Welcome to Tech Talents! In this newsletter, I share real-time key talent movements in the LatAm tech ecosystem, including founders entering and exiting stealth mode, executive-level movements in unicorns, and partner-level changes in local VC firms.
Here’s a quick look at what you’ll find in this week’s edition:
🔍 Know Your VC: Answering the non-obvious questions about LatAm VC firms. First edition: SaaSholic.
🎊 Startup Launches: Pax AI, Fensivo, Vendria AI
🤫 Talents Entering Stealth: Ex-Product Management Lead at Shopee, ex-Senior Software Engineer at Dropbox, ex-Sr. Oracle Cloud Architect at Creditas
🤝 Tech Talents Match: Vagas em startups brasileiras, atualizadas diariamente. Acesse aqui.
Let’s dive in…
🔍 Know Your VC: SaaSholic
Opening the black box of VC firms for better founder–investor matches.
As a VC myself, I always tell founders to run the same level of diligence on their investors that those investors will run on their startup. The problem is how little is actually available online to do it, especially in LatAm. How a firm works with founders, how its thesis has evolved, what it’s genuinely interested in today, what sets it apart from every other fund… Almost none of that lives on a firm’s website.
That’s where Know Your VC comes in: a new occasional section of this newsletter where I sit down with partners at LatAm VC firms to open the black box on the investor side of the table. The goal is the non-obvious questions, not the website thesis.
For the first edition, I talked to Diego Gomes, William Cordeiro, and Gustavo Souza, the three partners of SaaSholic, a São Paulo-based firm with a straightforward mandate: invest early in the best B2B software companies in the region. I asked what they’re actually looking for right now, how they work, and where they know they fall short. Below you’ll find a video with the highlights and the full written interview. I hope you enjoy it.
Before we move on to the more granular questions, here are some quick facts about the firm:
Deploying capital? Yes, from Fund III.
Investment Stages: Pre-Seed and Seed, with flexibility (Lead)
Industries of Interest: AI-Native B2B Software & Fintech
Geography: Brazil / Latam / US
Check Size: US$ 500k - US$ 1.5M
What’s the fund’s real thesis today, not the website version? What’s changed over the last 24 months in what you’re looking for?
SaaSholic, as the name implies, is positioned in one of the industries that saw the largest transformation over the last two years. That transformation worked in their favor: it forced them to step back and define which software models will prevail in the AI era. They distilled this into four characteristics they believe will make B2B software win: being AI-native, holding substantive proprietary data, touching money (processing payments, extending credit), and having network effects.
Over the last two years, that thesis has sharpened, and they have leaned even further on proprietary data. Before AI, they backed software whose proprietary data could become the single source of truth for a client. With AI, that takes a step further: companies can now build their own small language models (SLMs) on top of that data. These are vertical models the company fully controls, and they can match or beat frontier models on their specific task at roughly a tenth of the cost, a differentiation that foundational models can’t replicate. Nearly every Fund II company already leverages this kind of data, and they expect the same to prevail in Fund III.
Who are the investment team partners, and how do you divide the work?
Three partners, fifteen companies per fund, each partner sponsoring about five. They split responsibilities by function rather than sector: one owns the firm’s investment infrastructure and ops, one owns fund-level fundraising, and one owns go-to-market support plus legal and planning. Everyone still invests; the boxes are about who builds what.
What kind of team do you like to invest in?
Less pedigree-obsessed than most. They weigh ambition and problem proximity (e.g., a doctor building in health, a lawyer building in legal) over where someone studied. The weight on technical depth is rising: their last Fund II investment had four engineers as founders.
What’s your superpower as a VC? What truly sets SaaSholic apart from other funds?
Most funds say they create value, but with a large portfolio, they can’t actually be there for the founder. SaaSholic’s whole design is the opposite: a concentrated portfolio, five companies per partner, so the support is real rather than nominal. Their culture is to work for the founder, not the other way around.
“My job is one day a week for each of my 5 companies.”
In practice, that shows up on several fronts founders feel most. Through an LP base of founders and operators, they open doors to reference customers and to early and C-level hires. They also work on the next fundraise alongside the founder, sharpening the narrative and getting the model to where the round closes. Every investment opens with a 100-day plan, and from there the partners stay hands-on: weekly calls with every founder, plus information rights and a data-driven monthly review of each portfolio company, so support tracks what the numbers are actually doing, not what the founder remembers to flag.
And they’re candid about the flip side of concentration: it only works because they say no a lot. Being the right investor for five companies means being honest when they’re not the right investor for a sixth, even a great one.
How is an investment decision made internally — consensus, partner sponsor, vote? From first contact to term sheet, what’s the real average timeline?
There’s always a deal sponsor, the partner who brings it and carries it into the room, but the decision is deliberately not a consensus. Every deal goes through hard internal scrutiny against the thesis, with the partners talking to the company’s customers to get information at the source. If one partner has conviction and the other two are unconvinced, they’ll still do it, and from that point, everyone works for the company.
“If all three always agreed, we’d just be following our own bias. So heated disagreement is often a positive signal, a sign we’re seeing an angle the market isn’t pricing yet. “Coordinated chaos”, as we call it.”
First meeting to a terms conversation runs around 15 days; first meeting to close averages about 30. On first checks, they'll often skip a formal term sheet entirely and walk the founder through the whole process verbally instead.
And what’s the honest weakness? What do you not do well that founders should know before reaching out?
B2C and capital-intensive models. Plenty of strong founders come through the door with direct-to-consumer businesses, and SaaSholic is upfront that it wouldn’t add the value it would want to. They’re comfortable with complex-network businesses that are primarily B2B, but once a model leaves that box, they’re candid that they’re not the best owner of the cap table.
“If Nubank had walked past us, we wouldn’t have invested — and we accept that”
Is there any type of stage or funding round that you avoid? Any hard requirements like ownership, board seat, etc.?
Ownership target of 10–15%, and they don’t go below 10%, as at their level of involvement, they need to be a real shareholder. When a round is later-stage or tight, they’ll be creative and work to find a solution around it. They don’t insist on a board seat; instead, they suggest a “scalable governance” — that when a board forms, the two largest non-founder investors take the seats.
What makes you pass on a company that, on the surface, seems to fit the thesis? Is there any recurring red flag?
Three recurring red flags. Inflated ARR — GMV dressed up as revenue, or signed-but-not-closed counted as booked. Weak retention — no clear pattern of continued usage, even with real users. And no defensibility — they’ve passed on fast-growing, AI-native companies they admired because they couldn’t see a moat.
What’s the aggregate profile of your Limited Partners (investors)?
The LP base skews toward first- and second-generation tech founders with exits. Their investors represent an entrepreneurial network they treat as a real asset.
How are you using AI internally today?
Their line is that if you want to invest in AI companies, you’d better know how to use AI yourself, so SaaSholic runs an almost entirely in-house, AI-first stack. On the front end, agents source deal flow by watching public signals such as companies coming out of Nvidia and Google programs, Tech Talents, and other sources, and a scoring system filters them. That automation is why screening that used to cover roughly 100 companies a quarter now covers around 450.
It runs on the other side of the investment, too. They’ve built tooling that connects into their portfolio companies’ own systems, tracks the metrics that matter, including revenue, revenue per headcount, burn, and logs the fund’s interactions with each company, so they’re watching real growth rather than waiting on a quarterly update. The inversion they’re proud of: instead of asking founders to send reports, SaaSholic generates the reports for the founders.
How should a founder reach out to you? Which channel actually works vs. which one you say works?
The website application is the real front door. Applicants there get a faster answer than inbound elsewhere. The highest-quality channel, unsurprisingly, is a warm intro from one of their own portfolio founders.
🎊 Startup Launches
Founders who have just publicly announced what they are working on.
Pax AI
Overview
Startup Description: AI platform for law enforcement that unifies fragmented data into actionable intelligence to solve crimes faster and make cities safer in Brazil.
Industry: AI, SaaS, Physical Security
Team Size: 26
Time in Stealth: 1 year, 6 months
Founder Profile
Fernando Czapski - Co-Founder & COO at Pax AI
Featured as a Stealth Founder in Tech Talents #20
Founder Highlights: Masters, Unicorn Experience, Ex-Corporate, Top University
Previous Experience: Ex-Founder and General Manager of Nucoin at Nubank, ex-Senior Director of Investments at Nubank, ex-Associate Partner at Loyall Capital Partners, ex-Investment Banking Analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil
Ask for an Intro: Click here
Vendria AI
Overview
Startup Description: AI sales assistant for B2B on WhatsApp, handling orders, quotes, and customer inquiries to help teams sell more.
Industry: AI, SaaS, Sales
Team Size: 1
Time in Stealth: 5 months
Founder Profile
Alexandre Maluli - Fundador e CEO at Vendria AI
Founder Highlights: Serial Founder, Investor, Previous Exit, Y Combinator Alumni, Top University
Previous Experience: Ex-Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Zazos, ex-Founder and CEO at Estudar com Você (acquired by Docsity), Angel Investor.
Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil
Ask for an Intro: Click here
Fensivo
Overview
Startup Description: Data security software that turns employees into the first line of defense against cyberattacks.
Industry: Cybersecurity, SaaS
Team Size: 1
Time in Stealth: 5 months
Founder Profile
Jose Vicente Chavez - Founder at Fensivo
Founder Highlights: Unicorn Experience, Scaleup Experience, Marketplace
Previous Experience: Ex-COO at Kiggu, ex-Global Head of Value Proposition at Rappi, ex-Global Head of Advertising at Rappi, BBA from Hult International Business School.
Headquarters: Colombia
Ask for an Intro: Click here
+4 other Announced Startups over the past two weeks with Tech Talents Pro
🤫 Talents Entering Stealth
Talents with relevant experiences who have just entered stealth mode.
Bernardo Campos – Entrepreneur at Stealth Startup
Founder Highlights: Masters, Ex-Corporate, Ex-Consultant
Previous Experience: ex-Product Management Lead - Marketplace Operations at Shopee, ex-Product Manager, Investments at Nomad Group, ex-Chief Product Officer at Parafuzo, ex-Associate, Strategy - Disney Media Networks at The Walt Disney Company, MBA in Finance and Strategic Management (with Honors) from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University.
Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil
Time in Current Position: 1 year, 7 months
Ask for an Intro: Click here
Nicolas Macian – Co-Founder at Stealth Startup
Founder Highlights: Serial Founder, Technical Founder, Masters, Ex-Big Tech, Ex-Corporate
Previous Experience: ex-Software Engineer at Descope, ex-Tech Lead at Dropbox, ex-Deep Learning Researcher at D-ID, Computer Engineering degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Tucumán.
Headquarters: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Time in Current Position: 2 months
Ask for an Intro: Click here
João Soares – Cofundador at Stealth Startup
Founder Highlights: Serial Founder, Technical Founder, Ex-Big Tech, Ex-Corporate, Ex-Consultant, Unicorn Experience
Previous Experience: ex-Sr. Oracle Cloud Architect at Kaseya, ex-Sr. Oracle Cloud Architect at Creditas, ex-Head of UX at FinHand, ex-Sr. Cloud Technical Consultant | Application Specialist at Deloitte, Ensino Superior in Análise e Desenvolvimento de Sistemas (FullStack) from FIAP.
Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil
Time in Current Position: 6 months
Ask for an Intro: Click here
+4 other Stealth Founders over the past two weeks with Tech Talents Pro
🤝 Tech Talents Match
Vagas em startups brasileiras, atualizadas diariamente.
O Tech Talents Match agora conta com uma página que centraliza vagas abertas em diversas startups do Brasil. Procure por vagas filtrando por estágio da empresa, área funcional, setor de atuação e senioridade. Demonstre interesse por vagas com o seu nome, LinkedIn e e-mail e te conecto com os recrutadores responsáveis, se fizer sentido.
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