Leonardo Santos

Semantix is a company specialized in data-centric solutions. Founded in 2010 in Brazil, it operates throughout Latin America from its offices in São Paulo, Mexico City and Bogota. The company has a complete offer of products, consulting, support and specialized training in Big Data, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, IoT and Search, and it is a real one-stop-shop for these themes.

Semantix delivers data platforms for its customers using open source technologies and offers products such as OpenGalaxy Spaces, that allows the company to create online data platforms in a multi-cloud environment with just a few clicks. OpenGalaxy Cognitive allows the company’s customers to use complex neural network algorithms as an API, delivering AaaS (Algorithm as a Service). Semantix has also developed AIJUS, a platform that can predict lawsuit outcomes, and also able to deliver the company’s service for any industry in any location of the world. Right now, the company is becoming global, as it expands its presence in Latin America and, in the future, to the USA, Europe, and Asia.

Leonardo Santos Co-founded Semantix, along with Leo Oliveira and Leandro Santos. He is also the CEO of the company. According to Leonardo, “We were a big family when we co-founded the company. I’m the CEO, while Leo Oliveira is the CDO and Leandro Santos is the Senior VP of Sales. Later on, we brought a great talent, Anderson Paulucci, who is a university professor and worked in the largest software company in Latin America, now our CTO. We try to bring our background to the best of our abilities at the job and the four partners. Our background includes international MBA programs and specializations at Stanford University with extensions at Harvard, Cambridge and China.”

Leonardo holds more than 18 years of experience in the field of technology and entrepreneurship, developing new disruptive businesses.

A Stirring Leader with Always Be Learning Attitude

Leonardo worked in technology and retail markets for many years, especially in the fashion industry. While working in in the software and fashion industry, he learned that it is necessary to continuously innovate, otherwise the brand will just be abandoned by the customers, so Leonardo brought this wisdom to Semantix.”

Semantix is always reinventing itself to become more valuable to its customers and Leonardo even believes this is an important feature of how things are done. “We came from a bureaucratic country, Brazil, but we are trying to destroy bureaucracy in the name of innovation. Those two things are incompatible so we had a decision to make about that. Semantix invest in the long term, and never in the short term, as soon as we develop the business, we believe that those are the companies that survive,” he said.

Learning and Reinventing Consistently

Leonardo believes the ability to learn, to forget and relearn is one of the most important things these days. “We cannot get used to the status quo and we must be prepared to reinvent ourselves every time,” he asserts.

Semantix began as a consultancy company, and now it is moving forward and becoming a product company, using what it learned from consultancies. This is an example of how the company can reinvent itself without losing its essence. Leonardo always says at Semantix, “When I make a mistake, I fix it fast, and learn as much as I can”.

Shaping Success with Valuing Customers

According to Leonardo, his company learns from its customers, this answer is simple, but simplicity is, really, the path for real innovation. There are no innovations when someone makes things that people don’t want or do not understand. To learn what the customers want, he says, “We just had to do our own research, listen to them and figure out the pain points where a solution could be created and be much more valuable than a consultancy.”

Semantix invests in research laboratories, partnerships, and collaborations with companies in all major global innovation center. This is how the company has created its products so far.

Bracing People to Impel Innovation

For Leonardo, the main change is not at technologies but in people, and the company invests a lot in empowering people and then looking at technologies. Disruptive technologies are always based on some old concepts reinvented. Nothing is really totally new.

Moving ahead, Leonardo believes the role of a leader has changed in the sense that people need to understand what they can bring of value out of these technologies rather than speaking about the novelty of it.

“Some disruptive technologies won’t be valuable until we have a user base, a developer base and an infrastructure available that makes sense for customers. We know that the most disruptive technology coming out now will be quantum computing, but it is not ready yet to become part of our everyday lives. But, of course, we must be ready for when it becomes a thing.” Semantix customers value innovation more than disruptive technologies, and what really matters is the results that the innovation brings to impact people.

Winning Over Challenges with Past Lessons

Leonardo says, “We got ousted many times from business meetings at the beginning. We were too visionaries at the time and we struggled to figure out when would it be the right time to offer data analytics, Big Data, Machine Learning, innovations.” He remembers clearly that at the beginning, they were stopped in the middle of a meeting with some big companies in Brazil because they thought that the company’s product was a substitute to traditional technologies.

4 years later, those same companies invested in Semantix Products. This has taught Leonardo a lot on perseverance and how they should swim against the current, no matter what the obstacles were. Whoever is on the frontier of innovation needs to be prepared for these kinds of adversities, and breaking those sweeps Semantix would scale exponentially and also it is prepared for it.

Changing Future Landscape

Semantix eyes to become a global company. The industry of technology will require more of a global presence of the innovators. And Semantix has all the characteristics that will allow it to become a global player in these markets. Its solutions and products are being prepared to be global and to be used in many different markets.

According to Leonardo, “Accelerating people's knowledge and capacity, investing more and more in the empowerment of people within the company, without this we will not be able to take the next step. That’s our goal as of now.”

A Word of Wisdom to Potential Leaders

Leonardo advices budding leaders to learn, to forget and relearn at a faster pace that is important because nowadays customers and markets respect only innovation, this is the main asset one must invest. People cannot get used to old standards, as they become deprecated pretty fast. He added, “We need more leaders who are able to reinvent themselves and their businesses. This is the only way to stay alive in an ever-changing world.”