem, unprompted.

So in January 2021 he did the thing that terrifies most founders. He and three partners - Guilherme Guerra, Fabio Witt and Murillo Freitas - took the customers, kept the insight, and threw out the business model. HomeHero became Vobi. A two-sided marketplace became subscription software. It is, by wide agreement, the hardest transition a startup can attempt, because almost nothing carries over: not the product, not the revenue mechanics, not the way you talk to a customer. They did it anyway.

The pivotFrom matchmaking to management

The bet behind Vobi is narrow and stubborn. Give a small construction business one place to run a project from start to finish - quote it, plan it, buy the materials, pay the suppliers, and let the client watch it happen. The promise attached to that bet is even narrower: cut the manual work, mostly in budgeting and procurement, by up to half. Everything Vobi builds is supposed to ladder back to that one sentence. Give a contractor back half their week.

There is a reason the co-founder lineup matters here. Guilherme Guerra is a civil engineer with more than a decade in construction before he moved into tech. Murillo Freitas came in as the technical builder. Silva and his partners had already worked together inside MAR Ventures, a Brazilian venture builder, so the team was not four strangers who met at a hackathon. They were people who had watched the same industry break in the same places, from the inside.

TractionNumbers from a paper-first industry

The first year did the arguing. Vobi crossed 35,000 users, including a free tier, at monthly prices that started around R$69 and topped out near R$199. More telling than the user count was the volume moving through the platform: over R$1 billion in projects managed, in a market where most of that work had lived in notebooks a year earlier. Reported revenue for 2021 landed near R$4 million.

Those are the numbers that get a Sao Paulo contech startup a plane ticket to Mountain View. In early 2022, Vobi joined Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and announced its funding round, with the accelerator leading and an unusual set of names filling out the rest of the table.

Two of Brazil's better-known founding families writing checks into a construction-software seed round is its own kind of signal. It says the people who built physical, capital-heavy Brazilian businesses looked at Vobi and recognized the customer.

The playbookRun the company, host the room

Silva does something quietly smart with distribution. Alongside running Vobi, he co-hosts VobiCast, a podcast for construction-industry entrepreneurs, with co-founder and COO Guilherme Guerra. The audience for the show and the audience for the product are the same people. The podcast talks about sales, marketing, and how to manage a project without losing your evenings. The software does the last part. One builds trust, the other collects the subscription.

This is not his first company. Before Vobi, Silva co-founded Modiax, which was acquired by Foxbit in 2019, and he worked as a partner across MAR Ventures and eGenius Founders, hunting for early-stage opportunities. The pattern across all of it is the same: he is drawn to the markets other founders find too messy, too offline, too unglamorous to bother with. Construction, in Latin America, is the messiest of them all, and that is exactly why he likes it.

The ambitionAn industry that still runs on paper

The stated goal is not modest. Vobi wants to be the best digital environment for small construction businesses across Latin America - the place they manage the work and grow the business. In the first year the founders were already talking about hundreds of thousands of users and tens of billions of reais in projects flowing through the platform. Whether they get there depends on a slow, unfashionable job: convincing people who have run their entire careers out of a spreadsheet that software is worth the switch.

Silva's answer to that is not a feature list. It is a promise about time. Contractors were never asking for a dashboard. They were asking for their week back. He noticed the difference, and he built the whole company around it.