The partners of the startup Mvisia, a participant in the Academic Working Capital program in 2015, fulfilled every entrepreneur’s dream: they got the exit – that is, they sold the company they founded. The buyer was WEG, a Brazilian multinational that operates in the electrical machinery segment. With this transaction, announced on 06/23 via notification to the market, WEG now holds 51% of Mvisia’s share capital, while the founding partners and former AWC participants Fernando Lopes, Fernando Velloso and Henrique Oliveira, along with likewise partner Cassiano Casagrande, who joined the team in 2018, continue to hold the remaining 49%.
“It is an especially important milestone in our career. We started from scratch, in college, with a will and a notebook, and literally R$ 500. From there it began, we participated in the AWC of Instituto TIM, we won the Santander Award, and the company grew. We went with the client, always bootstrapped [only with their own resources], by our own sweat, and we survived for 5 years. We managed not only to survive but also to grow”, sums up the Administrative Director of Mvisia, Fernando Lopes. “It is a stamp on our first-time entrepreneur curriculum to be able to conduct a business from scratch and achieve an exit”, he adds.
At the end of AWC 2015, Mvisia’s main product was a machine that used artificial intelligence to make the automatic selection of eucalyptus seedlings. Since then, the company has changed its audience – from agribusiness to industry – and product – it has stopped making machines to focus on the intelligence behind them. Today, it offers a solution that, by means of cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence, processes images and uses the information obtained for specific purposes, integrating with other software, and acting locally. Despite the changes, the essence of the business remains the same as that of the seedling selector machine: obtaining information from images.
From now on, Mvisia is a part of WEG, while continuing to operate autonomously, keeping the same team, and selling the same product. “They will be alongside us, building what we were already planning on building whether we had an investor or not, which is our computer vision platform, our line of smart cameras”, explains Fernando Lopes.
See the full announcement on the acquirement of Mvisia by WEG here
