The Drachma co-founder and CTO built his career through self-study, science olympiads, early engineering roles, Penn, fintech, crypto, and a practical view of what AI should do inside real companies.

The first computer that caught Leonardo Felipe Nerone’s attention did not have internet. It sat on the first floor of his family’s two-story house in Guarapuava, a city in the countryside of Paraná, Brazil. There was another computer upstairs with internet access, but when he was young, he did not like going to the second floor alone. So he stayed downstairs and explored what he had.

He clicked around Windows XP. He looked behind the machine. He opened the case. He wanted to know what would happen if he touched something, changed something, tried something.

“That was probably one of my first experiences with technology,” Nerone says. “It was not formal. I was just curious. I wanted to understand what was inside the machine and what I could make it do.”

That curiosity would carry him much farther than he could have seen from Guarapuava. Today, Nerone is the co-founder and CTO of Drachma, a New York-based AI startup that builds custom AI agents and systems for companies. Drachma helps businesses connect AI to their real data, APIs, internal tools, permissions, and workflows, with the goal of turning AI from something companies test into something they can actually use.

The path there began far from Brazil’s major technology centers.

“I did not grow up around people talking about Silicon Valley or startups or studying abroad,” Nerone says. “A lot of what I learned came from the internet, from online communities, and from trying things myself.”

Science olympiads changed the shape of his world. In high school, they introduced him to programming and showed him a larger field of possibility. Programming gave him a way to build without waiting for permission, a practical outlet for the kind of curiosity that had started with the old computer downstairs.

As a teenager, Nerone met other young programmers online. Together, they built Teacch.Me, an educational app for children with autism. The project won the 2015 FIAP-Google App Marathon, a national competition with more than 300 submitted apps and around 9,600 participants.

“That project was important to me because it made technology feel real,” he says. “It was not just solving a puzzle or learning syntax. We were building something that could help people.”

The win was also an early sign that Nerone’s self-taught path could lead somewhere larger. After high school, he moved to São Paulo at 17 to work as a software engineer at Pagar.me. It was his first time living away from home, and it placed him inside a much bigger technology ecosystem.

The transition was not simple. He was working, living with friends, studying at night, and applying to universities in the United States. It was not a common path from where he came from, and there was no clear script for how to make it work.

“Moving to São Paulo changed how I saw technology,” Nerone says. “It was no longer just something I studied or built on my own. It became the way I entered a larger world.”

That larger world eventually included the University of Pennsylvania, where Nerone studied Computer Science after receiving a scholarship of about 90 percent. Fundação Estudar later helped cover most of what remained. At Penn, he entered an environment very different from the one he had known in Brazil.

He had to adapt to a new country, a new academic culture, and a new language environment. Before moving to the United States, he had not spent much time speaking with native English speakers. He also often felt that his background was different from that of other international students.

Over time, that difference became useful.

“I learned how to operate across very different worlds,” he says. “Coming from a place that was not obvious for technology made me more comfortable figuring things out without perfect conditions.”

During his time at Penn, Nerone interned at Facebook through FBU, later known as Meta University. Then the pandemic changed his plans. Instead of continuing with online classes as usual, he took a gap year and worked at Hashdex and then Init, gaining experience across fintech, crypto, and startup engineering.

His interest in crypto and privacy led him into open-source work as well. In 2022, he submitted a proposal to the Monero community to work full-time on Monero development, including wallet, RPC, proofs, and related open-source tasks. A company called Cryp saw the proposal and hired him for the summer to work on Monero and Bitcoin atomic swaps.

That varied technical background now shapes how Nerone thinks about AI. He has worked across payments, fintech infrastructure, crypto systems, open-source communities, data systems, and enterprise software. He sees technology not as a single trend, but as a set of systems that have to work under real constraints.

That view became central to Drachma.

Drachma did not begin with its current AI focus. Nerone says the company first started with a payments idea that did not work the way the founders expected. They had to listen to the market, pivot, and rebuild around a clearer problem: companies wanted AI, but many did not know how to connect it to their actual operations.

“That was an important lesson,” he says. “You can have a smart idea, but the market tells you where the real demand is. We had to be honest about what was working and what was not.”

Now Drachma builds custom AI systems for companies that need more than a generic chatbot. Many businesses have valuable information spread across databases, documents, spreadsheets, dashboards, and internal tools. Employees still waste time searching for information, repeating manual tasks, or moving data between systems. Drachma builds AI assistants and agents that connect to those environments and understand the company’s context.

“The goal is not to build a flashy demo,” Nerone says. “The goal is to build AI that works inside the reality of a business.”

From Guarapuava to São Paulo, from Penn to Facebook/FBU, from fintech and crypto to Drachma, Nerone has built his path by crossing between worlds and learning how systems behave in practice.

He believes AI should reduce wasted time and human potential, not create another unused tool. In many cases, he says, the greatest value is not replacing people, but helping teams become faster, more accurate, and more capable.

“Technology only matters when it helps people do something better,” Nerone says. “That was true when I was learning to program, and it is true now with AI.”

Drachma has raised approximately US$1 million in pre-seed funding, originally for a different idea, and has spent about a year working on its current AI direction. Nerone wants to build the company into a lean, technically excellent, sustainable business known for making AI useful inside companies.

His journey began with a child testing the limits of an old computer with no internet. It now continues through AI systems designed for real companies, real workflows, and real work.

“I still think the instinct is the same,” Nerone says. “You look at a system, you try to understand it, and then you try to build something useful with it.”

For information on Leonardo Felipe Nerone, visit his LinkedIn.