VTEX promised the world's largest retailer an online store in Brazil within eight months, from kickoff to launch. It delivered, and the Walmart project shaped everything that followed. The two engineers who founded VTEX in Rio de Janeiro decided big companies needed a commerce platform they could switch on, not build from scratch. When VTEX went public in July 2021, the pandemic had pushed shoppers online across Latin America, and it served over 2,000 customers in 32 countries.

Two Engineers from Rio

Geraldo do Carmo Thomaz Júnior and Mariano Gomide de Faria, both mechanical engineering graduates of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, started VTEX's operations in Brazil in 2000. They ran it as co-chief executives. The bet was that enterprises wanted speed to market more than custom code. VTEX built a cloud platform with marketplace features at its core. It opened its first office outside Brazil in 2013 and reached the United States in 2017.

Nineteen Dollars a Share

VTEX priced its offering at $19 a share in July 2021 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as VTEX. Customers on the platform included Whirlpool, which used it to run online stores in Latin America, its largest online market. By the end of 2025 VTEX served 2,200 customers and 3,100 active online stores across 44 countries. It still trades on the NYSE as VTEX.

Cover: Rio Jnhomerim in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, plate two from Landscapes, Louis Jules Frederic Villeneuve. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for the bay of Rio de Janeiro (its birthplace).