.png){kind=logo}
Alejandro Ricatti grew up in Corrientes, a city on the banks of the Paraná in north-eastern Argentina, a long way from the venture-funded world he now works in. He started writing code professionally in 2007, in his early twenties, at a local software shop called Soluciones Root, where the work ranged from a pest-control management system for an Argentine state agency to administering Linux servers for organisations with a few hundred staff. It was unglamorous, general-purpose engineering - and, he says, the best possible training.
"You learn very fast when you're the person who has to make it work and also the person who gets the call when it breaks," he said in a recent conversation. "There's nowhere to hide. That teaches you to build things that actually hold up."
In 2012 he moved to Dublin, then in the middle of a tech boom that had turned the city into a European base for large technology firms and a dense network of startups. He took jobs building enterprise software - customer-relationship systems for clients that included the BBC, the NHS and the English Premier League - but it was Dublin's hackathon circuit that made his name locally. Over roughly a year he won three in a row: Google's Startup Weekend, then the largest such event in Europe; Hack The Bank, Ireland's first banking hackathon, sponsored by Ulster Bank, where his team's app won by what contemporaries described as a landslide and drew interest from several European banks; and an Intel- and IBM-backed urban-data event where the prize was mentorship to build sensor-equipped "smart" waste bins. The banking-hackathon win earned him a mention in the Irish press - his first brush with coverage.
He is dismissive of the trophies themselves. "Hackathons are not about the prize," he said. "They're a compressed version of the real job. You have a vague problem, no time, a small team, and you have to ship something that works by Sunday. If you can do that repeatedly, it means something." The pattern - small team, hard constraints, working product - would repeat throughout his career.
By the end of the decade he had moved back to Argentina and into the orbit of American technology companies working remotely. He led an integrations team at Reciprocity, an enterprise governance-and-compliance platform, then spent nearly two years as a consulting engineer on the data-privacy team at Ring, the smart-home company owned by Amazon. There, he built services that handled customer data-deletion and export requests to comply with privacy regulations such as Europe's GDPR and California's CCPA - the kind of infrastructure that runs invisibly across millions of records and is noticed only when it fails.
The Ring work matters to how he thinks now, he says, because it was an early lesson in doing ambitious engineering inside strict guardrails. "Privacy and security are not features you add at the end. They're constraints you design around from the first line. That mindset never left me."
In April 2022 he joined ConCntric, a San Francisco-based startup building software for the preconstruction phase of building projects - the estimating, analysis and procurement work that happens before ground is broken. He came in as the senior-most engineer at the seed stage and has been the company's top technical leader since, effectively its chief technology officer without the title. He built the engineering organisation from scratch, and today leads a team of roughly fifteen engineers, designers and quality staff. During his tenure the company raised a ten-million-dollar Series A round.
Alejandro’s trajectory is a familiar shape drawn on an unfamiliar canvas: an engineer from an emerging economy, largely self-directed, moving through global companies on the strength of what he can build rather than where he studied. He is candid that the path has not been frictionless, and quick to credit the partnership at the top of ConCntric. He speaks warmly of building alongside Steve, the company’s founder and chief executive, a rare match, he says, of someone who shares his vision but brings deep, first-hand expertise in the construction industry itself.
He is now completing a master's degree in artificial intelligence at the University of Colorado Boulder, studying the field formally even as he ships it commercially. Asked where he wants to end up, he resists grandiosity. "I don’t know where I’ll end up on my current path, but I know it’s the correct one," he said. "Building the most advanced agentic AI system for the construction industry, and helping solve physical-world problems with technology, fills me with optimism about the future."
