Some Latin American entrepreneurs are building amazing startups. Today I want to share one of these stories with you. The startup is called BlazingDB and has been founded by Rodrigo Aramburu, Felipe Aramburu and William Malpica, two Peruvians and one Venezuelan. I have been mentoring them since last year.

BlazingDB has built an extremely fast SQL database able to handle petabyte scale. The database tool runs on massively parallel GPUs – graphical processing units, or the dedicated microprocessors designed and optimized to run the calculations required for graphic display – instead of the traditional CPU – central processing unit, which is the generalist processing unit of any computer. The BlazingDB product allows for SQL instructions to be run on a large number of GPUs. This parallel architecture generates huge improvements in processing time, which is fundamental for big data analysis where millions of data elements are analyzed. The team has been able to reduce processing time by factors of up to 30x compared to Amazon’s Redshift and 350x to MySQL!

You can watch their pitch here which explains what they do much better than what I can do. Also a TechCrunch article talking about them.

It really encourages me to see entrepreneurs from Latin America developing new technologies that are state of the art globally. We have talent in Latin America who is as good as anywhere else. We just need more people to believe they can do it.