Mexico’s conservatism has made it a tech laggard

To succeed, entrepreneurs must overcome prejudice against what makes Mexico great.

To see where the problem lies, Leonardo Vieira told The Mexico Political Economist, just take a look at the maintenance engineer at a factory at the end of a day’s work. Dirty, sweaty, knackered. And to think that the world economy dangles from this one exhausted thread.

One broken machine, one stalled production line, and the entirety of, say, a global car company’s supply chain can be disrupted. It is these essential workers, doing a thoroughly unglamorous job every day, that keeps global trade from collapsing under its own weight.

Mexico lies at the heart of the world’s global production chain. Yet, despite its industrial prowess, there is still a lot to be fixed and streamlined—and a lot of money to be made from addressing those issues.

That was what brought Vieira to Mexico. He is a Brazilian and the co-founder at Tractian, a tech startup that works with factories to predict faults before they happen. He likens his product to the Shazam of maintenance. Like the song recognition app, Tractian installs kit in industrial machinery that listens to vibrations, sounds, and temperatures to identify what might be off kilter and what might be on the path to breaking.

He said their service wants to ease the load of maintenance engineers. “They’re fire fighters, we want to change that.” But it also saves their customers—some of Mexico’s and the world’s biggest industrial firms—a pot of money. In turn, Tractian has done rather well; triple digit growth and $120 million dollars of venture capital (VC) investment secured just this year.

The recipe to Tractian’s success seems to have been to do the opposite of what every Mexican entrepreneur has ever been told to do.