Rui Costa
Student and CTO in Santa Clara, California / Porto, Portugal
Hi, my name is Rui, pleasure to meet you!
I'm a Software Engineering student from Porto's Superior Institute of Engineering (ISEP-IPP), living between Porto, Portugal, and Santa Clara (Silicon Valley/California), USA.
I've been studying IT/programming since I was 14 years old, although I fully dropped out of my bachelor's degree around 2016 to Co-Found Newton Labs.
Newton Labs is a startup focused on developing AI technology for HR, where I was CTO for 4 years.
What started as a two-person startup, in a small corner of the world, with no funding and almost no overall experience, eventually expanded to 3 countries in 3 continents, $500K in funding from multiple investors, and a big sense of personal fulfilment, seeing that all the hard work did pay off, even the world seemed to be against us. It was a long journey where I learned a lot, that eventually got to an end when I decided to leave the startup in the end of 2019.
In December 2019, I joined Asimily as a contractor. Asimily is a Silicon Valley Cybersecurity Startup, focused on building Software solutions for Health Systems, where my main responsibility was building their ProSecure solution, which enabled clients to proactively secure their medical devices before they even entered their environment, by leveraging some advanced data analytics techniques from across multiple data sources. I was also responsible for automating some processes (some of them were able to be reduced from 3/4 hours to just a couple of minutes of a person's day), and I also worked on other parts of the software as well.
In December 2020, by the end of my contract with Asimily, I joined LearningPal, where I performed my role as CTO.
LearningPal focused on building AI/OCR solutions for personal, SMEs, and large Enterprise clients. LearningPal ended up being acquired by Ripcord in April 2022, where I'm currently working.
I'm a very active person in volunteering, and I'm trying to become more active in the tech community (online & offline).
On the side, I've been working on a Python Programming/Engineering educational course, writing some theory for the introduction, with lots of practical examples to support newcomers as well as experienced people.
-- Not looking for jobs! --
If you'd like to get in touch, feel free to say hello through any of the social links below.