Tractian: Brio

Brio. You can find this word on Tractian’s career page. It is one of the core values the company looks for when hiring someone.

If you Google the definition, it says “vigor or vivacity of style of performance”. If you ask ChatGPT about it, it says, “‘brio’ is not very used in everyday English, but it appears occasionally in more formal or literary contexts. It means vigor or energy, particularly when describing someone’s performance, style of manner”.

This word is a fitting description of the uniqueness of Tractian’s founders: Igor, Gabriel and Leonardo. Contrary to the popular belief that founders should be complementary to each other and cover each others’ weaknesses, these three share strikingly similar traits: a lifelong familiarity with industrial plants, and the relentless energy that fuels their drive to build the company.

As Leonardo mentioned to us in a conversation, complementary may be overrated. The most important thing is if you share the same values and if you enjoy working with the other.

Origins

Igor’s journey: Self-Taught, Self-Driven

Igor is the embodiment of the classic tech entrepreneur we see in movies: self-taught, relentless, and obsessive. He taught himself to code at just 10 years old. At 13, he had already launched his first entrepreneurial venture: an inventory management system in PHP for a Portuguese manufacturing company.

Because of his young age and high-pitched voice, he used to bring his father - gray-haired and deep-voiced - to sit in on commercial calls and handle negotiations on his behalf. From that first project on, Igor knew that his place in the world was to be a builder.

[FOTO DO IGOR COM O PAI]

Manufacturing and maintenance have been part of Igor’s DNA from an early age. His grandfather was a mechanic, and his father, a maintenance engineer who spent 25 years working at an International Paper mill. Growing up, Igor was immersed in that environment and exposed to its challenges early on.

Like many traditional Brazilian middle-class workers who lived through the country’s hardships and transformations in the second half of the 20th century, Igor’s father placed great importance on education as a path to success and stability. He insisted that Igor go to college, even though Igor already knew he wanted to build. That decision became one of his father’s greatest contributions to him - it was in college that Igor met his future co-founders.

Gabriel: Brains, Discipline and Defiance

Unlike Igor, who never cared much about formal education and didn’t even plan to go to college, Gabriel was the classic straight-A student every mom asked for: he studied hard to get into top universities, and consistently earned the highest grades.

Igor and Gabriel’s friendship took shape quickly in the first weeks of college, as they were classmates. Igor soon began sharing his entrepreneurial projects with Gabriel, and was surprised by Gabriel’s extremely honest and direct approach: if something looked bad, he would say so bluntly, even at the risk of sounding impolite. Gabriel also carried a mix of confidence and defiance, often “showing off” his skills by betting with friends that he could complete tasks faster or better than them.

In the first project they worked together on, a crowdfunding platform, Gabriel and Igor were discussing the platform’s design, and Gabriel mentioned he hated it and that he was going to redo it all over again. Igor then asked Gabriel: “Do you understand Photoshop?”. Gabriel said he did not. Igor then said, “Well, good luck improving this design”. The two made a bet.

One week later, Gabriel strolled in with a completely redesigned platform that, to Igor’s surprise, looked better than his own, despite Igor’s far greater experience with design tools.

This lighthearted, almost innocent story revealed two traits that would later define Tractian’s culture: the founders’ harsh, no-nonsense transparency with one another, and a confidence so strong it bordered on arrogance.

Leo’s Leap: The Salesman Who Completed the Trio

The last piece of the founding trio is Leo. Like Igor, Leo grew up close to the factory floor. His brother worked his entire life with maintenance, and still does to this day. Leo saw the struggle up close. He recalls one Christmas Eve when his brother had to leave the family dinner table because a gearbox had fallen in the factory’s boiler.

Leo met Igor during a course at the University of California, Berkeley, where they grew close and began exchanging ideas. Some time later, while working as a Sales Lead in the industrial sector, Leo faced a major problem: a hydraulic pump kept failing, and no one could figure out why. That’s when he remembered Igor once mentioning an idea for diagnosing mechanical failures in factories. Leo picked up the phone and called him.

That call led to what would become Tractian’s first client opportunity (though the company didn’t exist yet). Igor and Gabriel went all the way to the industry’s headquarters and pitched directly to its directors. Leo backed them in the meeting… but everything went wrong.

Igor went into excessive detail. They priced a product that didn’t even exist as if it were finished. Leo nearly got fired for bringing in two young founders pitching something far from ready.

After the disastrous meeting, Igor called Leo and suggested grabbing a beer at Largo da Batata in São Paulo. The idea was to cool off and forget the pitch. But over beers, Igor got to the point: “Why don’t you come work with us? Gabriel and I are more product people, and we need a salesperson like you.”

Leo hesitated at first. He had a good job, steady pay, and the idea was still just that, an idea. But the more he spent time with Igor and Gabriel, the more he saw the potential. Eventually, he realized it was an opportunity he couldn’t miss, and he said yes.

In Brazil, we say “o santo bateu” (literally, “our saints matched”) when two people instantly click and form a strong bond.

This is what happened between Igor, Gabriel, and Leo - their saints matched. From day one, the three founders have been deeply aligned, bound by complete trust and a rare ability to be brutally transparent with one another. Contrary to popular belief that the great founding teams need complementary opposites, they describe themselves as strikingly similar, almost extensions of each other.

This chemistry shaped Tractian’s journey: the company’s strong culture and well-defined values are a direct reflection of the way its founders think, act, and push each other (and the entire company) forward.

Market: It is just Everywhere

"Your product is just as good as your factory." - Elon Musk

Look around. Nearly everything within your reach began in a factory. The clothes you wear. The shoes on your feet. The table where you sit, the chair you’re on, the phone in your hand, even the device you’re reading this on.

Factories, often far from sight, running day and night, are the invisible engine behind modern life. Every new technology, every product we take for granted, only becomes real because somewhere, someone built a new factory to make it at scale, from the state-of-the-art semiconductor foundries in Taiwan, to simple motorcycle assembly lines in Manaus, Brazil.

Factories are the basic unit of production for everything we consume.

Like any physical asset, the machines inside these factories wear down and fail. They require constant maintenance to keep production running. But here is the problem: Industry reports show that most technician hours are spent on reactive fixes — responding after breakdowns—while maintenance budgets are drained by inefficient programs that fail to prevent downtime.

Several root causes explain why industrial maintenance remains so inefficient:

1. Trapped in analog

As mentioned above, Igor’s father spent his entire career in maintenance. He recalls that, in his early days, the only way to learn about a machine’s specifications was by going to the technical archive - a large, dim room in the factory lined with shelves of thick manuals. If a piece of equipment failed, the only way to understand it was to pull down the right binder and read page after page until you found something useful.

There was also a more “hands-on” method: listening to the machines (does that ring a bell?). Technicians would try to guess what was wrong by the noise the machines made. The tool of choice? A simple screwdriver (!!). By pressing it against the equipment and feeling its vibration, they would attempt to interpret the problem. After the diagnostic, the conclusion was scribbled on a piece of paper: “Come back in three months to see if this machine is working well.” Everything was as manual as it could be.

Even in an age of computers and smartphones, many industrial facilities still operate with outdated systems. Maintenance engineers may no longer press a screwdriver to a motor to “listen” for problems, but they often rely on the same guesswork. Most still depend on sharpened ears to catch unusual noises, or on rigid, calendar-based maintenance schedules that fail to capture what is really happening inside the machines.