ALITAR

Born in São José dos Campos-SP, but raised in the countryside, in the town of Paraibuna (~40km from SJC). Lived there until age 16. It was me and my brother, 9 years younger. During my school years, I commuted daily to SJC to study. I had the privilege of attending high school at Anglo São José dos Campos during its golden era, with some of the most incredible teachers I have ever known. From that time at Anglo, I carry the best memories and many of my closest friends!

Unlike what one might expect from a child from the "countryside," nothing defined the path I followed more than the gift I received from my parents in 1987 when I was 8 years old. On that birthday, I received an MSX Gradiente 1.1 computer with a 5¼" floppy disk drive (the MSX still works perfectly, thanks to my mother who lovingly kept it!). I was always very curious about how toys and "things" worked, and this machine was truly special at that time: It could display graphics with up to 16 colors and connect to regular TVs, came with integrated speakers and could play sounds or simple music, and had MS BASIC installed from the factory! There was no internet yet, and in Brazil, the way to acquire applications and especially games was through piracy (unauthorized copies from floppy to floppy). However, what really enchanted me was the possibility of creating my own games and applications. After devouring the MSX manual which contained basic programming concepts, I discovered magazines like Micro Sistemas that brought game listings and applications in BASIC and sometimes ASSEMBLY that I could type and use on my computer. I started eagerly awaiting the beginning of each month to buy each magazine. This period crystallized my curiosity and defined me as an avid reader and student for life. But most importantly, it was there that, at age 8, I discovered it was possible to express desires, objectives, and procedures logically for a machine to execute step by step. And that completely shaped my interests to this day!

Later, I assembled a PC XT, a 386, and eventually a Pentium. I discovered MANDIC BBS via dial-up in 1994 and soon after, the Internet. In the world of the internet, my interest in creating my own games led me to discover x2ftp.oulu.fi, a fantastic game development repository. There I had contact with open source software for the first time and discovered the Demoscene. I started participating in Brazil's nascent Demoscene in 1995 when my demo Paradise won first place at Painless Compo 1996. In '97 I placed third with a ray tracing demo in just 2kb! At that time, Unity3D didn't exist, and to make a Demo you had to program 100% of your rendering engine, much of it in assembly, to achieve minimum performance in texture rendering, lighting, and animations. It was a magical time when there were fewer layers of abstraction and a single "coder" deeply understood 100% of the "bits and bytes" of Hardware and Software. This period was fundamental in consolidating my passion for mathematics, physics, and programming – disciplines that shaped the way I think and how my professional career developed. Throughout these years, I also developed all the automation software for my parents' business, "Churrascaria Korujão," which was located on Rodovia dos Tamoios. The software that was developed while I was still a child ran until 2004, on Linux, with almost no support from me. In a way, I see this software as a small material thank you for the bet my parents made on me. However, it is incapable of representing the deep gratitude I feel for them having allowed me the time, access, and especially the tranquility to engage and develop in subjects that were so new and distant from their reality and that ultimately were so beneficial to me.

As expected, my passion for mathematics, physics, and programming led me to Computer Engineering at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCAR) in 1998, where I eventually met my wife. In 2003, driven by IAESTE's motto at the time "Face the World," I had the opportunity to start at Profactor, working with robotics, computer vision, and signal processing — areas that defined my understanding of complex systems and how to extract meaning from raw data. Returning to Brazil, I founded Spatium, a pioneering company in industrial 3D digitization in Brazil, responsible for the first 3D scanner developed in the country (2005). Spatium served major automotive and aerospace industries, applying precision technology to real challenges in engineering and advanced manufacturing. Despite this, we didn't have enough market available in Brazil and didn't have the resources to take the business abroad. It was there in practice that I learned how much responsibility exists in allocating investors' capital, how emotionally difficult it is to frustrate yourself, but especially others, and finally, the main lesson: the certainty that regardless of any outcome, I would never have a traditional career, my calling was – and always will be – to be an entrepreneur.

In 2012, I founded Propz — guided by the vision of transforming consumer data into automated business decisions and actions. Our motto was "Better Decisions, Intelligent Sales." We created Brazil's first Analytical CRM platform and recommendation models at scale, applying decision intelligence to thousands of stores, tens of thousands of products, and millions of consumers. Propz pioneered the use of Apache Spark as the foundation of the data layer when many of AWS's managed services didn't exist. We were also pioneers in seeing our solution as a "System-of-Action," a topic much talked about now in 2025, the idea of software being proactive, automating dozens of tasks that previously were the responsibility of marketing analysts, was always part of Propz's vision and allowed lean teams to execute, and more importantly, measure thousands of campaigns every month with very low involvement – basically just authorizing the execution of campaigns proposed by the tool. For over a decade, Propz helped major retailers sell more intelligently, combining data science, behavioral modeling, and machine learning in production. In 2025, I concluded this cycle with the sale of Propz to Rock Encantech, consolidating a 13-year trajectory of innovation, execution, and impact.

My journey has always been about how to transform data into decisions, and now, in the cognitive era, my purpose is a continuation of that journey. My strategy is to combine my foundation in signal processing and over 20 years building analytical systems in production with the most advanced artificial intelligence techniques. This guides my studies, investments, and the initiatives I decide to support. In other words, after decades programming machines to understand the world, I now study how machines can help the world understand itself.