Episodes

For Tikue Anazodo, founder and CEO of Kudos, his entrepreneurial journey began long before Silicon Valley—long before Google, Microsoft, Affirm, or Shopify. It started in Lagos, Nigeria, in an environment where entrepreneurship wasn’t a career choice. It was a necessity. The post Tikue Anazodo On Raising Over $20 Million To Build An AI-Powered Smart Wallet Service That Optimizes Consumer Rewards And Benefits On Purchase appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Doug’s story also captures what it truly takes to build financial infrastructure in an emerging market: resilience, humility, and a deep respect for capital. In this engrossing interview, he discusses the challenges he faced in building, scaling, and raising funding for SWAP. The post Doug Storf On Raising ~$30 Million To Build The Leading Banking-As-A-Service Infrastructure Platform For B2B Businesses In Brazil appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Yuval Golan's is a story of how a kid from Startup Nation became a global entrepreneur, survived geopolitical gray zones, navigated China, COVID, capital markets, and ultimately built a platform designed to fix one of the most broken systems in the world: cross-border real estate ownership. The post Yuval Golan On Building A FinTech Platform To Enable Non-US Citizens To Buy Assets In The $50 Trillion US Real Estate Marketplace appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Ben Freeman’s story is not one of overnight success or neatly plotted career moves. It is a story of friction—between old-economy instincts and venture-scale ambition, between external validation and internal conviction, and between momentum and meaning. The post Ben Freeman On Raising ~$75 Million To Build An AI-Native Procurement Platform That Automates And Streamlines The Entire Buying Process For Businesses appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Tomas Bercovich’s entrepreneurship path was never a straight line. All through, it has been a sequence of experiments, pivots, hard decisions, and compounding lessons; each one sharpening his instincts for what truly matters when building enduring companies. The post Tomas Bercovich On Processing Over $7 Billion Through A LatAm Fintech Platform Enabling Cross-Border, Multi-Currency Money Transfers appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

When Philipp Heltewig talks about his journey, he does not describe “building a startup.” He talks about building a real company, one that hits its KPIs, scales globally, survives shocks like COVID, and rides new technology waves like generative AI. The post Philipp Heltewig On Raising $169 Million To Build The Global Leader In Conversational AI And Then Selling The Company To NICE For $1+ Billion appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Andrew Jamison, co-founder and CEO of Extend, chose an entrepreneurial path that didn’t involve a bold dive. Instead, he spent years quietly learning, observing, and accumulating enough pattern recognition to know when it’s finally time to build. The post Andrew Jamison On Raising $70M To Build An AI-Powered B2B2B Spend And Expense Management Platform appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Julio Martinez is the co-founder and CEO of Abacum, an AI-native Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) platform used by finance teams across 40+ countries. He has raised more than $100M from elite global funds like Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Cathay Innovation, Creandum, and Atomico. The post Julio Martinez On Raising $100 Million To Build An AI-Native Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Platform For Early Enterprise and Mid-Market Companies appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Aneesh Reddy belongs to that rare category of founders who have built their companies for nearly two decades through multiple cycles, reinvented their businesses through crises, expanded across continents, and still managed to retain over 100 employees who have stayed for more than 10 years. The post Aneesh Reddy On Raising $300+ Million, Expanding Into 30+ Countries, And Taking His Company Public By Powering Cloud-Based Customer Loyalty Solutions For Global Enterprise Brands appeared first on ...

Ryan Wang is building in one of the most consequential layers of modern software: the operational infrastructure that allows great ideas to scale without breaking. As the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, Ryan sits at the intersection of customer support, AI, and organizational design, an area most companies only confront once growth exposes their cracks. The post Ryan Wang On Raising $71 Million To Provide Companies With An AI-Powered Customer Support Platform That Integrates WFM And AI Agents ...

Pierre Brossollet is the founder and CEO of Arverne, a geothermal energy company that has raised €220M ($258M), employs 250 people, has gone public, and is now pursuing more than €3B ($3.53B) in projects by 2030. The post Pierre Brossollet On Raising Over $250 Million To Harness And Provide Geothermal Energy Solutions And Extract Low-Carbon Lithium appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Founder of Dagster, Nick Schrock’s career defies the neat, linear playbooks often associated with Silicon Valley success. He didn’t follow a rigid five-year plan, nor did he obsess over titles or prestige early on. Instead, his journey has been shaped by systems thinking and cultural curiosity. The post Nick Schrock On Raising $55 Million To Build An Open-Source Data Orchestrator Used To Build, Manage, And Observe Complex Data Pipelines appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Founders like Joshua Silver are the architects of multiple companies, each bigger, more innovative, and more strategically positioned than the last. His entrepreneurial pathway traces his early days as a tinkerer and engineer to a $450M exit in healthcare payments. The post Joshua Silver On Selling A Company For $450 Million And Now Building A Payments-As-A-Service (PaaS) Platform For Vertical Software Companies appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Lyron Bentovim’s entrepreneurial career is anything but linear. His journey spans continents, cycles, and sectors. He started as an ice cream shop operator in Israel, a tech entrepreneur in the dot-com era, a hedge fund manager during the bust, and became a public company turnaround executive. The post Lyron Bentovim On Cofounding A $100 Million AUM Hedge Fund And Now Raising $50 Million To Build A Diversified Immersive Technology Platform appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Orr Yarkoni’s path started in academic research and went on to building Colorifix, one of the world’s most ambitious biotech-textile companies that radically reframed how biology can power industry. The post Orr Yarkoni On Raising $46 Million To Create Sustainable Dyes For The Textile Industry Using Synthetic Biology appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Rylan’s story is shaped by discipline, risk, curiosity, and a relentless drive to tackle problems on a global scale. Today, as the co-founder of Blue Water Autonomy, Rylan is building fully autonomous ocean-going vessels that can travel across open waters for months at a time. The post Rylan Hamilton On Selling A Company To Shopify For $450 Million And Now Raising $60 Million To Build Autonomous Naval Vessels appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Some founders are shaped by success. But Ben Borodach’s journey is forged by the lessons of failure, reflection, and the relentless pursuit of doing it better the second time around. The co-founder and CEO of april, he learned extensively from an early stumble. The post Ben Borodach On Raising $80 Million To Build An AI-Driven Tax Platform To Enable Users To Plan And Manage Their Taxes Throughout The Year appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Some founders plan every move years in advance. But Sudheesh Nair, the co-founder and CEO of TinyFish, thrives in the chaos of serendipity, making the right choices with the data at hand, learning quickly, and never looking back. The post Sudheesh Nair On Raising $47 Million To Develop And Operate “Enterprise Web Agents” That Replicate Human Interactions Online appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Some founders stumble into the frontier. Others live there by instinct. Stefano Ermon, an Italian-born scientist, Stanford professor, and co-founder of Inception, is firmly in the second camp. Stefano was working on the foundations of generative AI long before it became a phrase on every investor deck and conference stage. The post Stefano Ermon On Raising $50 Million To Enable Businesses To Create 10x Faster, Real-Time AI Applications appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Some founders dream of billion-dollar outcomes. Others quietly stack experiences, industry by industry and skill by skill, until their time arrives. Michel Tricot is the latter. Before co-founding Airbyte and raising $185M, Michel helped build two companies that sold for $300M and $115M, respectively. The post Michel Tricot On Raising $185 Million To Build An Open-Source Data Integration Platform To Move Data From Various Sources Into Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, And Databases appeared first on...

Jason Johnson’s entrepreneurial journey is the kind that lives at the intersection of tech history and personal resilience. He talks about building, scaling, and exiting, as well as navigating the different cycles of company building with Darwin Networks and August Locks. The post Jason Johnson On Raising $70 Million To Pioneer Bluetooth Smart Locks And Now Building His Next Intelligent Home Venture appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Henric Suuronen’s story is a masterclass in how childhood passion can evolve into global impact. His journey started from pirating games in cold Finnish winters and went on to building a $100M+ gaming company and investing nearly $500M into startups. The post Henric Suuronen On Building And Selling A Gaming Company For $100 Million And Now Backing Gaming Startups Through A $450 Million VC Firm appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

When you hear about startup journeys, you often expect Silicon Valley dorm rooms, tech hacks, or venture capital from day one. Mark Rampolla’s path couldn’t have been more different. He journeyed from a Pittsburgh childhood to the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, and eventually founded ZICO. The post Mark Rampolla On Selling A Company To Coca-Cola for $200 Million, Repurchasing It, And Now Co-Founding A $600-Million AUM Private Equity Firm appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Alex Hawkinson's path as a founder reflects his incredible skills in problem-solving, curiosity, and knowing when to bootstrap and when to raise. With multiple exits under his belt, including a $200M acquisition by Samsung, he has learned to trust his instincts. The post Alex Hawkinson On Selling A Company To Samsung For $200 Million, And Raising $78 Million To Automate Global Infrastructure For A Sustainable Future appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.