Uruguay celebrated its first Woman Meetup at the region’s signature technology event

The fifteenth edition of Punta Tech Meetup brought together – for the first time – women from the local and regional technology sectors for an event created especially for them.

Pablo Brenner, businessman and founder of the Punta Tech Meetup, spoke about the importance of building this new space. “We always wanted to promote gender equality at our event and the truth is that it’s very important for everyone because women make up at least 50 percent of the talent and 50 percent of the clients and purchasing decisions. They must be represented,” he said.

Punta Tech, the signature event for the technology sector during the South American summer, held for 15 years in the region’s most exclusive tourist destination to bring together technology leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors, gradually added female participants over the years. This year, however, the event’s founders decided to go farther and create a “safe space” to facilitate the entry of new women in the field.

Carolina Kind, Brenner’s business partner and fellow event-organizer, celebrated this first meeting and expressed her wish that it be the first step on a long journey. “Gender inequality affects us all. For us, the multiplying effect of persuading female entrepreneurs to support each other is very important, inspiring new generations of women to pursue careers in technology, science, and other fields where women have traditionally been a rarity. More girls studying in these fields will mean more women in leadership roles in technology and business, which will contribute to building more equality in Uruguay and the region,” she added.

Successful Businesswomen

Macarena Botta and Magdalena Giuria, partners at Brava, the Uruguayan company dedicated to closing the gender gap at companies and promoting diversity through data and technology, discussed how they got started. “In 2020, we founded Brava, first thinking we would promote the appearance of more female conference speakers because we believed the female talent was already there. We were always sure of that, but we thought we had to make it more visible. As we moved along this path, we realized that we actually had to involve everyone in the conversation,” Giuria recalled.

Botta added that, in the context of a series of difficulties women face, the obstacles to creating relationships and contacts that translate into business opportunities is especially significant. “We’d like to invite you to recreate the first editions of Punta Tech and for this to be a safe space where we build networks to get to know each other, accompany each other, and, above all, close more and better business deals – to make our companies grow and accumulate capital,” she added enthusiastically.

The women interviewed the Brazilian businesswomen Deborah Palacios Wanzo, the success story shared at this first meeting.

Palacios Wanzo shared her story as a businesswoman. Today, as president and co-founder of Tuvis, she is a leader in the rapidly expanding startup’s global expansion to meet the needs of clients in 35 countries. Tuvis is a prominent CRM platform helping companies improve client relationships by significantly increasing the quality of customer service teams. The company currently has offices in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States.

At the event, she stressed that women have the great responsibility of speaking up, expressing their opinions, and telling their stories to show they can do anything they want and set their minds to.