ALEC OXENFORD
Founder & Sponsor
CEO and Chairman
Mr. Oxenford is a serial tech entrepreneur. Mr. Oxenford is regarded as a top technology sector entrepreneur and visionary because of his track record of identifying promising opportunities and nurturing their growth to become established players. He is also an active angel investor in the technology industry with a focus on emerging markets. Prior to founding Alpha Capital, in 2015, Mr. Oxenford co-founded and served as CEO of letgo, a person-to-person used goods online trading platform in the United States and Turkey until July 2020 when its United States operations were merged with OfferUp (an online mobile-first consumer to consumer marketplace) and its Turkey operations were simultaneously acquired by OLX (the leading global online classifieds platform with a focus on Latin America, Asia, and Europe according to SimilarWeb). Under Mr. Oxenford’s leadership, letgo grew to over 100 million downloads and 400 million listings according to Techcrunch, and became a unicorn. Mr. Oxenford supervised the merger between letgo and OfferUp which created the top grossing application in the U.S. in the shopping category on both iOS and Android, according to Sensor Tower. Mr. Oxenford has been a member of the OfferUp board of directors since the merger. Prior to letgo, from 2006 to 2015, Mr. Oxenford co-founded and led OLX, a unicorn, which, under Mr. Oxenford’s leadership became the largest online marketplace in Brazil, India and several other emerging market countries, according to Fortune Magazine. Mr. Oxenford continued to serve on the boards of several OLX affiliates in various capacities until 2019. Mr. Oxenford also co-founded DineroMail in 2003, an online payment platform in Latin America which was acquired by PayU in 2013. In 1999 during the early days of the Internet, Mr. Oxenford founded DeRemate.com, an online auction platform targeting Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, which was acquired by MercadoLibre in 2005.
RAFAEL STEINHAUSER
Founder & Sponsor
President and Director
Mr. Steinhauser has over 35 years of senior corporate experience in Europe and Latin America in the high-tech industry. He served as president of Qualcomm Latin America from 2011 to 2020. During that time, he contributed to Brazil’s digital inclusion through the broad access to the internet via smartphones and to technological evolution through the commercial launch of the first worldwide SiP-based smartphone in Brazil. He fostered Qualcomm’s investment in the Latin American region’s Center for the 4th Industrial Revolution which is led by the World Economic Forum. He also led the effort to create Qualcomm Ventures in the region, currently one of the largest corporate venture capital investors in Latin America, which has invested in several companies that are now unicorns (for example 99, Quinto Andar and Loggi) and the creation of the first public-private partnership fund devoted to the Internet of Things. Mr. Steinhauser was President for Latin America for Acision from 2009 to 2011 and president of NextWave Latin America from 2006 to 2009. He also served as President of Cisco Brazil from 2002 to 2006, where he was recognized in 2005 for growing Cisco Brazil’s operations faster in terms of revenue than those in other countries within Cisco’s large country category, and as president of Brazil Nortel Networks from 2000 to 2002. Earlier in his career, Mr. Steinhauser held executive positions with various telecom service providers, such as Head of Mobile Satellite Services of Eutelsat in Paris and as Executive VP of the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier Vésper in Rio de Janeiro, and as a sales engineer at Standard Electrik Lorenz and Siemens in Germany.
He has extensive corporate and private venture capital experience in Latin America.
Mr. Steinhauser graduated in Aerospace Engineering from the Technische Universität Berlin and in Performing Arts from the Escola Superior Célia Helena in São Paulo. He co-founded in 2015 the B Future Forum, a sustained action-oriented dialog on the future of humanity, and EBAC in 2016, a world-class higher educational institution for the Creative Arts in Brazil. He was nominated and won various awards including the Shell Prize and twice the State of São Paulo Governor Prize for his work in Performing Arts. He has three nationalities and is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and German.
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INNOVA CAPITAL
Co-sponsor
Innova Capital, which is one of our co-sponsors, is led by Veronica Allende Serra. Veronica is the Founding Partner of Pacific Investments and Innova Capital Fund with 20 years of experience making private and growth equity investments in a variety of sectors in the US and throughout Latin America. Innova Capital was established in 2009 to focus on innovation and has as its key backers leading families who invest globally. Early investments included leading anti-fraud platform Clearsale and cable company Blue Interactive (sold to Net/Grupo Claro). Veronica has exited numerous investments in the past years such as leading email marketing company Virid (sold to Experian), Digital Ad agency Fbiz (sold to WPP), data company Zipcode (TransUnion), shopper marketing Epigram (WPP), E-Smart (B2W), mobile distributor Allied (Advent), tech platform KeepTrue (Avalara), Snapchat (IPO) and Editas Medicine (Nasdaq: EDIT). Some of the current investments of Innova are Accera (supply chain software), Movile – the leading mobile content and services company in Latam interacting with 120M people every month. Veronica is also an investor in Vitta, Bloomlife, Yogome, Jampp, and Brex. Veronica was active in entrepreneurship as a mentor and helped establish numerous companies, including Patagon.com in Brazil (sold to Banco Santander). From 1998-2001 she headed investments for Latin America of IRR LLC, and prior was an assistant to the CEO of Leucadia National Corporation and worked at Goldman Sachs. In 2015, she was elected one of the top 25 business women in LatAm by LatinTrade Magazine. Veronica received her MBA from Harvard Business School in 1997, graduated in Law from the University of São Paulo and Art and Advertising from Escola Panamericana de Arte. Veronica was born in Chile, grew up in the US and Brazil, and is fluent in several languages.
FJ LABS
Co-sponsor
Founded in 2015, FJ Labs is a hybrid venture fund and startup studio founded and managed by Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin. FJ Labs is a stage-agnostic investment firm that focuses on marketplaces and consumer facing startups. Their investments are seed and series A. The investment range of the company is $50,000 to $5,000,000. It invests in Alibaba Group, beepi, BrightRoll, Betterment, ADORE ME, and earnest. Fabrice partnered with Alec Oxenford to start OLX.
DR. IRWIN JACOBS
Co-sponsor
Irwin Mark Jacobs is Founding Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Qualcomm, a company he co-founded in 1985. As CEO through 2005 and Chairman through 2009, he led the growth from startup to Fortune 500 Company, now with over 30,000 employees worldwide. Qualcomm pioneered the CDMA wireless technology used by all third-generation cellular networks to deliver broadband Internet access to over 2.2 billion customers, and is the leader in supplying fourth-generation technology. Through continuing innovation, Qualcomm has become the world’s largest semiconductor supplier for mobile devices.
Dr. Jacobs previously served as co-founder, CEO and chairman of LINKABIT Corporation, leading the development of Very Small Aperture Earth Terminals (VSATs) and the VideoCipher® satellite-to-home TV system. LINKABIT merged with M/A-COM in August 1980, and Dr. Jacobs served as executive vice president and a member of the board of directors until his resignation in April 1985. Over 100 San Diego communications companies trace their roots to LINKABIT.
From 1959 to 1966, Dr. Jacobs was an assistant, then associate professor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1966 to 1972 he served as professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). While at MIT, Dr. Jacobs co-authored with Jack Wozencraft a textbook on digital communications, Principles of Communication Engineering. First published in 1965, the book remains in use today. Dr. Jacobs received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1956 from Cornell University and Master of Science and Doctor of Science degrees in electrical engineering from MIT in 1957 and 1959, respectively. He holds fourteen CDMA patents.
