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Andres Barreto is Managing Director at Techstars and helps founders accelerate reaching…
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thisMona (Techstars 2025) raised $3.5M to help small businesses find funding. Mona is an AI finance platform that matches small businesses with loans, grants, and government funding, and pairs them with human coaches. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners led the round, with Alumni Ventures, Wisdom Ventures, and angels including Eric Schmidt. Mastercard backed it through its Strive USA Innovation Fund. Congrats to Andrew Leon Hanna and Anny Dow. Forbes has the story: https://lnkd.in/e9GwcNX6 #Techstars #Fintech #SmallBusiness
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thisThree weeks left to apply for Spring 2027. Eight Techstars accelerators are taking applications now: → Northwestern Medicine & Techstars Healthcare Accelerator → Techstars AI Health Baltimore → Techstars Anywhere Accelerator → Techstars Boston Accelerator → Techstars Chicago → Techstars London Accelerator → Techstars New York City Accelerator → USC and Techstars Accelerator Every accelerator company gets $220K in capital, three months of hands-on mentorship, and a network of investors, operators, and corporate partners that keeps opening doors for years. Apply by Nov. 18: apply.techstars.com #Techstars #Founders #Startups
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thisWe trained our own graph-native embedding models, optimized them for coding, and hit #1 SOTA in code retrieval. They're open source and open weights. Thanks to our investors for supporting us on our journey: E14 Fund: Habib Haddad, Calvin Chin Techstars: Andres Barreto, Kerty Levy BAG Ventures: Jackson Georges Jr, Bonita Stewart, Eric Blackmon Tachles VC: David Marek, Karel Tušek IM Fndng: Nicolas Rouhana and Google for Developers / Google Cloud, with special thanks to Hamza A. on our Google Cloud team cc: Amir Kabbara Rony FerzliIntroducing papr-embed: schema-native embeddings, and open-weights embeddings for code retrievalIntroducing papr-embed: schema-native embeddings, and open-weights embeddings for code retrieval
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thistl;dr Startup Intervention, hosted by yours truly, launches November 3rd. I’m on a mission to create more founders, fewer failures… If you're a founder looking to build a successful startup, you know getting advice isn't the hard part. Lots of people have opinions. Figuring out what to do, when to do it, and what advice actually works, that’s where the magic is. This fall, Startup Intervention shows you how founders figure it out in real time. And it doesn’t stop there! I’ve assembled the most goated experts in fundraising, product-market fit, go-to-market, customer acquisition, and branding. I’m talking folks with proven track records of success from Uber, YouTube, Google, Postmates, and Hinge to Techstars, YC, Nvidia, GoDaddy, and more! Watch as the experts diagnose the challenges, then put their own advice to the test by giving the founders an actual experiment. And yes, I follow up with each founder and share the results. Startup Intervention shows you relatable challenges, plus the decisions and the work it takes to solve it, not just generic advice. I know I’m biased, but this show…these founders...their experts…y’all ain’t ready! 🎬 Check out the trailer and subscribe to @startupintervention on YouTube ▶️ If a founder comes to mind while you're watching, send the show their way Excited to have you as part of this journey. 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gy47bHfq
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thisHey all! Today we’re finally launching BuiltBlock 💥 We help customer teams make sure each of their customers get the results they signed up for. I’ve spent my whole career in customer-facing roles. Sales, support, solutions, CX, CS. Big tech, little tech, no tech. The products/services changed each time, the busy work kept ripping. Rereading months of emails five minutes before a renewal call. Digging through Slack trying to remember what we promised someone last quarter. Finding out way too late that our champion had gone quiet. Either the tools really just weren't there yet, or we had all that context, we just didn’t have time to read it and figure out what to do next. When ChatGPT came out I thought ok, this is it. And we did make tremendous strides in what we could accomplish. The reality is that lately things have plateaued off. Most of the account teams I talk to have just swapped one kind of busywork for another. Now they’re tweaking prompts, wiring together janky internal apps, and babysitting AI outputs at night. The hype hasn't matched the outcomes. Meanwhile, software engineers are getting real autonomy: tools that write, test, and ship code without constant hand-holding. Account teams deserve that same kind of leverage. That’s BuiltBlock. It stays on top of every account, figures out what each customer needs next, and keeps things moving so they actually get the results they signed up for. Nothing to build, nothing to maintain. Your team approves every move, and you hand off more as it earns your trust. We finished Techstars last spring. Contrary to what I think people would expect, we didn’t come out brimming with confidence. It actually exposed how naive some of our ideas were and really lit a fire under us to make progress. I’m really grateful for that. Now our direction is solid, we’re onboarding teams, and it’s the platform I would’ve bought in a heartbeat when I was leading CX teams. I wanted to thank some folks who were huge in getting us here: Andres Barreto, Kerty Levy, Vance D., Cord Brown, Edy Yazmín Giraldo, Dan Parelskin, Tamir Verthim, Alexander Tange, Hemang Upadhyay, and Sid K. 🙏 I’m gonna list my fellow Techstars cohort instead of individuals so no one gets mad that I forgot them :) Check them out if you haven’t: Analog Craft, Arcticar, Chain, Papr.ai, Power Dime, QLUU LAB, Safety Bolt, Zwipe, Volumes Inc., Nukleas, Indora Labs, Cohesive Robotics, SNOWBOTIX Appreciate you all. If you want to get your team back to focusing on the real customer work, hit me up or grab a free trial on our website.
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thisI previously ran an accelerator with a new batch every few months. Some already had a lot of revenue, close to $100k a month. Others had nothing. You'd think the revenue leaders would still be leading at the end of the program. But that almost never happened. More often, the companies that started with nothing shot past the established ones within 4 months. And some of the companies that came in with the most traction totally plateaued. I think revenue is a signal of a founder's ability to sell, but not of product market fit. In my experience, companies that find it often take a while. But when they do, revenue just shoots up. The market pull is so strong you can go to millions within weeks. The hard part is finding the right angle that gets you there. Sometimes it takes a major pivot. Other times it's micro pivots, like tweaking the messaging or the ICP, or making one feature the main thing. So a company with tons of revenue early isn't necessarily closer to that angle, and a company with nothing yet might be about to find it. The companies that surprised me most were almost always the ones nobody had pegged as winners on day one. The trick is to have such a close rapport with customers that they'll tell you everything and then experiment and learn super quickly. And of course, to get really lucky. For more tips and tricks for founders, sign up for The Founder Playbook (link in the comments).
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thisSix members of the Techstars network made the 2026 Payload Pioneers, Payload's list of 30 people under 30. Four of them are founders of Techstars-backed space companies: → Muhammad Hunain, founder, Melagen Labs (Techstars 2024) → Anna Shaposhnik, founder, ORBES (Techstars 2025) → Marc Galobardes Esteban, co-founder, AMURA SPACE (Techstars 2025) → Tyler Bernstein, co-founder, Zeno Power (Techstars 2019) They're joined by Dhruv Jain, engineer at Kayhan Space (Techstars 2020), and Chase Dalton, investment analyst at Techstars. Meet all six on the Techstars blog: https://lnkd.in/eyn7CfSj #Techstars #SpaceTech #Founders
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Andres Barreto reposted thisGuidance, patience, headspace, reinforcement - super grateful to Brendan for his mentorship in getting me where I am.Andres Barreto reposted thisSix years as a Techstars mentor, and a few founders really stick with you. Yuge Ji is one of them. Yuge is incredibly curious, collaborative, and always asks the best questions. She's an incredible founder and going to do big things. Yesterday, Reflector Bio came out of stealth. Most AI drug discovery predicts where a molecule binds. Reflector predicts what it actually does to living cells: efficacy, toxicity, whether it reaches the brain. Those are the signals that decide whether a drug ever makes it to trial. The early proof: they virtually screened 1.9M compounds, sent just 5 to the lab, and 4 were hits. In an industry where roughly 92% of candidates fail in clinical trials, that kind of hit rate matters. Proud to have had a small seat in the early chapters. Congrats, Yuge. Keep crushing it!
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Andres Barreto reposted thisAndres Barreto reposted thisWith mounting R&D costs and international pressure, biotech teams get one or two real shots before the money runs out. Screening compounds against complex, functional readouts gives those shots the best chance of success, but it has never scaled. Now, with an in silico phenotypic model trained on millions of real experiments, it can. Read the announcement: https://lnkd.in/eiqnvqcpFounded by MIT and Flagship Alum, AI Drug Discovery Company Reflector Bio Emerges from Stealth | Reflector BioFounded by MIT and Flagship Alum, AI Drug Discovery Company Reflector Bio Emerges from Stealth | Reflector Bio
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This is awesome
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Armando Sosa and Sam Xia you two should talk. Highly recommend both of you to each other!
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Andres Barreto reacted on thisAndres Barreto reacted on thisMona (Techstars 2025) raised $3.5M to help small businesses find funding. Mona is an AI finance platform that matches small businesses with loans, grants, and government funding, and pairs them with human coaches. Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners led the round, with Alumni Ventures, Wisdom Ventures, and angels including Eric Schmidt. Mastercard backed it through its Strive USA Innovation Fund. Congrats to Andrew Leon Hanna and Anny Dow. Forbes has the story: https://lnkd.in/e9GwcNX6 #Techstars #Fintech #SmallBusiness
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Andres Barreto liked thisAndres Barreto liked thisWe trained our own graph-native embedding models, optimized them for coding, and hit #1 SOTA in code retrieval. They're open source and open weights. Thanks to our investors for supporting us on our journey: E14 Fund: Habib Haddad, Calvin Chin Techstars: Andres Barreto, Kerty Levy BAG Ventures: Jackson Georges Jr, Bonita Stewart, Eric Blackmon Tachles VC: David Marek, Karel Tušek IM Fndng: Nicolas Rouhana and Google for Developers / Google Cloud, with special thanks to Hamza A. on our Google Cloud team cc: Amir Kabbara Rony FerzliIntroducing papr-embed: schema-native embeddings, and open-weights embeddings for code retrievalIntroducing papr-embed: schema-native embeddings, and open-weights embeddings for code retrieval
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Andres Barreto reacted on thisAndres Barreto reacted on thistl;dr Startup Intervention, hosted by yours truly, launches November 3rd. I’m on a mission to create more founders, fewer failures… If you're a founder looking to build a successful startup, you know getting advice isn't the hard part. Lots of people have opinions. Figuring out what to do, when to do it, and what advice actually works, that’s where the magic is. This fall, Startup Intervention shows you how founders figure it out in real time. And it doesn’t stop there! I’ve assembled the most goated experts in fundraising, product-market fit, go-to-market, customer acquisition, and branding. I’m talking folks with proven track records of success from Uber, YouTube, Google, Postmates, and Hinge to Techstars, YC, Nvidia, GoDaddy, and more! Watch as the experts diagnose the challenges, then put their own advice to the test by giving the founders an actual experiment. And yes, I follow up with each founder and share the results. Startup Intervention shows you relatable challenges, plus the decisions and the work it takes to solve it, not just generic advice. I know I’m biased, but this show…these founders...their experts…y’all ain’t ready! 🎬 Check out the trailer and subscribe to @startupintervention on YouTube ▶️ If a founder comes to mind while you're watching, send the show their way Excited to have you as part of this journey. 🚀 https://lnkd.in/gy47bHfq
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Andres Barreto reacted on thisAndres Barreto reacted on thisGameto, my sixth unicorn, was just acquired by Ferring for $1.38 billion. In 2020 I endowed a fellowship at Harvard in my father’s name, Carlos M. Varsavsky, in the lab of George Church, one of the world’s leading geneticists. Its goal: to make human eggs in the lab. Gameto grew out of it. Ferring Pharmaceuticals, the Swiss fertility drug maker, is acquiring Gameto for up to $1.3825 billion. I am a co-founder. This is its story. I came to fertility in 2016 with Prelude Fertility, a network of US clinics I built, now part of Inception, the largest fertility network in North America. Inside those clinics I learned that IVF works, but it is brutal. For two weeks a woman injects herself with hormones so her ovaries release many eggs at once: around 28 shots, ultrasounds, blood tests, bloating and mood swings. Many women go through it once and never again. Every one who stops is a pregnancy that never happens. Fertilo lasts 3 days and takes one shot. That is a huge improvement. In 2020 we started Gameto with about $3 million from friends, among them Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jack Abraham of Atomic and Shervin Pishevar, an early Uber investor. Making an egg proved enormously hard; nobody has done it yet. The fellowship paid for the PhD of Christian Kramme, a Californian geneticist who worked out at the Harvard team on how to make in the lab the cells that surround an egg in the ovary and help it mature. He is now Gameto’s chief scientific officer and has been fundamental in our development. In 2021 I brought in Dina Turner as co-founder and CEO. She was 26, a physician trained at University College London who had competed in STEMM olympiads, and one of the brightest people I have ever worked with. Many questioned the bet on someone that young. It paid off incredibly well. I had a moonshot and a fellowship. Dina turned them into a very successful company. She looked at Christian’s cells and saw a product: if the egg was out of reach, we would do the ovary’s work in the lab. That became Fertilo. With Fertilo a woman takes hormones for two or three days, about 80% fewer shots. Her eggs are collected immature and spend a day in the lab with those cells, which do the ovary’s job. Then they are fertilized as in any IVF cycle. The cells never enter her body. On December 16, 2024, the first baby conceived this way was born in Lima. By August there were five babies and more than twenty pregnancies. Three gentle rounds beat one painful round many don't want to repeat. Gameto is the sixth company I have built to pass a billion dollars, after Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com, Eolia Renovables, sold in 2017, and Inception Fertility, which absorbed Prelude. Telecoms, internet, clean energy, clinics, biotech: nothing in common, and in every one the team mattered most. Thank you to Dina, to Christian and to the whole absolutely brilliant Gameto team. We will go on with Ferring to turn Fertilo into a mass product available to all women.
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Global Mentor
Endeavor
- Present 14 years 8 months
Economic Empowerment
Mentor early stage companies in global expansion and fundraising.
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Member Of The Board Of Advisors
Coderise
- Present 14 years 4 months
Education
Fundraising and strategy for non-profit that empowers underprivileged youth in Latin America through computer programming education.
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Advisor
Global Student Startup Competition
- Present 1 year
Education
Where the world’s brightest students build tomorrow, and visionary investors find the future.
Patents
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SYSTEM AND METHODS FOR PROVIDING CONTENT OVER A DATA COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK
Issued US 11864977
Languages
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Spanish
Native or bilingual proficiency
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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