The Realistic Optimist

Biography:

Sebastian Ruales is the co-founder of Bia Energy, a Colombian startup. 

Bia enables businesses to access smarter energy consumption analytics, simplified billing, and more transparent access to renewables. In 2023, the company raised a $16.5M Series A round. It serves over 3,500 clients, in 250+ cities. 

Prior to Bia, Sebastian was part of the founding team at Rappi, Colombia’s first unicorn. 

Certain legislative changes ushered in Bia’s opportunity. How so?

One needs to understand where Bia sits in the energy value chain. We’re an energy retailer. Simply put: we’re the company that deals with clients directly. We install meters, handle billing, manage customer service, and ensure reliable consumption data.

For decades, Colombia’s energy incumbents did essentially nothing on the retail front. Customers received a bill, paid it, and never thought about it twice. One of our initial challenges was

Biography:

Samer Choumar is the co-founder & CEO of z.systems, a Moroccan startup transforming the country’s traditional retail ecosystem. On the Z app, FMCG brands can open their own branded stores, and Moroccan traditional retailers can order from it. Z connects with third-party distributors to take care of deliveries. 

Z closed a $1.5M seed round at the end of 2024. MNF Ventures, Witamax, CashPlus Ventures and Kalys Ventures participated in the round. Other co-founders include Meriem Benabad, Youssef Haddouch and Reda Nebri.

Prior to Z, Samer worked at BCG and was co-founder & CEO of a tech-enabled hospitality startup in Saudi Arabia. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. 

Startups digitizing traditional retail are numerous. In Africa, one thinks of Chari, Wasoko & MaxAB (which have merged),…How is Z different?

Startups digitizing traditional corner stores have raised millions in funding, from Morocco, to

Biography

Raghuram Trikutam is the co-founder of QuickLend, an Indian lending startup.

QuickLend provides loans using financial assets as collateral, starting with mutual funds. In Q1 2025, QuickLend raised a pre-seed round of INR 6.75 crore (~$800k) to scale up operations.

Raghuram and his co-founders previously built payments teams at major tech companies.

Raghuram was with the Google Pay team and worked with India’s United Payments Interface (UPI). Co-founder Arun Jadhav was at UberPay in Amsterdam, and co-founder Abhishek Uppala was the founding engineer for Stripe India.

How did the co-founders’ background help in starting QuickLend?

The three of us have been in the fintech space for more than a decade. We’ve each built companies like Google Pay, UberPay, and Stripe in India. This gave us a strong Indian fintech network, which allowed us to approach and speak to various people to figure out a market gap.

Biography:

Raffaele Sertorio is the co-founder of Niko, a Mexican startup helping homeowners and businesses install and finance solar panels. Niko has raised over $26M to date, of which $11M in equity and $15M in debt.

Prior to Niko, Raffaele co-founded Cocinas Ocultas, a dark kitchen company he sold to Travis Kalanick’s CloudKitchens. 

What problem are you solving?

Mexico has increasing energy needs but lags in solar energy adoption. Your average Mexican household doesn’t have enough reliable companies helping them switch their house to solar. The previous Mexican president ran a fossil-fuel friendly administration. This slowed down solar and the governmental incentives needed to boost its adoption.

We’re inspired by what Enpal is building in Germany. We wanted to replicate the model in Mexico knowing that solar here is picking up pace (despite the initial lag). Mexico is one of LATAM’s fastest growing countries in

Biography

Archie Cochrane is co-founder and general partner at Nascent, a top decile LATAM pre-seed fund. 

Prior to Nascent, Archie worked for global fintech PayU (acquired by Naspers) and was an investment principal at Anthemis Group.

In your articles, you speak about the importance of tailoring a venture fund’s strategy to its specific context. What does that imply?

It comes down to what product you are offering your customers. In my case, my two customers are the LPs that bought my fund product and the founders I support.

Venture capital used to be an artisanal, cottage industry. Particularly in the last decade, the asset class has grown and the average VC fund size has expanded with it. The spectrum of ‘fund products’ now goes from industrial-sized funds (ex: Softbank’s Vision Fund) to boutique funds like ours. We are all called venture capitalists but the products we offer

Biography

Ana Zucato is the CEO and founder of Noh, a Brazilian startup building a joint account app for couples. “Noh” means “knot” in Portuguese.

Via Noh, couples can discuss and organize their finances, with the exact same level of permission on both sides. They also receive a card linked to the account.

In 2022, Noh raised a $3M seed round. Ana has over a decade of experience in various tech companies, including roles at Intuit and Truora. To date, Noh has been downloaded around 400,000 times and processed over $60M. 

Noh started as a bill-sharing app. What led to the pivot?

Our initial thesis was that Brazil lacked multiplayer financial capabilities. We share everything (Netflix, housing, meals) but payments always rely on a single card. We weren’t certain for which user persona that pain was most acute for however. We gave ourselves a year to test

Biography:

Maha Shahzad is the CEO and founder of BusCaro, a Pakistani mobility startup. BusCaro is a bus hailing solution for companies, industries and institutions. The company has raised $1.5M in funding.

Previously, Maha was the general manager for Swvl in Pakistan and was the head of partnerships for Careem. 

Swvl and Airlift, two companies with a similar model, failed in Pakistan. Why try again?

The problem both of these companies addressed was real. Pakistanis struggle to find reliable, cheap, safe transportation to get them to work or school. This problem is exacerbated for women, who face terrifying rates of sexual harassment on public transport. The state of public transport in Pakistani cities such as Karachi is dismal and painfully unreliable. 

Airlift, the most funded Pakistani startup at the time ($110M raised), is an unfair comparison. While they started out with the same model as Swvl and