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Juliano Primavesi

Juliano Primavesi

Founder & CEO, Mahalo Ventures

In 2006, Juliano Primavesi staked everything — USD 200,000 of personal debt — on a hosting company called KingHost. Twelve years later he sold it to Locaweb — a bet in the dark on a company that might one day reach the public markets, or might not. It did. That was one of four exits across 25 years of building technology companies, defending them, and learning what makes one last.

The Journey

To understand that, go back to high school. Juliano's first venture, Prokura, was a semi-automated search engine that indexed 200,000 Brazilian websites — and his first acquisition exit. The pattern was set early: build something real, learn by doing, move on. He would run it again and again.

A small first hosting venture, Webrasil, gave him the taste. In 2000 he co-founded Hostnet, taking it to BRL 60K in monthly recurring revenue in two years before selling his shares. Then came HostSul, a burst of consumer products (GigaFree, GigaBusca, GigaFoto, GigaColor), and Giga — a wireless internet provider he built between 2014 and 2018, growing it from 100 to 4,000 customers across Porto Alegre and the mountain towns beyond it before Adylnet acquired it.

Then came the bigger leap. In 2006, USD 200,000 in personal debt bought him a single conviction: that he could build a better hosting company than anyone in Brazil. KingHost proved him right slowly, then all at once. Twelve years on, it served 80,000 active customers, hosted more than 300,000 websites, employed 220 people, ran at 35% EBITDA, and made Great Place to Work's ranking of Brazil's best tech employers eight years running. In 2018, the year it hit break-even, Juliano summited Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak — Uhuru, at 5,895 meters: a financial summit and a literal one in the same year. The next year he sold KingHost to Locaweb — then still a private company; a year later Locaweb went public on Brazil's B3 exchange (LWSA3), turning a bet in the dark into one that paid off.

Behind that uptime was something most customers never saw. Years before KingHost, Juliano had built Sinapse — first a predictive watchdog that auto-healed outages, then a system that tuned servers in real time and watched every packet crossing the network. By 2009 it could read an anomalous traffic burst, reach straight into the edge routers, and kill the attack — at the firewall and over BGP, negotiating directly with upstream link providers. It did this when Cloudflare was still a niche tool and Arbor cost a fortune. Under his watch, Sinapse absorbed attacks beyond 200 Gbps and hundreds of millions of packets per second, detected in under ten seconds, holding a 99.9% uptime SLA — which is how fewer than ten people kept 3,000+ servers alive across three data centers. That instinct — to ask of everything he built, "how would someone break this?", and fix the weakness first — became engineering culture at KingHost, taught to every developer. It is the "hacker" lens he still reads security and AI companies through today.

After the sale, Juliano stayed on, running KingHost as a Locaweb subsidiary through its parent's IPO — a front-row seat to public-company governance and compliance. He has since advised across the ecosystem: former Senior Strategic Consultant at UPX (a cybersecurity company), advisory board member at Guia da Alma, and strategic advisor at Adentro.

Four exits taught him the same lesson from four angles: durable companies are never built on capital alone. So he became the investor he once needed. Through Mahalo Ventures, he now partners with founders in AI, Cloud, and frontier technology — bringing not just a check, but the operating playbook of someone who has carried personal debt, woken before dawn a thousand times to keep the servers running, and sold a company into uncertainty only to watch it reach the public markets.

Key Milestones

Today

He looks for the same things he once had to build himself: recurring revenue, real operating leverage, and growth that compounds. But he watches the founder just as closely — drawing on a postgraduate background in neuropsychology and positive psychology to back people who can carry the weight of building something that lasts. The strongest companies, he argues, are built where sound fundamentals meet a founder who won't break.

Areas of Expertise

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