Linhagem do fabricante
Bematech - a dissertation that became the till
Brazilian commercial-automation manufacturer founded in 1990 in Curitiba, known for fiscal printers.
Bematech was founded in 1990 in Curitiba and became one of Brazil’s commercial-automation manufacturers, best known for fiscal printers - the class of device that exists because the state requires a machine at the point of sale to produce a record it can audit.
Its origin is unusually specific and worth keeping. Marcel Malczewski and Wolney Betiol met on the industrial-informatics postgraduate programme at CEFET-PR, now the Federal Technological University of Parana, and built a telex printing system as a master’s dissertation. The subject was a requirement of the examining board; they treated it as an opportunity, and in December 1989 the project became the first venture accepted by INTEC, the newly founded Curitiba technology incubator.
That is a complete route from a university department to a manufacturer, and it is the same argument the USP and Unicamp entries on this timeline make from the other direction - the companies were founded by people who met somewhere, and the somewhere was frequently a public institution.
The commercial trajectory is the ordinary part: private investment in 1991 with six new partners, incorporation as a company, a decade of diversification, then software and services acquisitions from 2006 to become a one-stop provider. Ownership has changed since - the encyclopaedia records Elgin as the current owner, while TOTVS lists Bematech among its subsidiaries, and both statements are reproduced here without resolving which is current.
It is also one of the few manufacturers on this timeline that actually manufactures. Most of the equipment described on these pages was designed by one company, fabricated by another and assembled by a third - the arrangement recorded in the making milestones.