portuguese mathematician, five startups, four degrees, probably too many hobbies, and a serious obsession with building things. i exited my first business at twenty, moved from lisbon to san francisco, studied mathematics and data science, and landed in tech startups shipping ai products from seed to series a. currently building in stockholm. my name is Leandro Duarte.
right now i'm working full time as an ai engineer at mimo, a series a startup in stockholm, building ai automations for accountants. you can also find me finishing my ai master thesis, running marathons, failing to learn swedish, or playing football on some scandinavian pitch.
view project AI startup building voice agents. joined as second engineer.
in a small team, you do everything. shipped python by morning, ran client calls by afternoon.
in a small team, you do everything. i shipped python and LLM pipelines in the morning, and ran client calls in the afternoon. we doubled the team on my time there.
a podcast i started to market my tutoring center. became portugal's leading youth career guidance channel.
led a five-person team and produced every episode for 2.5 years.
created the concept, led a five-person team, and produced every episode for 2.5 years. young people across portugal watched this to figure out what to do with their lives.
built portugal's first fully online tutoring center. covid hit and every tutoring center was stuck offline. i took the opportunity. scaled to 20+ tutors and 100+ students, and sold the business within a year.
Web3 gaming startup. Decentralized videogame retail platform with NFT-based game resale.
Legal Tech AI startup. LLMs + agentic workflows for document editing, search, and legal automation.
AI-powered carbon credit marketplace for SMEs. Built at HackEurope hackathon.
i've been learning by doing, over and over. i built my first company from scratch and sold it. then joined an early stage startup, helped scale and raise. now i'm inside a series a, seeing how thirty people build a robust product to massive adoption. every step taught me something the last one couldn't. i've seen 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and 10 to 100.
Born in Portugal
Started working in family business, age 8
Portuguese Youth Parliament finalist
Competing in Portuguese National Football Championship
BSc Applied Mathematics and Computation
Back at Portuguese Youth Parliament finals
Founded the Online Tutoring Center C.E.O.
Created Tenho Média Pa'Isto podcast
Started coding degree at 42 Lisbon
Joined JUNITEC, Best Junior Enterprise in Europe
Founded Hash Game Store. Web Summit Alpha Startup
Joined BI4ALL as Data Scientist
Seville Marathon
Joined Sonant AI, 2nd engineer
MSc Data Science at KTH Stockholm and UPM Madrid
Stockholm Marathon
Joined Mimo as AI Engineer
i started working at eight. selling vegetables at local markets. every weekend for over a decade. in between, i was pushing to be the best student in school. i didn't know what a startup was. i just knew that if i showed up earlier and worked harder than everyone around me, something would eventually open up. and it always did. that rhythm never left me. wake up earlier, stay later, find a way. effort compounds if you never stop showing up. that shaped everything.
alright, these are the questions usually asked. might as well answer them here.
centro de explicações online: built and scaled an online tutoring platform, sold at 20. now: portaldasabedoria.pt
tenho média pa'isto: educational podcast, 600k+ views. youtube.com/c/TenhoMediaPaIsto
sonant ai: full-stack AI voice platform, second engineer. sonant.ai
ithaca: legal-tech AI platform, EIT Digital venture incubation. ithacalegal.eu/en
hash game store: web3 gaming startup, Web Summit 2022 Alpha. whitepaper
carbonbridge: AI carbon credit marketplace for SMEs, built at HackEurope. github
this website: hope you like it.
march 2020, covid hits. every tutoring center in portugal suddenly needs to go online, and all of them have terrible websites. i was 19, already knew how to build, so i created one really polished platform overnight while everyone else was still figuring out zoom. captured the market before the incumbents even reacted. then used a podcast as the marketing engine, which accidentally became portugal's biggest youth career guidance channel. the whole thing was a chain reaction from one well-timed move.
for three years i ran a mathematics degree, a coding school, a business i built and sold, a podcast that reached 600k people, and a tech startup, all at the same time while still helping my family's business. no funding, no connections, no safety net. just the belief that if i moved fast enough on all of them, something would work.
always down to chat about startups, tech, or whatever you're working on. drop me a line.