The Partners

Tiago Ferreira

Managing Partner

Tiago founded Telhaverde in 2020 after selling his programmatic advertising platform to a French ad-tech group in 2019. That platform reached €8M ARR on the back of a bidder architecture he built from scratch in Lisbon — optimising ROAS across paid social and display for mid-market European retailers. Before that, six years running paid acquisition and growth at a Portuguese e-commerce company gave him a ground-level view of how marketing operations actually break at scale. In 2019, watching early generative models begin to surface in the content and creative tools his former customers were testing, he concluded that the stack wasn't going to be patched — it was going to be replaced. Telhaverde is the vehicle for that conviction. He writes about the restructuring at telhaverde.com/insights.

Rui Mendes

Principal

Rui holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Universidade de Lisboa, where his research focused on multilingual semantic parsing — the kind of work that bridges academic NLP and production content systems. He spent three years as a founding engineer at a London-based content intelligence startup, building the NLP pipeline that powered the product's topic clustering and content scoring features before the company was acquired in 2023. He joined Telhaverde in 2024 to lead technical diligence across all new investments and to support portfolio CTOs on the decisions that have the longest-term product consequences: foundation model selection and fine-tuning strategy, training data quality and annotation pipelines, inference cost architecture, and the specific tradeoffs between proprietary model development and third-party API dependency. His standing position: most marketing AI products are wrappers with no durable advantage. He looks for the ones that aren't.