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Revelo’s Evolution: From Job Board to AI Training Platform

The best startup pivots aren’t planned—they’re discovered. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Lucas Mendes, founder and CEO of Revelo, shared how his company transformed from a simple Brazilian job board into a $48.7 million tech talent platform serving both traditional staffing and the cutting-edge world of LLM training for hyperscalers.

What makes Revelo’s story particularly compelling isn’t just the scale of their transformation, but how they’ve navigated two major market shifts by staying ruthlessly responsive to customer demand rather than forcing predetermined visions onto the market.

The Accidental Entrepreneur’s Second Act

Lucas’s journey began with a problem every startup founder knows intimately: the impossibility of hiring great tech talent. “During that first business, I had a really tough time hiring tech talent,” Lucas recalls. “Not just finding and screening tech talent, but really, you know, finding people who were really, you know, at the right point of their careers that wanted to join my project.”

After selling his first e-commerce company to a private equity group, Lucas channeled this frustration into what would become Revelo. Starting in 2014 with a focus on Latin American talent, the company initially operated as a straightforward job board for developers—a far cry from the sophisticated platform it would eventually become.

The first iteration was modest: “We raised some money for that business, which was essentially a job board focused on developers.” But sometimes the most transformative changes come from the most unexpected sources.

The COVID Roller Coaster

When the pandemic hit, Revelo experienced the kind of dramatic revenue swings that would break most companies. “I remember very well, from April through May 2020, our revenue dropped by something like 80%. We thought, well, we’re screwed, we’re done,” Lucas admits.

But having recently raised capital gave them the runway to experiment. “We had a pretty full war chest and that gave us the liberty to try things out. Basically, we’re launching new products, trying new ways to serve our clients since, you know, companies essentially stopped hiring from a month to the next.”

The experimentation paid off in ways they never expected. As remote work became normalized, US companies suddenly needed what Revelo had been building all along: access to vetted Latin American talent. “We started getting a lot of inbound interest from US companies who wanted to recruit talent from Latin America but didn’t really know where to start.”

This pivot transformed Revelo from a simple job board into a comprehensive nearshoring platform handling “not only the recruiting, but also payments compliance, perks, benefits, health insurance. Everything that you need to run your distributed tech team.”

The results were dramatic: “We grew 6x in three years.”

The AI Opportunity Nobody Saw Coming

Just as Revelo was hitting its stride with nearshoring, another unexpected opportunity emerged. “More recently we actually started getting interest from other types of companies who were looking for tech talented at scale. And those companies are hyperscalers and data platforms that are training LLMs,” Lucas explains.

The timing was perfect. As AI companies raced to improve their models, they discovered a crucial bottleneck: “You need a lot of data generated by humans to fine tune your LLMs in a phase that’s called the post training phase of LLMs.”

Once again, Revelo found themselves uniquely positioned to serve this demand. “We have access to a very large network of pre vetted talent right now, something like 400,000 engineers that have been pre vetted on our platform and we can deliver that at scale.”

But Lucas is characteristically honest about how they discovered this opportunity: “I wish I could claim credit for that, but it was again, us responding to inbound interest from clients.”

Building Beyond Commodity Services

The LLM training market taught Revelo a crucial lesson about differentiation. Simply providing bodies wasn’t enough—especially when competing for hyperscaler contracts worth millions of dollars.

“There’s too many of these companies out there for there to be any meaningful demand for somebody who’s just a workforce supplier,” Lucas explains. “You need to have done this before. You need to have the expertise in actual human data projects.”

This realization led to a fundamental shift in how Revelo approached the market. They invested heavily in building specialized platforms for code annotation—something generic data labeling tools couldn’t handle effectively.

“When it comes to code, you need something very specific,” Lucas notes. “Because you need to be able to prompt different models and get different responses and then run the code or debug the code or trace the code, the actions that the software engineer takes during the process.”

The consulting layer became their competitive moat. “There’s this layer of consulting that you need to add on top of the actual data that you’re providing them. That’s really something that can help you differentiate against the competition.”

The Founding Team as Explorers

When building this new business line, Lucas made a counterintuitive decision: instead of hiring external executives, he deployed his senior leadership team. “It’s me, the CEO, the CTO, the head of product, the head of sales of the company. You get all your senior guys.”

This approach treated the LLM training business like a startup within a startup. “Essentially it feels a lot like an early stage startup. And in a sense you can’t hire market executives for that phase. You need to have a founding team for that phase.”

While exhausting, this strategy proved essential for navigating the complexity of serving hyperscalers. “It’s exhausting, it’s excruciating, it’s stressful, but it is very much an early stage startup.”

The Art of Enterprise Sales

Selling to hyperscalers taught Revelo another crucial lesson: enterprise sales requires treating each team as a separate customer. “When you’re talking to these hyperscalers, you’re not talking to one company, you’re talking to several different teams.”

This reality forced them to systematize their approach. “We build a core corpus of sales collateral, like case studies and, you know, materials that they can socialize internally. That really helps you scale that because, you know, you’re going to have to do that 50, 100 times for the same client.”

The key was being transparent about capabilities while building trust through expertise. “You have to be really clear about what you can do and what you cannot,” Lucas emphasizes. “Some of these companies are saying, hey, we want to do projects where you’ll do some, you know, human data for code, but also some human data for video. We have to say no to that because at some point, you know, you’re going to get caught red handed if you try to deliver on something that you just can’t.”

The Numbers Tell the Story

The success of this approach is evident in Revelo’s revenue mix. The human data business, which didn’t exist 18 months ago, now represents 25% of total revenue. “Last year it got to about 25-75. So 25 human data, 75 staff augmentation and staffing. And this year it could get to 50-50.”

This growth came from following market signals rather than forcing a predetermined strategy. “We’re so deep into this and it’s working, why not put another chunk of effort in,” Lucas reflects on their escalation of commitment.

The Consolidation Play

Looking ahead, Lucas sees consolidation as the next chapter in Revelo’s evolution. “We’re very active in the M&A space. We’ve acquired five companies to date and, you know, there’s definitely benefits of scale that accrue to the largest players in this space.”

The rationale is straightforward: “At the end of the day, this is a marketplace. You do have two sides. So the larger you are, the more, the better matches you can make.”

But Lucas has learned that successful acquisitions come down to people, not just numbers. “The deals that work best for us are the deals where, you know, you feel that you can work with that person that you’re joining forces with.”

The Vision for Tomorrow

Revelo’s ultimate vision extends far beyond staffing or even LLM training. “We want to be the backbone of tech talent for the age of AI,” Lucas explains. “Essentially whenever somebody is developing an LLM or an AI feature or implementing AI at their company, you want to be the go to destination for finding the talent and the people that you need to implement that solution.”

This positioning recognizes a fundamental truth about the AI revolution: while everyone focuses on the technology, the real bottleneck is often human talent. “The staffing side of Revelo is the OPEX quote unquote of AI. If the CAPEX of AI is GPUs, eventually what you’ll use as OPEX to implement that AI is tech talent.”

Lessons for the AI Age

Revelo’s journey offers several crucial insights for B2B founders navigating today’s rapidly evolving landscape. First, the importance of responding to market signals rather than forcing predetermined visions. Both of Lucas’s major pivots came from customer demand, not strategic planning.

Second, the value of building deep expertise to escape commodity competition. In crowded markets, differentiation comes from developing specialized knowledge that competitors can’t easily replicate.

Finally, the power of transparency in building trust with sophisticated buyers. Rather than overselling capabilities, being honest about limitations often leads to stronger, more sustainable relationships.

As AI continues to reshape entire industries, Revelo’s story demonstrates that the biggest opportunities often come from unexpected directions. The key is staying responsive to market needs while building the specialized capabilities that turn those opportunities into sustainable competitive advantages.