Stefanini

**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.