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Who is behind Zerlotti Signal

Rodrigo Zerlotti

For three decades, Rodrigo has made a career of seeing technology shifts early and helping organizations act on them before competitors do. He has built companies, advised boards, and tracked AI's trajectory long before it became a boardroom agenda item.

Zerlotti Signal is not a firm. It is a practice, deliberately small, deliberately selective, for leaders who want to think ahead, not react.

Thesis

The same curve, in four different disguises.

Every new technological wave produces two groups of companies. The ones that treat the technology as an upgrade of what they already do, and the ones that redesign themselves around it. The first group is disrupted. The second group disrupts.

Rodrigo has seen this pattern repeat four times since 1994. Internet. Cloud. Mobile. SaaS. He built his entire career on top of it.

AI is not the fifth wave. It is the wave that compresses the other four. And the gap between what it makes possible and what organizations are prepared to do is the largest Rodrigo has seen in three decades. Zerlotti Signal exists to close that gap, a few C-suites at a time.

Track record

Four dimensions of a single trajectory.

Operator, executive, investor, engineer. Each layer explains the next.

  • Operator

    Built, scaled, and sold.

    Four companies founded and acquired: DbLive (climate intelligence and IoT, patent granted in the United States), Suiteplus (NetSuite localization leader in Brazil, acquired by Avalara), Rezolve (SaaS e-learning built on ERP frameworks, acquired by DOT Digital Group), Enlizt (collaborative recruitment platform). Operator, not commentator.

  • Global-scale C-suite executive

    Decided firsthand, across three continents.

    CAIO, CTIO, and COO at DOT Digital Group during 7 years of growth above 60% per year. General Manager Latin America at Avalara, coordinating the global tax compliance leader's entry into the Brazilian market. Executive operations across the United States, Brazil, and Latin America.

  • Investor and ecosystem builder

    Own capital on early-stage bets.

    Member of Tech Coast Angels, the largest angel investor group in the United States. Early-stage investments in Silicon Valley and Brazil. Named inventor on a US patent for environmental prediction at points of interest.

  • Technical foundation nobody improvises

    Engineering, not guesswork.

    Master's in Aerospace Engineering from ITA, with a thesis on trajectory optimization for satellite launch vehicles. Graduate work in Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. BS in Physics from UNESP. Published, peer-reviewed research.

The five waves

Five waves. Five entries. Always before the market named it.

The pattern has never changed: arrive early, build while others are still watching, move on before it becomes obvious.

  1. 1994

    Internet

    First connected systems. Dow Chemical, intercontinental supply chain.

  2. 2000

    Cloud + IoT

    DbLive. Patent in climate intelligence. Millions of daily transactions before the word “cloud” went mainstream.

  3. 2010

    SaaS

    Suiteplus. NetSuite localization leadership in Brazil. Acquired by Avalara in 2016.

  4. 2018

    Mobile + Platform

    Enlizt. Collaborative recruitment platform. Tech Coast Angels.

  5. 2025

    Agentic AI

    CAIO at DOT Digital Group. Founder of MUZT. Zerlotti Signal.

The signal was always there. Most people saw it after the fact. Rodrigo built on it first.

What this means for you

You are not hiring an opinion about AI.

You are hiring thirty years of pattern. The difference is large.

Most AI consultants learned the subject in the last three years. They can explain what an agent is. They cannot tell you with confidence what will happen in your industry in the next twenty-four months, because they have never crossed four previous technological inflections as operators.

Rodrigo has. He built through each one. He sold companies in three. And the reason Zerlotti Signal exists is because, for the first time in thirty years, the speed of change has exceeded the capacity of most C-suites to process it alone.

If you are one of the few who refuses to learn AI from the headlines, this practice was designed for you.

Operating, not commenting

In parallel with the advisory, Rodrigo builds.

Rodrigo is founder and adviser at Plooral, an established HRTech that first brought the ATS concept to the Brazilian market. He is also the founder of MUZT, an AI-native company that builds and launches vertical products with an agentic engine that accumulates proprietary intelligence every cycle. Each product feeds the next: faster, smarter, cheaper. The moat is not the software, it is the compounded intelligence underneath.

This means that when Rodrigo advises a C-suite about AI, he is not repeating what he read. He is describing what he is building right now.

Next step

There are three ways forward.

01 / ADVISORY

Hire the advisory

For C-suites and boards ready for a strategic decision about AI. Minimum engagement: two private sessions.

02 / SIGNALS

Get the Signals

Analyses and frameworks published regularly. Distribution restricted to executives.

03 / ARCHIVE

See the Signals already published

Thirty years of reading, translated into frameworks applicable today.

For full CV, speaking invitations, or press: Download CV (PDF)LinkedIncontact@zerlotti.com

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