MADE IN RIOMADE IN RIO
NEXT AI SALON RIO
About · Made in Rio01Who We Are02Our Mission03Our Story04Partner with Us05Book a Session with Luana06Book a Session with Gui07Press & Media
ABOUT US · MADE IN RIORio de Janeiro · 22.9°S 43.2°W

Google organized the internet.Facebook organized your friends.

CompaniesInvestorsGovernmentAcademiaStartups
LabsEventsOpportunitiesJobsProducts
01 · Who We Are

Made in Rio is the platform
organizing Rio’s AI ecosystem.

Think of us as Google for AI opportunities, events, jobs, bosses, etc. in Rio de Janeiro

01

Why ecosystem?

Until the ’50s, Silicon Valley was nothing. The serious people were on the East Coast: Ivy League schools, old money, established institutions, serious people in serious suits. (Remind you of somewhere in Brazil?)

A Stanford professor named Frederick Terman got tired of watching his best students leave for jobs back East.

So he made them an offer: stay. Two of them listened: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who set up in a garage in 1938.

Then came Stanford Industrial Park, government research money (hello BNDES here in Rio!), startups becoming big and staying (like Intel), and then VC as the last layer.

Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley because of an ecosystem.

FREDERICK TERMANSTANFORD INDUSTRIAL PARKSEMICONDUCTORGO AFTER GOVERNMENT MONEY BEFORE VCNO MORE EAST COAST
02

Why Rio?

Energy+Talent=AI

AI needs two things: energy and talent.

Rio is Brazil’s energy capital, full stop. Petrobras, Axia, and BNDES are here: the energy giant, the biggest power utility in Latin America, and Brazil’s development bank.

As for talent, no other city in Latin America has something like this: IMPA, IME, PUC-Rio, and UFRJ/COPPE (the largest engineering teaching and research center in Latin America). Add in the federal science cluster: CBPF, LNCC, Fiocruz, CEPEL, and the National Observatory.

Ah! And did we mention that LatAm’s most powerful academic supercomputer, Santos Dumont, is also here?

Lastly, tech is a thing for rebels, not people in suits.

So the energy is here. The compute is here. The talent is here. The rebels are here. The missing piece is the ecosystem layer. That’s us.

IMPAIMEPUC-RJCOPPEPETROBRASAXIA
02 · Our Mission · Values

Turn Rio into the AI capital of Latin America.

Put plainly: make Rio the city where the next wave of technology is built. Not admired from a distance. Built. Here.

01

Yes, and.

We don’t kill an idea — we build on it. Every “what if” gets a “yes, and” before it gets a “but.” That’s how a city full of maybes turns into something real.

02

No complainers.

No bitching about Rio. Everyone already knows what’s broken — we’d rather be the ones fixing it than the ones narrating it. Build, don’t complain.

03

Tenacity with delulu.

The mission is veryyy big and we know it. Wild hopes, unrealistic expectations, a little believing-in-unlikely-scenarios. Call it delulu — fierce self-belief is how dreams quietly become deadlines.

04

Unapologetically us.

Unscripted, spontaneous, a touch mischievous. We give serious topics the rigor they deserve and the lightness they rarely get. Rebels with a cause and a sense of humor.

05

We get shit done.

Period.

03 · Our Story
Rio × UCLA · 2022

Two cariocas who met at UCLA Anderson (our MBA has paid off!) and discovered we shared two obsessions: technology, and Rio.

Luana & Gui — Co-founders of Made in Rio
Luana Helsinger & Guilherme Pereira
01 · 2022

The cold call.

It started with a cold call. In 2022, Luana phoned Gui without knowing him — she was doing work at UCLA on how to get Brazilians to come home after the MBA. What would they need? How could the school connect better to employers back in Brazil?

She called over forty people. Gui was the only one who didn’t want to hang up. One hour on the phone about the bridge between Brazil and UCLA, the talent that keeps leaving, the city they both missed. He’d just moved back to Brazil. They kept in touch ever since — and the idea never quite let go.

02 · Early 2025

“I know someone. Me.”

Three years of messages and the occasional call later — always about tech, always about Rio — they got on the phone again to catch up on what each was building. Gui had joined a founding team. Luana was deep in AI from Silicon Valley, running her own channel on it.

She mentioned she was about to launch an AI event in Rio and asked if Gui knew anyone who might want to help. He volunteered himself. He was already on the ground in Brazil, a flight away from Rio after all.

03 · March – April 2025

Working from three cities.

The first AI Salon Rio happened in March 2025. Gui worked it from São Paulo. Luana ran it from Silicon Valley. The room was in Rio. Somehow it came together.

They finally met in person at the second edition, in April, at Instituto 12. Three years of conversations, months of building together, and the first handshake happened inside the project they’d already built.

04 · Mid-2025

Both home.

A few editions in, the picture got hard to ignore: the people, the institutions, the energy, the timing — it was all here in Rio, and someone had to connect it.

By mid-2025, both had moved back to Rio. For good. It became our mission: no one else should have to leave the cidade maravilhosa to build serious tech any longer.

Two cariocas with Anderson MBAs, too much taste, too little patience, and a vendetta against the idea that every serious tech thing in Brazil has to happen in São Paulo.

04 · Partner with Us

Partner with the platform organizing Rio’s AI ecosystem.

Backed by
VisagioAWSInstituto 12

Be in the room where Rio builds what’s next. Made in Rio brings together the companies, investors, government, academia, and startups shaping the city’s AI agenda. Partner with us to put your brand, space, program, or thesis closer to the people turning Rio into an AI capital.

Sponsor

Back AI Salon Rio

Open your doors for a night. The AI Salon comes with the crowd, the curation, and the energy — you bring the room and put your name on the city’s best AI evening.

Co-curate

Build an AI day or night with us

Co-create an event, roundtable, demo night, or private gathering at your venue around the AI theme your company or institution wants to lead.

Website

Get listed in AI in Rio

Be featured in our AI in Rio tab, where we highlight selected partners working with, building, investing in, researching, or enabling AI in Rio.

Connect

Plug into the AI ecosystem

Use Made in Rio to launch opportunities, or learn about the right companies, startups, investors, etc. in Rio tech.

Bring your name to the city’s largest AI ecosystem.

Or · Not a company?

You could just buy us a coffee.

We’re trying to make Rio impossible to ignore.

Every opportunity, AI Salon, podcast episode, founder story, and ecosystem map is built by a very small team running on curiosity, optimism, and an unreasonable amount of coffee.

If Made in Rio helped you find an opportunity, learn something, meet someone interesting, or just feel more optimistic about AI in Rio — help us keep building.

Pix or card · takes ten seconds · no account, no guilt-trip
05 · Book a Session with Luana
Luana Helsinger

Luana Helsinger

Co-founder, Made in Rio

Luana brings 16+ years across private equity, equity research, and AI, including 3 years decoding the AI from Silicon Valley. She’s now pursuing a Master’s in AI at Cambridge (where AI actually started, hello Alan Turing!) and came home to turn Rio into the AI capital of Latin America.

AI StrategyInvestor LensPrivate EquityEquity ResearchSilicon Valley
16yrs
in tech & finance
LinkedIn
Silicon Valley · LA · Houston · SP (but shhhh) · Rio
where she was made

Pick her brain on

Direct with Luana
Video · 60 min

AI Strategy Session

Where does AI actually fit in your company, product, or workflow? We’ll cut through the hype, find the two or three moves actually worth making, and leave you with a plan you can act on Monday.

R$ 800
Video · 60 min

AI Opportunity Check

For investors and companies looking at an AI product, partnership, market, or thesis. Bring what you’re trying to understand and I’ll help you pressure-test what’s real, what’s hype, and what questions to ask next.

R$ 800
Video · 60 min

Pitch Deck Review

Send the deck before the call and I’ll show up already marked up. We’ll sharpen the story, fix the flow, tighten the numbers, and make the ask impossible to miss, whether you’re pitching investors, partners, or your own board.

R$ 500
Video · 30 min

Career Pivot into AI

For professionals trying to move into AI without pretending they suddenly became engineers overnight. We’ll map the skills that carry over, the gaps to close, and the first real moves to make.

R$ 300
06 · Book a Session with Gui
Guilherme Pereira

Guilherme Pereira

Co-founder, Made in Rio

Gui brings 15+ years across Big Tech and startups, including roles at Microsoft and TikTok. He invests in founders, co-founded Bruin Angels Brazil, UCLA’s alumni angel investing network in the country, and understands how companies find customers, build operating rhythm, and turn good ideas into things that actually move.

Big TechGTM & ScaleRevenue OpsTech AdvisoryAngel Investor
15 yrs
in big tech & startups
LinkedIn
Rio · LA · Seattle · SP · Rio
all roads lead home

Pick his brain on

Direct with Gui
Video · 60 min

Operator on Call

Bring one operating problem: hiring, pricing, sales process, partnerships, founder roles, team structure, or a deal decision. We’ll diagnose the issue, map the tradeoffs, and leave with a clear next step.

R$ 600
Video · 60 min

Would I Invest?

Send the deck and anything else you’d put in front of an investor. I’ll review it like a company I might back and help you fix the story, the red flags, and the questions you don’t want to meet cold.

R$ 600
Video · 60 min · In-person available, ask about pricing

Where’s the Revenue Leak?

Your revenue motion isn’t working and you don’t know why. We’ll find out whether the leak is in the funnel, the team, the process, or the story, and you’ll leave knowing what to fix first on Monday.

R$ 600
In-person · For teams · On request

Bring Me to Your Team

For offsites, portfolio days, and leadership teams trying to understand AI in enterprise, building tech teams in Brazil, and what scaling actually looks like inside Microsoft and TikTok how tech companies actually grow.

On requestContact
Also · Expectations, managed

We don’t
do intros.

Mostly because we do not have the bandwidth to become everyone’s unpaid biz dev department.
Charming, we know. (Also, capitalism.)

Need someone to chase leads for you? Beautiful. That is called a biz dev role — post it on our Jobs tab.

What we do is organize the ecosystem, make the right people easier to find, and create the in-person spaces where companies, investors, government, academia, and startups can actually connect.

07 · Press & Media

Writing about the Rio AI movement? Let’s help.

Here’s everything you need — the numbers, the assets, the people. Grab what helps and reach out for the rest.

The numbers
Monthly
AI Salon Rio, since March 2025
1,200+
attendees, 50% returning
4.9
average Luma rating
36+
AI startup pitches

“When we set out to create a community of technical scholars in Silicon Valley, there wasn’t much here and the rest of the world looked awfully big. Now a lot of the rest of the world is here.”

— Fred Terman · Stanford Engineering dean & provost (1944–1965) · “Father of Silicon Valley”