Experienced as Always, Young as Never

 

THE FIRST YEARS

As a result of the union of four people, who were colleagues and idealists of a better Brazil at the time, Visionnaire began operating as Visionnaire Consultoria em Informática. Flavio Bortolozzi, Manoel Camillo Penna, Vinicius Malucelli and Sergio Mainetti Jr. were the founders, and had as their common point of contact the PUCPR (Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná). The four had just returned from Masters and Doctorate programs in Brazil and abroad, Flávio and Manoel with PhD in France, Vinicius with Masters in Rio and Sergio with Masters in the USA. Everyone in the computer field, each with their own expertise. The first joint performances were in consultancy and training, the four were also teachers, which made these jobs seem an extension of their own teaching activity.

But soon came the software development activity, and already in the first months Visionnaire had clients in software projects, the first clients were Siemens, Bamerindus (later HSBC Bank) and research projects with PUCPR.

For young people who are setting up startups these days, it is very difficult to imagine the computer scene in Brazil at that time, there was no connected world as it is today, there was no Internet at home (it was exactly in 1995 and 1996 that formerly Embratel began making Internet available to people and businesses in Brazil), oddly enough, Google did not exist (according to Google's own search, Google was founded on September 4, 1998).

Visionnaire was one of the first companies in Brazil to develop software for the Internet (or as it was also called Web software), it was the first company to develop software in modern technologies for the time (Java language, Object Orientation, Object Distributed). Visionnaire was an official representative of OMG (Object Management Group) and created what was at the time, Brazil's premier corporate software development event, "Distributed Objects", which lasted for nine years.

In today's terms, we were a Startup, created by idealistic young people who worked hard (if possible 24 hours a day every day of the week) with a strong academic bond (which we preserve to the present day) and already with much experience!

 

THE INTERNET BOOM

From the years 1998 and 1999 we experienced the so famous Internet boom, which in Brazil started a few years later than in the USA, but lasted until the turn of the millennium. Visionnaire was the seventh Brazilian company approved in the Prosoft program of BNDES (National Development Bank) receiving a capital contribution, which for us was significant, it was at this time that we also changed the name to Visionnaire Informática S.A.

It began a phase of rapid growth, and if that wasn't enough, we were approached by six other private investors (now called Venture Capitalists, or VCs) and struck a deal with Banco Pactual in 2000 for a new round of investments. Later, in 2004, Banco Pactual sold its stake in Visionnaire to Ideiasnet (a publicly held holding company on Bovespa), which remained a partner until 2010.

Rapid growth is an interesting event that some technology companies experience, over a period of about a year we have grown from 14 to almost 100 people. At this time with clients such as HSBC Bank, Siemens, Telemar, Brasil Telecom, TecBan, Petrobras, Unimed, FIEP among others.