Software exports from Colombia just passed $2 billion USD for the first time. Ten technology chiefs, from Medellín’s nearshore floors to Bogotá’s bank towers, will shape whether that number keeps climbing.
Sometime this past year, tech in Colombian quietly crossed a line. Exports of software and IT services topped $2 billion SSD for the first time, and the wider digital industry sold $2.463 billion USD abroad, up close to 10%, according to Fedesoft.
Shortly after, Fedesoft and the research centre Cenisoft counted 6,805 active IT companies with sales of 44.25 trillion pesos and 406,000 jobs between them.
The capital behind new companies has changed its manners. The Latin America Venture Capital Report 2026, by Cuantico VP and Startuplinks, put regional venture investment at $4 billion USD in 2025, spread over 681 rounds instead of 694 the year before. Investors are larger checks, and also asking questions about the engineering underneath.
These questions, in many cases, land on the desk of the CTO.
Here are ten of those leaders whose decisions over the next year will show up in the next round of numbers.
Steve Daly, CTO, Gorilla Logic
This month Steve Daly was named the new CTO of Gorilla Logic, a Colorado-based company founded in 2002 that also has offices in Costa Rica and Medellín, Colombia. He arrives as the firm is rewriting what AI-native engineering work looks like. While he is not based in Colombia, his impact on technology in the region will surely be felt here.
Steve brings more than 35 years of technology leadership experience, with deep expertise in digital transformation, AI/ML, cloud architecture, and technology strategy.
Throughout his career, he has led technology organizations, built and scaled innovative solutions, and partnered with clients and business leaders to turn emerging technologies into meaningful business outcomes.
According to the company, “His combination of technical expertise, strategic leadership, and client-focused thinking will be instrumental as we continue to strengthen our technology capabilities and drive innovation for our clients.”
Mohamed Maan, CTO, Chromatics AI
Maan is CTO of Chromatics AI, which builds and manages open-weight physical AI systems for real-world industrial settings. The company pulls together data from machine vision cameras, robots, IoT sensors and machines, then uses it to help enterprises automate processes, improve safety and run production environments more efficiently.
Its clients span manufacturing, energy, healthcare and ports, sectors where AI has to work on a factory floor or a dockside rather than in a chat window. That makes Maan’s job less about software alone and more about making AI dependable around heavy equipment and real people.
Chromatics AI’s Board Member Amyn Gillanni earlier led the company Talos Digital, which was acquired and was a large employer in Colombia.
Carlos Cruz, CTO, Ontop
Carlos Cruz is responsible for the rails that move money and issue contracts at Ontop. The company, which is an alumni of Y Combinator, was founded in Bogotá in 2020 to pay remote workers across borders and now runs from Miami, with 197 people in 20 countries.
Ontop says its edge is that it owns those rails instead of renting them, which puts Cruz’s work at the centre of the business.
Mike Hoey, Founder and CEO, Source Meridian
One of Colombia’s most recognized tech leaders is Mike Hoey, who founded Source Meridian. While he serves as CEO, not CTO, Mike Hoey comes from a technical background and started the company in 2016.
It has since grown into one of Colombia’s larger tech enterprises, in addition to its office in the US.
He built Source Meridian around a narrow speciality: data pipelines, BI and medical vocabulary management for US life-sciences clients.That work runs under strict SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance rules.
Hoey is also a Mentor at Stanford University’s entrepreneurship program, and at Tec de Monterrey.
Sandeep Sharma, Chief AI Officer, Ness Digital Engineering
Sharma was named Chief AI Officer in July 2026, after earlier roles as a director at KKR and an associate partner at McKinsey.
His appointment puts AI in its own seat at Ness’s top table, further than most firms have gone.
Ness opened offices in Mexico in 2025 as an AI center of excellence for North American clients. It also tracked more than a hundred of its engineers using AI copilots in live production, and 70% of them reported higher job satisfaction. Ness’s Latin American footprint is the context Colombian firms compete in, and a dedicated AI chief signals how buyers will start to judge them.
Pope Davis, CTO, Bold
Davis joined Bold as CTO in April 2026, coming from Bitso. The Bogotá payments company processes about 6% of the money moving through cards in Colombia and has lent around 400,000 million pesos to small businesses.
His first major test sits across the border. Bold bought Peru’s VendeMás, so it now has to run a single platform under two different regulatory regimes, and making that work falls to Davis’s engineering team.
David Cuadrado, Co-founder, Truora
Cuadrado co-founded Truora in Cali in 2018 and has spent the years since building identity checks that run inside WhatsApp. Before that he spent nearly five years as an engineer at Twilio, and that background shows in the product’s messaging-first design.
Truora has sold more than 400 clients in nine countries on doing customer onboarding through a chat window instead of a traditional app or web form.
Álvaro Carmona, Vice President of Technology, Bancolombia
No technology chief in Colombia is watched more closely than Carmona. When he took the role, the bank said it was spending more than 1 trillion pesos a year on technology transformation, with about 3,200 IT professionals.
This year’s app failures followed ATM and web outages in 2025, and together they have put that spending under public scrutiny. The Financial Superintendency’s complaint figures will effectively be his scorecard.
Katherine Duque, Executive Vice President of Engineering, BBVA Colombia
Duque became EVP of engineering in July 2026, replacing Gregorio Blanco, who moved to BBVA in Spain. She is a systems engineer from the Universidad del Quindío with 18 years in banking technology.
She spent the last two years shaping digital strategy for the bank’s retail arm, so she arrives already familiar with the customer-facing side of the business she now builds for.
Juan Camilo Suárez, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Grupo Éxito
Suárez became Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Grupo Éxito after running Dentsu and Merkle across Colombia and Latin America. He is an EAFIT production engineer with 28 years in the field.
He now has to make AI, cloud and cybersecurity work across the country’s largest retailer, where the stakes are visible: a failed checkout is felt in thousands of stores at once.
Christian Struve, Co-Founder and CEO of Fracttal
Christian Struve is an engineer, technology entrepreneur, and AI innovator focused on reshaping industrial maintenance and asset management. As co-founder and CEO of Fracttal, he leads the development of technology solutions that combine artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and IoT to help organizations improve equipment reliability, streamline operations, and transition toward more proactive and autonomous maintenance models.
With an engineering background and over 15 years of experience in information systems and industrial technology, Struve specializes in applying emerging technologies to real-world operational challenges. Under his leadership, Fracttal has incorporated AI and machine learning into its platform, enabling companies to identify potential equipment failures before they occur, allocate resources more efficiently, and make informed decisions based on operational data.
The company raised a $ 35 million round this year to advance AI in maintenance in LATAM and Europe.
