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Welcome to the DealMakers show, hosted by Alejandro Cremades. Alejandro is a serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, and cofounder at Panthera Advisors (M&A and fundraising advisory). On this podcast you will find interviews with entrepreneurs that have been very successful at raising capital or getting their company acquired. You will learn what they did right and what mistakes they made through the process of closing the deal. DealMakers is the ultimate guide for entrepreneurs and senior executives that are in the process of fundraising or selling their company.
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Bill Lenihan’s entrepreneurial path didn’t start as an engineer, product builder, or early startup operator. Instead, his career began in the structured world of finance—investment banking and private equity—before evolving into technology operations and eventually entrepreneurship.
The post Private Equity Investor-Turned-Founder Bill Lenihan On Raising $25 Million To Solve Energy Access For 3 Billion People appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
While many startup founders begin as engineers, product builders, or early-stage operators, John Howard took a very different path. His entrepreneurial journey began in unexpected places—the structured, high-stakes world of investment banking and private equity.
The post John Howard On Raising $52 Million to Create an “Intentional Commerce” Ecosystem appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
For Andrew Antos, the path to building a successful AI company began in an unlikely place: a family of scientists in the post-communist Czech Republic, followed by a brief career in law, and eventually a leap into the startup ecosystem at Harvard and MIT.
The post Andrew Antos On Raising Over $90 Million To Automate Document-Intensive Workflows, Reduce Manual Work, And Increase Efficiency appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Constantin Schröder’s entrepreneurial journey started long before he launched his first company. The mindset—discipline, resilience, and the ability to learn from failure—developed through experiences that seemed unrelated at the time.
The post Constantin Schroder On Raising $50 Million To Build An AI-Native Property Management Company That Optimizes Short-Term And Vacation Rentals To Maximize Revenue For Owners appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Few founders embody the entrepreneurship journey better than Jagdeep Singh. In reality, building transformative companies is a long journey of curiosity, persistence, and disciplined problem-solving. It’s never about a series of lightning strikes of ideas and overnight successes, as often portrayed.
The post Jagdeep Singh On Selling A Company For $550 Million, Taking Another Public At $1.2 Billion And Raising A Historic $450 Million Series A Round To Build Humanoid Robots To Transform The Future Of Work appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Felipe grew up in Colombia, worked in consulting, studied at Harvard Business School, and witnessed firsthand the massive gap in healthcare access across Latin America. Today, he is building Welli, a fintech company that expands access to healthcare.
The post Felipe Gomez Herrera On Raising $115 Million In Equity And Debt Funding To Build A “Bank For Healthcare” In Latin America appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Most startup stories follow a familiar arc—an idea, early traction, a grind toward product-market fit, and eventually, scale. Wen Sang’s journey breaks that pattern. After building, scaling, and exiting his first company, he went on to start another startup, Genspark.ai.
The post Wen Sang On Raising $460 Million To Build A Unicorn That Reached Over $155 Million ARR In 10 Months appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
David Metz is the founder and CEO of Prizeout, a fintech platform that powers rewards and monetization programs for financial institutions, David has raised over $64M and built a company on the brink of profitability. But his journey there was anything but linear.
The post David Metz On Raising $64 Million To Enable Users To Withdraw Rewards From Partner Platforms And Receive Bonuses appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
For Tikue Anazodo, founder and CEO of Kudos, his entrepreneurial journey began long before Silicon Valley—long before Google, Microsoft, Affirm, or Shopify. It started in Lagos, Nigeria, in an environment where entrepreneurship wasn’t a career choice. It was a necessity.
The post Tikue Anazodo On Raising Over $20 Million To Build An AI-Powered Smart Wallet Service That Optimizes Consumer Rewards And Benefits On Purchase appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Doug’s story also captures what it truly takes to build financial infrastructure in an emerging market: resilience, humility, and a deep respect for capital. In this engrossing interview, he discusses the challenges he faced in building, scaling, and raising funding for SWAP.
The post Doug Storf On Raising ~$30 Million To Build The Leading Banking-As-A-Service Infrastructure Platform For B2B Businesses In Brazil appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Yuval Golan's is a story of how a kid from Startup Nation became a global entrepreneur, survived geopolitical gray zones, navigated China, COVID, capital markets, and ultimately built a platform designed to fix one of the most broken systems in the world: cross-border real estate ownership.
The post Yuval Golan On Building A FinTech Platform To Enable Non-US Citizens To Buy Assets In The $50 Trillion US Real Estate Marketplace appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Ben Freeman’s story is not one of overnight success or neatly plotted career moves. It is a story of friction—between old-economy instincts and venture-scale ambition, between external validation and internal conviction, and between momentum and meaning.
The post Ben Freeman On Raising ~$75 Million To Build An AI-Native Procurement Platform That Automates And Streamlines The Entire Buying Process For Businesses appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Tomas Bercovich’s entrepreneurship path was never a straight line. All through, it has been a sequence of experiments, pivots, hard decisions, and compounding lessons; each one sharpening his instincts for what truly matters when building enduring companies.
The post Tomas Bercovich On Processing Over $7 Billion Through A LatAm Fintech Platform Enabling Cross-Border, Multi-Currency Money Transfers appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
When Philipp Heltewig talks about his journey, he does not describe “building a startup.” He talks about building a real company, one that hits its KPIs, scales globally, survives shocks like COVID, and rides new technology waves like generative AI.
The post Philipp Heltewig On Raising $169 Million To Build The Global Leader In Conversational AI And Then Selling The Company To NICE For $1+ Billion appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Andrew Jamison, co-founder and CEO of Extend, chose an entrepreneurial path that didn’t involve a bold dive. Instead, he spent years quietly learning, observing, and accumulating enough pattern recognition to know when it’s finally time to build.
The post Andrew Jamison On Raising $70M To Build An AI-Powered B2B2B Spend And Expense Management Platform appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Julio Martinez is the co-founder and CEO of Abacum, an AI-native Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) platform used by finance teams across 40+ countries. He has raised more than $100M from elite global funds like Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Cathay Innovation, Creandum, and Atomico.
The post Julio Martinez On Raising $100 Million To Build An AI-Native Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Platform For Early Enterprise and Mid-Market Companies appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Aneesh Reddy belongs to that rare category of founders who have built their companies for nearly two decades through multiple cycles, reinvented their businesses through crises, expanded across continents, and still managed to retain over 100 employees who have stayed for more than 10 years.
The post Aneesh Reddy On Raising $300+ Million, Expanding Into 30+ Countries, And Taking His Company Public By Powering Cloud-Based Customer Loyalty Solutions For Global Enterprise Brands appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Ryan Wang is building in one of the most consequential layers of modern software: the operational infrastructure that allows great ideas to scale without breaking. As the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, Ryan sits at the intersection of customer support, AI, and organizational design, an area most companies only confront once growth exposes their cracks.
The post Ryan Wang On Raising $71 Million To Provide Companies With An AI-Powered Customer Support Platform That Integrates WFM And AI Agents appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Pierre Brossollet is the founder and CEO of Arverne, a geothermal energy company that has raised €220M ($258M), employs 250 people, has gone public, and is now pursuing more than €3B ($3.53B) in projects by 2030.
The post Pierre Brossollet On Raising Over $250 Million To Harness And Provide Geothermal Energy Solutions And Extract Low-Carbon Lithium appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
Founder of Dagster, Nick Schrock’s career defies the neat, linear playbooks often associated with Silicon Valley success. He didn’t follow a rigid five-year plan, nor did he obsess over titles or prestige early on. Instead, his journey has been shaped by systems thinking and cultural curiosity.
The post Nick Schrock On Raising $55 Million To Build An Open-Source Data Orchestrator Used To Build, Manage, And Observe Complex Data Pipelines appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
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Fascinating journey of Paul from Belfast👍
I love this podcast in general, but this seems episode sounds more like an ad.
awesome interview 👍