Dear reader,
Before we start: we're hosting an RO Webinar on corporate mobility startups (on September 3rd).
The conversation will include Maha Shahzad, founder of BusCaro (Pakistan) and Denis Muchoki, co-founder of E-Moti (Kenya). It will be moderated by RO Ambassador Tashfeen Khan. You can sign up here.
Back to the article.
The glorified startup is one that creates something brand new, that unearths a need people didn't know they had. The pro of this model is the lack of competition (at least initially), while the con is the disorientating unpredictability of demand.
Another type of startup is one that improves an established, entrenched product. The pro of this model is the pre-validation of demand, while the con is the saturated competitive landscape.
Today, we dive into a startup of the second type.
Biography
Artur Negrão is the co-founder of Salvy, a Brazilian startup building a modern B2B telco carrier. Salvy was part of Y-Combinator’s winter 2024 batch. Salvy currently serves over 10,000 customers and has raised $3M.
Prior to Salvy, Artur held senior product roles at Transfeera and EBANX. He was also a VC at Honey Island Capital.
What problem are you solving?
Brazilian companies waste a ton of time and money dealing with their telco carriers. The incumbents (Vivo, Claro, TIM) serving them are painfully slow, meaning it takes weeks to activate and cancel new phone lines. Across a large organization, this translates into dozens of inactive phone lines that companies pay for for nothing.
We’re also seeing the rise of AI agents, both voice and text, that Brazilian companies are increasingly using for customer service, sales, etc… These agents need their own phone lines, and a modern telco carrier to interact with.
Salvy answers these two problems by providing a fully-digital, flexible B2B telco carrier. Through Salvy, companies can easily buy, cancel, and measure the phone/data plans they have across their entire organization.
RO Insights: AI agents for a healthcare startup
AI isn’t good at everything, but it sure is exceptional at synthesizing massive amounts of data.
For startups dealing with torrents of customer communications, AI agents can be useful to both extract insights and take on some of those communications itself.
Sanii is a Brazilian startup that acquires small “home help” agencies (ie: agencies providing care givers for the elderly) and seeks to improve their operations with AI.
Here’s how Sanii co-founder Michael Kapps described their work with AI agents:
“First, we digitized patient and caregiver records into a low-code tool (Airtable). Then, we optimized scheduling, a major headache for agencies. We built a dynamic calendar / scheduling system, replacing their messy Excel sheets and disparate WhatsApp messages.
As soon as we had that working, we started automating a lot of the team’s WhatsApp communications (confirming that the careworker was on their way, if they arrived, etc.). Today, we have AI agents that filter 10K WhatsApp messages per day and Sofiia, our care co-pilot, that generates reports and insights from unstructured WhatsApp data.”
Excerpt from Sanii: home care for the elderly in Brazil, originally published in The Realistic Optimist (May 2026)
In terms of telco infrastructure, what does Salvy own versus rent?