Álvaro Pintado is a young Spanish entrepreneur who went from dropping out of college to creating a company at the age of 17 currently valued at 16 million euros, with the hope of standing up to technological giants like Google or Microsoft. He has always had the desire to change the world, he says, to “leave a mark and be part of history, impacting society in a positive way.”
Student of piano and musical language since he was 6 years old, Álvaro Pintado He created his first business when he was only 16 years old.: an e-commerce company selling products (watches) imported to Spain. Shortly after, he heard the term ‘blockchain’ (fascinated, as he himself states, by the possibilities that this technology offered of not depending on governments or institutions that manipulate or monopolize industries or sectors) and it would change his life.
In this way, and after many hours of reading and research, At the age of 17 he published The decentralized financial system —a 134-page book, independently published on Amazon with more than 500 copies sold—, in which he explains with graphic and illustrative examples concepts related to cryptocurrencies, NFTs, blockchain technology and the Metaverse.
Also at the age of 17 he created an artificial intelligence company in just one weekend: Whisperan AI chatbot similar to Chat GPT, but before Chat GPT existed. With this last company he gained 160,000 users and decided to sell it for a five-digit amount.
In that same year, while studying for Selectivity, he founded hello.app —whose domain cost 107,000 euros. hello.app is the only app in the world that pays the user to store data on their phone. It already has 200,000 users in more than 200 countries.
At only 19 years old, Álvaro has already raised capital worth 800,000 euros for hello.app, through two rounds of financing, in which, in addition to private investors, the business angel networks of Esade and Iese, Castiventures and Bcombinator have participated. Now He is confident that his company will be worth 1 billion euros in 2027.
In his personal life, the young Spanish entrepreneur practices martial arts (kickboxing and Muay Thai).
His dream: reinvent the Internet as we know it today. A dream that starts from this vision:
“Why not use all the existing hardware of mobile phones, iPads and laptops that are increasingly more powerful to replace these clouds and that the control falls on the users instead of on 2-3 technological giants and there is a higher price fair? Just compare a Blackberry from 10 years ago with a current iPhone and imagine in 5 years how powerful any mobile phone will be, it will be able to replace a CPU or server”.
