Reflections on the Journey to Gabriel's Series A

The reason why my partner at Gabriel Otávio and I became friends back in China is due to an improbable shared story. It can be told around our fascination on this 2009 The Economist cover: Brazil takes off.

This edition came out as I was about to go to college. I was 17 and had just moved to São Paulo. This cover was an affirmation of Brazil’s arrival on the world stage as a superpower. It captured the pride and excitement Brazilians felt. I purchased a copy, framed it, and nailed to my dorm’s wall. It would follow me since. As I write, it’s just by my side at Gabriel’s office.

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Both of us grew up in the 1990s in a pessimistic country. I vividly recall my older cousins trying to convince me to move abroad. If staying, success at least meant working for a multinational corporation, driving an imported car, and living in a house with the price denominated in US dollars. After the lost decade of hyperinflation and stagnation of the 1980s, it was hard to feel otherwise. Yet, somehow we did.

Despite being raised in very different backgrounds, we shared an odd sense of duty to give back to a nation that gave us so much. Not a messianic one, to feel we knew better. Not a masochistic one, to carry it as a burden or out of guilt. One coming from a juvenile and naïve certainty we would be part of the generation to materialize the ever promise of a great Brazil.

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A few weeks after Brazil beat the USA, Japan, and Spain to host the 2016 Olympics, the magazine’s cover came out. Miles apart, we watched the bidding process on live TV, inches from the screen. We both became obsessed with the blue, green, yellow, and white tie the Brazilian delegation was wearing. Otávio’s father - now one of the few black Generals in the Brazilian Army - was at that IOC meeting as an aide-de-camp to President Lula and brought him one of the ties. I’m still trying to convince him to get me one of those.

That day felt like a vindication to my cousins who badmouthed Brazil. Now, foreigners started flocking here, seeking to learn from us, not the other way around. I would read Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neil’s BRICs papers, and my main concern was if Brazil would be the 3rd or 4th economy by 2050, ahead or behind India.

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After the economic, political, and literal 7x1 of 2014, we both ended up self-exiling to study and work abroad, picking up the pieces from a cracked - yet not broken - dream. Intuitively, we ended up in China on different scholarships. We were drawn by the unquieting curiosity of how a county that was way poorer than ours just a generation ago had overtaken us.

When we arrived in Beijing, one could see change happening before their eyes. Social mobility was tangible. The Government and entrepreneurs were both fixing problems at breakneck speeds. As a result, ambition was not only rewarded but expected. Otherwise, you wouldn’t even get funding - either as a government official or as a startup founder.

Little did we know when we got there, but China retaught us how to dream. And to dream bigger.

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A little over two years after we came back to Brazil, we’re now damn proud to announce the Series A round of Gabriel, the company we’ve started to fix public security in Brazil.

Our Government and society spent the past decades recovering a long-lost feeling of safety with more muscle and heavier weapons. Ironically, the ones who could afford ended up living in homes that look like prisons - tall walls, electric fences, guards everywhere. We’ve been spending billions of Reais every year on security, yet our lives haven’t gotten any better. It’s time for our generation to try something smarter.

We, at Gabriel, have aligned incentives so that private citizens can pay for improving their Government’s law enforcement. We are building an infrastructure of cameras placed on the edges of private areas to cover public ones and combining intelligence from the network to help public authorities with ongoing investigations or rapidly dispatch patrols in the case of emergencies. It comes at no cost to taxpayers. The more subscribers, the denser the coverage, the safer the neighborhoods.

In 16 months of operations, we've proudly helped the Government of the State Rio de Janeiro in over 140 criminal cases - through already existing legal frameworks. We're currently serving customers with over 1,500 cameras, never having had a single contract cancelation. In fact, over half of our new customers come from organic referrals.

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Nevertheless, we know our challenges are huge.

We know public security is a very complex and intricate subject. Accountability is just one of the blocks to fix it and it will never work alone. Still, we got to start somewhere.

We know we’re currently only serving rich - already safer - neighborhoods. Yet, we are working hard every day to cut our prices and reduce friction, aiming to scale nationwide across class divides.

We know good things can be subverted for the bad, as we have seen and experienced first hand in China.* We've deliberately chosen NOT to collect personal data from our cameras, to mention one the most basic precautions.

We don't know everything.

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At least, we were lucky to cross paths with brilliant people who share the dream that great things are possible in Brazil. People who would also point at an Embraer airplane (also on the first photo) if someone said we can't develop really disruptive technology over here.

People like our co-founder Sergio Andrade, and great partners like Vinicius Almeida, Bia Bebianno, Vitor Finger, Izidoro Mion, Diego Medeiros, Anderson Mendonça, Felipe Araújo, Vinicius Cruz, Lucas Mendes, Nicholas de Lucena, Daniel Ranquino, Luis Fernando Lopes, Paulo Silveira, José Paulo Gomes, and Juliana Puterman, singling out some of the 69 doers in our team, as well as our advisors Irit Epelbaum, Joana Monteiro, Wolff Klabin, Pedro Jahara, Daniel Santana, José Caetano Lacerda, Luis Soares, and the entire Hardcuore (Breno Pineschi, Patricia Clarkson, Renata Garcia) team.

We were blessed to be supported by truly bold investors, willing to lead rounds for ambitious ideas outside of Silicon Valley, such as Marcos Toledo, Izabel Gallera, Filipe Portugal, Henrique Leite, Julio Vasconcellos, Florian Hagenbuch, Mate Pencz and Patrick de Picciotto from Canary, and Paulo Passoni, Felipe Fujiwara and Marcelo Claure from SoftBank.

In a happy coincidence, I was already fortunate to have had my Master's Program in China (Schwarzman Scholars) funded by SoftBank's founder Masayoshi Son.

We're honored to also be supported by our friends at Norte Ventures (Gustavo Ahrends, Gabriel Benarros, Bruno Nardon, José Cacheado, Juliana Haddad), Indie Capital (Marcelo Bronze, Daniel Reichstul, Felipe Montagna, João Nerasti, Henrique Jacob, Paulo Gomes), Globo Ventures (Roberto Marinho Neto, Luis Lora), Endeavor ScaleUp Ventures (Igor Piquet), Wayra (Livia Brando), QMS Capital (Marcelo Kayath), CamelFarm Ventures (Thadeu Diz), Atmos Capital's partners (Bruno Levacov, Eric Lassner, David Kaddoum), and Simma Ventures (Daniel Blandon), as well as top-notch angels, including Konrad Dantas (aka, Kondzilla), Michel Zyngier, Matheus Goyas, Geraldo Thomaz, Renato Freitas, Richard Yuan, Mauricio Feldman, Breno Fortuna, Vinicius Vieira, Clécio Guaranys, Erick Brêtas, Bruno Bannach, Augusto Rocha, Alex Kremer, Edgard Corona, André Pezeta, José Luis Rizzardo, Patrick Strauss, Julio Cesar Samorano, Pedro Ramaldes, João Grossi, Andres Lawson, Ricardo Weder, Christian van der Henst and Paulo Bittelman.

As Raul Seixas sang: a dream dreamt alone is just a dream. A dream dreamt together is reality.

Now, let us get back to work to make it a reality.

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* On a personal note, Otávio was unfairly arrested in Beijing due to deliberate lack of transparency and authorities’ abuse. Democracies cannot give up on the right to privacy. Open societies cannot give up on transparency. Both are foundations of a prosperous nation.