The Rise Of American Latinx Tech Leaders: Here’s What They’re Up To

Dominican American YouTube star Krystal Lora, with her 323,000 subscribers, is among the most popular technology reviewers, and she’s going from strength to strength as she uses her platform to break down the latest Apple and Google products for growing Latino YouTube audiences.

It’s clear that Latinos across the US are shaking things up – whether as founders, investors, tech reviewers, or engineers. Although there’s still a long way to improve diversity in the industry and ensure the community is getting enough support and investment – this Friday POCIT is celebrating the Latinx tech founders, VCs, and reviewers already doing amazing things.

Here’s part one of the list:

Katie Beauchamp

Clara de Soto is the co-founder of  Reply.ai, which Facebook acquired.  Reply.ai is the Conversational AI solution that helps companies better reach and serve customers on the Messaging and Voice channels via Chatbots. Reply’s chatbots provide instant, personalized attention at scale-better, faster, and a fraction of the cost of traditional media.

Isaac Saldana

Saldana is a General Partner at Hive Hatch. He is also the co-founder of SendGrid, a cloud-based customer communication platform. SendGrid had its IPO in November 2017 (NYSE: SEND) and was later acquired by Twilio for $3B in 2018

​Isaac is the founder and CEO of Memo, a company providing a new way to communicate and connect. Isaac received a double major in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Riverside, and an MBA from MIT.

Rachel Ten Brink

Rachel is an active angel investor, advisor, and board member. She was a Partner at Five Four Ventures, a VC and Start-up Studio with offices in New York and San Francisco. Five Four Ventures builds businesses and makes early-stage investments across digitally-powered consumer brands.

Previously, she was co-founder and CMO of Scentbird, a fragrance and beauty subscription service that raised over $24MM in venture funding and scaled to 500K subscribers. Prior, she spent 20 years at top global CPG and beauty companies. She was Executive Director at Elizabeth Arden, and Estee Lauder also held senior roles at Gillette, L’Oreal, and Bacardi.

Elias Torres

Torres is Founder and CTO at Drift. Drift is the Revenue Acceleration platform that uses Conversational Marketing and Conversational Sales to help companies grow revenue and increase customer lifetime value faster. More than 50,000 businesses use Drift to align sales and marketing on a single platform to deliver a unified customer experience where people are free to have a conversation with a company at any time, on their terms.

Omar Gonzalez

Gonzalez is a Puerto Rican photographer from Hoboken, New Jersey, with over 120,000 subscribers, reviews the latest high-tech cameras and advises his YouTube audiences on taking better photos. Although he isn’t a founder or VC, he is popular in the tech space and uses his platform to educate the community on the latest gadgets.