THIS IS MY STORY
I was born in Parkdale, Toronto, Canada, to Brazilian immigrant parents. Early exposure to two parallel economies—families working to unlock opportunity and build stability, and street entrepreneurs generating meaningful capital while often failing to capture equity and long-term asset value—shaped a clear focus: understand how capital moves, and position myself where it is allocated.
I started my first business at 12, buying and selling used goods in my neighborhood. At the same time, I became a top-performing athlete, earning multiple basketball scholarships. I chose to turn them down and attended university in line with my parents’ expectations, before ultimately dropping out to pursue entrepreneurship full-time. The decision wasn’t conventional or supported—but it was directional.
What began as a lifestyle brand built through street teams and city-wide events in the early 2000s evolved into a digital marketing company. That platform became my entry point into working with financial institutions, which expanded into technology—and ultimately, capital markets.
In 2011, I co-founded a decentralized technology startup with my partner and CTO. We bootstrapped the business, scaling to a 10-person systems design and engineering team and achieving meaningful recurring revenue. Like many early-stage operators, we eventually hit the limits of capital availability. In 2016, we used that experience to launch NicheeLabs, a systems design and engineering firm building software and AI-powered solutions for Fortune 1000 and venture-backed companies.
We scaled NicheeLabs without external capital. Through a partnership with a family office, we designed and developed a machine learning-powered logistics system that led to a strategic exit. That experience fundamentally shaped my investment lens: commercialization potential, technical depth, capital efficiency, and clarity of path to monetization, scale, and exit.
In parallel, I entered investment banking. In 2017, I was invited—by a former client of my digital marketing company—to become Partner and Head of Investment Banking at a Toronto-based advisory firm. Becoming a Partner of an advisory firm wasn't part of my plan. Still, it's how the universe blessed my path into investment banking and earned me the title "The Girl Who Moves Money." By 2022, I had led and executed over $5 billion in buy- and sell-side transactions, advising wealth managers, family offices, and financial institutions on the acquisition and disposition of discretionary and non-discretionary platforms across retail, private wealth, and institutional asset management.
What I didn’t know at 12 was that this combination—street-level intuition, early pattern recognition and execution, a formative startup failure driven by capital constraints, building and scaling on retained earnings, exiting a deep tech company, and earning the trust of family offices and financial institutions while executing institutional-scale transactions—would ultimately define how I source opportunities, add value, underwrite risk, and structure investments.
MATR VENTURES
I founded Matr Ventures to give investors access to proprietary undervalued opportunities in sectors driving the next generation of global economies.
The firm focuses on digital infrastructure, foundational technologies, and dual-use solutions across applied AI, semiconductors, robotics, machine learning, and automation in Energy, Cyber, Climate, Health, and Fintech. These areas and sectors require extensive focus on commercialization, are technically complex, and often inefficiently priced—creating opportunities for us disciplined investors with access, insight, and execution capability.
We focus on capital efficiency, downside protection, and asymmetric upside—identifying and supporting undervalued opportunities and structuring investments for long-term performance.
Matr Ventures provides accredited investors, wealth advisors, family offices, and quasi-institutional partners with direct exposure to high-quality, often inaccessible opportunities—executed with institutional rigor.