Stefanini - A teacher started it in a spare room, and teaching is what won the first work.

Marco Stefanini founded the company in 1987 in a bedroom of his own house in São Paulo, aged 26. It was not a consultancy. It began as a training business, running programming and technology courses for the staff of large companies, and only pivoted to IT consulting about two years later.

The route in is worth telling, because almost none of it was planned. He read geology at the University of São Paulo, spent a month at a cassiterite mine in the interior of Goiás and concluded the profession was not for him. Struggling to find work in São Paulo, he moved into technology at his sister's encouragement - she was already at Serpro, the federal data processing service - took a systems analysis course, and joined the IT department at Bradesco. He also worked at Engesa, the military vehicle manufacturer, and at IBM.

And he was teaching at the time, which is the detail that matters. In his own account, because he was already giving classes, moving into training was straightforward, and that skill is what won the company its first projects. A teacher's business became a technology business rather than the other way round.

The first office was thirty-eight square metres. The timing was good: Brazil's large banks and industrial groups were computerising, and a firm that could both train people and supply them found no shortage of work. Systems development and IT outsourcing followed, and for its first years the company was entirely domestic.

Then it went abroad, which Brazilian technology companies mostly did not. Expansion into other markets became the central growth strategy rather than an afterthought, and the result is a genuinely unusual company: a Brazilian multinational in a sector where the multinationals almost always arrive from somewhere else. By 2025 it reported operations in 41 countries and more than 35,000 staff speaking 45 languages, with revenue around $1.4B for 2024. A Fundação Dom Cabral study once ranked it the fifth most internationalised Brazilian company of any kind.

Growth has been substantially by acquisition and the company says so plainly, with a stated target of R$2B of purchases by 2027, and it makes a point of being unleveraged - which in a high interest rate environment is less a boast than an explanation of why it can keep buying when others cannot.

Read beside the HCL entry, the two make a matched pair, inverted. There, the founder of a technology company started a training institute in 1982 because a domestic industry cannot grow faster than the supply of people who can staff it - training built as infrastructure for a business. Here, the training came first and the business grew out of it. Both companies concluded that teaching and technology services are the same trade approached from different ends, which is a conclusion this site has some sympathy with.

The timeline

Buenos Aires, and the reason for it
The first office outside Brazil. The trigger was not ambition abroad but pressure at home: through the 1990s the large international services firms arrived in Brazil, and rather than fight them for the same domestic accounts the company went to compete in theirs. Going abroad was a defensive move that turned into the strategy.
The method changes, the direction does not
Until the financial crisis, expansion had meant opening offices and building operations from nothing. The crisis devalued currencies and assets to the point where buying an established firm cost less than building one, and the company switched. TechTeam - Michigan, 2,300 staff, subsidiaries in sixteen countries - was won against seven other bidders.
Forty-odd acquisitions on
More than forty purchases since founding, thirteen of them in four years, against a stated target of R$2B more by 2027.

Flagship products and solutions

Application development and maintenanceThe original consulting business: building and running software for organisations that would rather not employ the people who do it.
IT outsourcing and service deskThe volume business, and the one that made the international footprint necessary - supporting a multinational client means supporting it wherever it operates.
Digital and data servicesCloud migration, analytics and automation, much of it acquired rather than built, including specialist practices around individual cloud providers.
Vertical platformsBanking and financial software sold as products rather than as project work - the attempt every services firm makes to earn something other than by the hour.

Key innovations

Internationalising away from competition rather than toward opportunityThe usual account of a company going abroad involves demand it wants to reach. This one went abroad because the competition had come to it. That is a different calculation and a harder one, since the firms it followed home were larger, better known and operating in markets where nobody had heard of it.
Travelling on your customers' passportsOpening in a new country is easier when an existing client already operates there and wants the same supplier. The multinationals it served in Brazil provided both the initial reason to be present and the first revenue on arrival, which is the only cheap way a mid-sized firm enters a foreign market.
Building until buying got cheapGreenfield expansion until 2009 and acquisition afterwards is a company reading currency markets correctly. A devaluation makes foreign assets cheap for whoever holds a different currency, and the same crisis that closed opportunities for others opened this one - which is why the acquisition strategy dates from a downturn rather than from a boom.
Retention as the actual metricAround 97% client retention with an average relationship approaching twelve years is the number that matters in this business. Services firms do not usually lose contracts to better proposals; they lose them by disappointing somebody slowly. A retention figure is a claim about not doing that, sustained over a decade.

Main markets

Financial services above all in Brazil and Latin America, and automotive and manufacturing in the rest of the world - two different centres of gravity in one company, reflecting where each region's work came from.

It competes with the global systems integrators and the Indian services majors, on a footprint that is genuinely worldwide but a scale that is not. Roughly 40% of revenue now comes from outside Brazil.

Analyst standing

Its distinguishing characteristic is easy to state and hard to achieve: it is a technology services multinational headquartered in a country that mostly receives them. Rankings of internationalised Brazilian firms have placed it near the top for years, having placed it seventeenth in 2011.
The trajectory to watch is whether a company built on labour arbitrage and client relationships can hold those relationships as the work itself becomes more automated. Twelve-year average relationships are an asset in a stable market and a liability in one where the service being bought changes underneath the contract.

Stefanini IT Solutions ↗

From the company

Official site ↗

Sources