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:
🎊 Startup Launches: Lina, Vector Labs
🦄 Leadership Movements: New CTO at Galaxies, new Head of Artificial Intelligence at Nuvidio
📖 Recent Reads: How to Fix Your Entire Life in 1 Day, Rise of the Borderless Founder & more
🤫 Talents Entering Stealth: Ex-Director of Data at Blip & more
🤝 Tech Talents Match: Veja vagas abertas em mais de 20 startups brasileiras, atualizadas diariamente. Acesse aqui.
Let’s dive in…
Esta edição do Tech Talents é oferecida pela Austera.
A Austera é o time financeiro da sua startup que você não precisa contratar.
A maioria dos founders só descobre que seus números são um problema quando um investidor pede para vê-los. A Austera atua como CFO & FP&A as a Service: assume a rotina financeira, incluindo contas a pagar e a receber, conciliação bancária, ERP e transforma isso em informação que sustenta decisões. Com eles, o fechamento mensal cai de 20 para 3 dias.
O escopo acompanha o estágio da empresa: BPO para a camada operacional, FP&A quando você precisa de visibilidade, e um CFO sênior na mesa quando o assunto é o planejamento dos próximos três a cinco anos. Sem o custo de um C-level interno.
Ainda tomando decisões no escuro?
🎊 Startup Launches
Founders who have just publicly announced what they are working on.
Lina
Overview
Startup Description: Lina is an AI WhatsApp companion that helps operative workers build profiles and skills, making their experience visible to employers.
Industry: HR Tech, AI
Team Size: 3
Time in Stealth: 11 months
Mario B. - Co-Founder & CEO at Lina
Talent Highlights: Investor, Ex-Big Tech, Ex-Corporate, Masters, Top University, Unicorn Experience
Previous Experience: Ex-Investor at Upload Ventures, ex-Investor at SoftBank Group International, ex-Product at Uber, MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Headquarters: Mexico
Ask for an Intro: Click here
Vector Labs
Overview
Startup Description: Builds custom AI agents that augment teams, fill operational gaps, and boost productivity.
Industry: AI, Consulting
Team Size: 4
Time in Stealth: 1 month
Fabricio Pedreira – Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer at Vector Labs
Founder Highlights: Technical Founder, Ex-Corporate, Unicorn Experience
Previous Experience: Ex-Head of AI at Neon, ex-Head of Information Technology at Solfácil, ex-Lead Software Development Engineer at Banco do Brasil, Information Technology from Universidade Paulista.
Headquarters: Brasília, Distrito Federal, Brazil
Ask for an Intro: Click here
+3 other Announced Startups over the past two weeks with Tech Talents Pro
🦄 Leadership Movements
Promotions, new hires, and other movements in local unicorns and scaleups’ executive-level.
Jonathan B. - CTO at Galaxies
Previous Role: Founding Team & CTO at Vetto AI
Previous Experience: Ex-Senior Software Engineering Manager at QuintoAndar, Ex-Founding Team | VP of Software Engineering at Kenoby.
Headquarters: São Paulo, Brazil
Time in Current Position: 1 month
Marcus Alexandre Silva - Head of Artificial Intelligence, Architecture, Research & Development at Nuvidio
Previous Role: IT Engineer Manager at Localiza&Co
Previous Experience: Ex-Solutions Architecture Manager at Localiza&Co, Ex-Technical Leader at Prime Systems, ex-Senior Systems Analyst at TOTVS.
Headquarters: Minas Gerais, Brazil
Time in Current Position: 1 month
📖 Recent Reads
My quick takes on interesting articles, news and data that I’ve come across recently.
How to fix your entire life in 1 day by Dan Koe
I had this text on my reading list for a while and I’m glad I didn’t forget about it. The author goes over what he believes are the important variables to make meaningful, long term changes to your life and become who you want to become. It is not only about changing your daily actions or your lifestyle, even though this is definitely part of it, but it is also about setting the right goals and being aware of the goals already buried in your actions, even if they are not apparent. His argument is that all behavior is goal-oriented, so if you procrastinate or stay in a job you hate, there is an unconscious goal being served, usually safety or protection from judgment. The three main ingredients to get the life you want are opportunity, agency and intelligence. If you have one or two of those, they are not enough. Lastly, he closes with a full-day protocol to put this into practice: a morning of questions to map both the life you don’t want (what he calls your “anti-vision”) and the one you do, reminders scattered through the day to break you out of autopilot, and an evening session where you turn the insights into a one-year lens, a one-month project and the daily actions that actually start changing those variables.
30 Features of an AI-Native Company by Alex Lieberman
I’ve talked about what it actually means to be an AI-native company before, but I’ve come across another great text that goes over 30 features that define a truly AI-native company. Here are a few that caught my attention:
“Treat context as code, ensuring architecture documents and conventions remain updated while allowing for diligent upfront planning.”
“An automated, agent-native development system where fleets of AI coding agents handle planning, writing, testing, reviewing, and shipping code while humans define the intent and acceptance criteria.”
“Finance org that runs processes continuously in accounting (record-keeping) to redefine and reset forecasts on a much, much tighter cadence.”
“Closed loop, self-improving non-engineering workflows that learn from previous runs based on external performance metrics or internal evals.”
“Everyone is a builder. Especially C-level execs. This is a defining trait of companies reaching higher levels of AI maturity.”
Rise of the Borderless Founder by Gabriel Vasquez and Angela Strange
Starting a startup is hard. Starting a startup outside your home country is even harder, but it comes with its advantages. In this piece, a16z partner Gabriel Vasquez explores these advantages “Borderless Founders” (people with one foot in their home market and one in Silicon Valley) have and how his firm has structured a playbook to map and attract them. He points to three: privileged access to customers in their home countries, where knowing the right people lands brand-name design partners and first contracts far earlier than their traction would normally justify; brand recognition, since press and even governments at home turn them into representatives of the local tech sector; and talent, being able to identify and hire the best engineers in their home markets before the rest of the market catches on. Something that I would add to these is perspective. Being born in a different place and being exposed to different cultures while growing up can give you different perspectives that could help a founder come up with differentiated product and strategy attributes that could set them apart from competitors whose founders weren’t in contact with this diversity.
🤫 Talents Entering Stealth
Talents with relevant experiences who have just entered stealth mode.
Ishvann Villate Larsen – Founder / Founding Engineer at Stealth Startup
Founder Highlights: Technical Founder, Ex-Corporate, Scaleup Experience, AI
Signals: Data and engineering leader who left Blip in Sep 2026 and now holds a Stealth Mode Founder / Founding Engineer role. Prior to that he was Partner and Head of Data Engineering at XP Inc.
Headquarters: Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil
Time in Current Position: 1 month
Ask for an Intro: Click here
+3 more Stealth Founders this week with Pro, including:
Sixteen years at a global enterprise tech giant, now co-founder and CEO of a stealth healthcare AI company.
Nine years at a Brazilian proptech unicorn, rising to senior software engineering manager, then Head of Product & Technology at a startup he left last month. Now co-founder and CTO of a stealth venture.
Six years across two Brazilian digital-risk companies in fraud prevention and people operations. Now co-founder of a stealth startup tackling AI risk.