Start-up Society #94: The International Series — Brazil 🇧🇷

Keeping the American (and Brazilian) Dream Alive

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Start-up Society

6 min readMay 24, 2022

Welcome to the 94th edition of Start-up Society! This blog highlights some of the most exciting start-ups in the country striving to keep the American Dream alive.

Make sure you check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here!

While the COVID-19 pandemic crippled several countries from a startup generation/entrepreneurial standpoint, Brazil’s startup ecosystem remained strong. In fact, in 2020, 2.6 million entrepreneurs established new businesses, which was an 8.4% YoY increase. The country’s innovation sector also received a record $9.4 billion in investments in 2021.

This week we are exploring two Brazilian companies — a venture capital firm and an industrial machine intelligence company — that are contributing to the rise of entrepreneurship in Brazil.

Latitud

HQ: São Paulo

Founded: 2020

Employees: 89 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Latitud is a tech entrepreneurship platform that seeks to provide community, infrastructure and capital to world-class entrepreneurs from Latin America.
Latitud offers several services to tech founders, investors, and even operators. Latitud Go is a product that better enables proper company formation tactics in Latin America. Founders can get access to tax planning and structuring, templates for legal documents, and banking and accounting services, all at a price five times less expensive than the market price.
Latitud Fellowships is an educational program that has curriculums taught by renowned operators from top tech companies globally. It has more than 800 entrepreneurs who, in total, have raised $250 million at a collective valuation of $1.5 billion.
Latitud Ventures, the company’s VC arm, has invested in over 80 companies including Alinea, BHub, and Pomelo.

Some of Latitud’s partners include Carey Olson, MongoDB, a16z, AWS, Notion, Stripe, Zendesk, and Silicon Valley Bank.

MEET THE TEAM

Gina Gotthilf, Co-Founder

Previously, Gina was a Growth Lead at Hawkfish LLC, running digital marketing experiments for the Mike Bloomberg presidential campaign.
She was the VP of Marketing/Growth at Duolingo, the Founder and CEO of Global Ginga, and an International Marketing, Growth and Community Lead at Tumblr.
Gina earned her B.A. in Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Foreign Languages from Brandeis University.

Yuri Danilchenko, Co-Founder

Yuri is concurrently an Investor at Kocomo and an Advisor at BHub.ai.
Previously, he was the CTO of Escale Digital, the Co-Founder and CPO of Vemos, and a General Manager of Product and Engineering at UNEAR.
Yuri earned both his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Northern Kentucky University.

Brian Requarth, Co-Founder

Brian is concurrently a Non-Executive Chair at Kocomo and a Non-Executive Chair at aptuno.com.
Previously, he was a Chairman at Grupo ZAP, the CEO and Co-Founder of VivaReal, and the Founder of Bilingual Marketing Group.
Brian earned his Bachelor’s degree in Spanish from San Diego State University.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Entrepreneurship is on the rise in Brazil, yet more often than not, having access to the right resources and overcoming company formation challenges is the biggest hurdle for Latin American founders. Thus, Latitud finds itself in an empowering position, helping other Latin American startups to get kickstarted.
Latitud’s game-changing play can potentially be its aggressive push toward augmenting an Operations-as-a-Service business model. Since the company already has a vast network of tech operators and other industry experts, it can look to serve as an operational backbone for startups, further cutting their costs and possibly establishing new investment models.

GO DEEPER

Latitud Secures $11.5 Million in Seed Funding to Scale Next Generation of Tech Startups in Latin America

a16z, NFX back Latitud’s effort to become ‘the operating system for every venture-backed company in LatAm’

Investing in Latitud

Tractian

HQ: São Paulo

Founded: 2019

Employees: 101(on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Tractian is a machine intelligence company that offers industrial monitoring systems and solutions. The company’s goal is to democratize access to sophisticated real-time, online monitoring and asset management tools.
Tractian provides services to several industries such as food and agriculture, plastic and packaging, mining, casting and machining, and clinical engineering along with others.
Tractian Smart Sensor is an advanced IoT technology that detects failures and generates insights based on expected machine operations.
TracOS™ is a maintenance management software that offers users an all-in-one platform for maintenance planning, maintenance KPIs, inventory management, and procedures library.
The company also offers predictive maintenance services where users can control their machines through hardware and software solutions, automate processes, and manage activities.

MEET THE TEAM

Igor Marinelli, Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Previously, Igor was the Co-Founder and CTO of Blue and the Co-Founder of Somos Todos Heróis.
He was also a Product Manager at Shawee, a Software Engineer at Klabin, and a Product Manager at Digital Innovation One Inc.
Igor completed a Startup Semester program in Engineering and Entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkley. He also participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.

Gabriel Lameirinhas, Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Gabriel was a Software Engineer at Klabin, the Co-Founder of Somos Todos Heróis, and a Software Engineer at OLX Egypt.
Gabriel earned his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from the University of São Paulo and completed an Engineering Leadership Professional Program at the University of California, Berkley. He also participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.

Bruno Félix, Co-Founder

Previously, Bruno was a Software Engineer at Bizut — Sistema de Recrutamento e Seleção.
He also participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.

Leonardo Vieira, Co-Founder & Chief Commercial Officer

Previously, Leonardo was a Sales Lead at Drausuisse Brasil and a Corporate Business Analyst at Grupo Coimex.
Leonardo earned an Executive Education in Sales and Negotiation from the University of Akron. He also participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.

THE START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

According to a report by MarketsandMarkets™, the predictive maintenance market could be worth upwards of $12.3 Billion by 2025. This is an expected CAGR of 25.2%. Since Tractian will be using its recent funding towards product development and expanding the company’s workforce and geographic footprint, it finds itself in excellent shape to capitalize on the potential growth in the industry.
Predictive maintenance not only plays a vital role in preventing machine failures, but also in reducing costs and unplanned downtime. Below is an infographic from a study done by Senseye which shows the cost of downtime across a few industries: