On his first day of work in Tul, in Bogotá, José Murillo did not stop by an office. The COO picked him up in his truck and took him to the warehouse, where he had some tamales and a red wine with the team. From there he got on a motorcycle with a saleswoman and toured marginal neighborhoods of the city selling cement and rebar.
“It gave me a big click,” he recalls: construction was a tens of billion-dollar industry, with no technology players doing this. It was an unsexy industry, she says, and that made her feel very sexy.
José Murillo is one of those who, when the Oscar nominations come out, watches all the films of the year. He runs, plays tennis and likes to talk about politics and books with his friends. In his story there is a constant: choosing paths that seem unattractive, but in which he believes.
From public policies to the startup world
He grew up in Mexico with the certainty that he wanted to be someone important for Latin America, and he thought that that meant working in public policies. He was obsessed with understanding how countries like Korea and Singapore, which were previously poorer than Mexico, are much richer today.
At Harvard, a campus full of ambitious people, he learned how high the bar for excellence can be. He studied economics and discovered computing, and technology convinced him that it was the way to have more impact.
He did internships at Facebook and Goldman Sachs, and concluded that neither was for him: investment banking seemed too square and big tech, too big, with a very defined scope. Startups were a mix of everything he liked: ambitious people, growth, and small teams with a lot of responsibility.
Returning to Latin America was, he says, a lifelong dream. And it came at the right time: towards 2020 and 2021, a great wave of investment was felt in the region for the first time.
Close with integrity
José Murillo experienced the cycles of the ecosystem up close: from the investment wave of 2021 to the turn of 2022, when the Federal Reserve raised rates and investors stopped betting on risky regions.
From there he learned a lesson: in a region with so much volatility in investment, you have to build a company that is resilient to the appetite of investors.
With Santiago Buenahora, whom he met at the end of 2019 and with whom he has been working for almost six years, he founded Centrito, a low-cost e-commerce with local suppliers, something similar to Temu before Temu arrived in the region. They operated it for four years and closed it in March 2025
- What did it mean to close the company?
“We had tried to raise money and we had a couple of offers, but they were not enough to take us to the scale that the business was going to need. It was super sad to close: we were a team of 45 people. Yes we could raise more money and continue running, but I knew that I had a fiduciary responsibility with the current and future investors”
“I didn’t see a clear picture for how the company would use that capital to reach the scale it needed,” he mentions.
Being a good leader, he says, is making the right decision even if it is not the popular one, and taking responsibility when something goes wrong.
What he is most proud of is what came next: 90% of the team had other work after closing, in many cases thanks to their referrals, everyone received their full settlement and returned the remaining money to investors.
- What is the most common mistake you see in startup leaders?
“They get carried away by the herd. In 2021 it was ‘unit economics don’t matter, everything is speed’. Then, since there was no more money, it was ‘unit economics are the only thing that matters’. We were a very small company, we sold 10,000 products a month. Why are you going to worry about unit economics on a scale that doesn’t even exist?”
Today he sees the pendulum swinging to the other side: the idea that in Latin America there is nothing left to build and we have to go to San Francisco. I wish, he says, there were more people who stayed with their own conviction in what they believe.
Day one of First
With Santiago Buenahora and Andrés Rosales, his friend from Harvard, José Murillo founded Primero AI. The idea came from two observations. At Centrito they had built seven internal applications for a small operation, and when closing they asked themselves why not sell that technology to large retailers.
And Andrés, who worked in a family business, saw there that what was needed were tailored solutions, difficult to repeat in others.
They recently announced a seed round with two venture capital funds. José Murillo says that they are the best-funded enterprise AI startup in Latin America, but what he feels most is responsibility: “This is day one of the company.”
For large companies, he explains, support matters: they do not work with three people in a garage without financing, because they need certainty that their supplier will be there in five, ten and twenty years.
- What differentiates Primero from other companies that do the same thing?
“We are a product company. Although we do customization and work very tailored with clients, we do everything on top of our platform. With a consulting firm you end up building 100 different solutions that do not communicate with each other or have maintenance. To deploy artificial intelligence, these companies need a layer where they can deploy, with continuous maintenance and solutions that work together”
The platform, which describes how the “organizational brain” of a company, connects to its databases and stores the context of its processes. His dream is for customers to be able to deploy agents on their own.
And now, he says, measurable results can be sold: they work with banks to automate the approval of SME loans, which can take a month and a half or two months, and which an agent can resolve in two hours.
Today they work with a couple of dozen large corporations in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, companies with 20,000 or 40,000 people.
- What advice would you give to José who was starting out?
“Feel comfortable having an opinion different from that of the market. When we started First it was a very contrary idea: it felt like a consulting firm and it was difficult to explain. With my previous company, doing low-cost e-commerce was the least attractive, and I worried about unit economics when the only thing we should care about was growth. If a company does not exist, it is because no one has started doing it, and entrepreneurs should understand that no one knows their business better than themselves.”
Would you change anything about your career? Nothing, he answers: he has only made mistakes, but without them he would not be who he is.
