Andrea Matsui, CEO of Generation Brazil, received the Entrepreneur of the Year 2024 award from Unicamp in a ceremony held on November 14th. The entrepreneur was present at the 19th Unicamp Ventures Annual Meeting to receive the trophy, granted by the Unicamp Innovation Agency (Innovates Unicamp) and delivered by its executive director, professor Renato Lopes. The 19th edition of the meeting took place in the auditorium of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Urbanism (Fecfau) from Unicamp, on the Barão Geraldo campus.
The choice of the entrepreneurial person represents one of the main categories of Entrepreneur Award from Unicamp, organized by Inova Unicamp with the support of a group of entrepreneurs called Unicamp Ventures and currently in its eighth edition. Lopes praised Matsui when announcing his name.
“This was a very difficult choice because we had four excellent finalists, who presented their work very well. pitches. But pitch from Generation Brasil, presented by Andrea, was exciting and showed the great social impact provided by the company, which promotes education and social mobility”.
Matsui, graduated in electrical engineering from Feec, had already received, during the event, another trophy on behalf of Generation Brasil, the Unicamp Entrepreneur Award 2024 in the Socio-Environmental Impact & Diversity category. The trophy for this category was presented by Eduardo Neger, elected Unicamp Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017 – the first edition of the award –, former advisor to the Unicamp Ventures group and director of the subsidiary company Neger Telecom, sponsor of the award this year.
Generation Brasil, also a subsidiary of Unicamp, operates in the education and employment sectors, offering free courses in technology and sales to people in situations of social vulnerability in order to train young professionals who are ready to enter the job market. Among the criteria for choosing Matsui as Unicamp's Entrepreneur of the Year, her contribution to the company's success and the social impact achieved by the enterprise stand out.
The Entrepreneur of the Year 2024 stood out among the four finalists. The other three also represented winning spin-off companies in the categories of Female Leadership, Innovation and Scale-Up. All presented the following pitches of your startups during the ceremony.
“Unicamp is my home. I came to the University when I was 17 years old and here I discovered myself, both as a human being and as a professional. The award in the category of Socio-Environmental Impact & Diversity that the company received was already something incredible. And yet, receiving this other award, this time as Unicamp’s Entrepreneur of the Year, is something that is beyond measure. This award means a lot to me. I am very grateful. I don’t even have words,” said Matsui.
In addition to the trophy, the entrepreneur also won two tickets from Inova Unicamp to participate free of charge in the international fair Mobile World Capital (MWC) and your event to startups, the Four Years From Now (4YFN), to be held in March 2025 in Barcelona (Spain), as well as a cost of living allowance of R$5 and a RuralMAX (a device that expands connectivity in remote regions). These last two prizes were offered by sponsor Neger Telecom.
entrepreneurial trajectory
After graduating from Unicamp, Matsui worked for years in the financial market, specifically at Citibank, and also in large companies, such as AmBev. At the latter, he experienced for the first time working professionally in the area of social impact, dealing with projects related to environmental, health and well-being issues, among others.
After completing her MBA in the United States, the entrepreneur began to have greater contact with social impact actions and decided, despite having a well-established career, to change fields and carry out activities that could have a faster and more effective impact on people's lives. At that moment, Matsui chose the field of education, and this was due to the transformative power of teaching, something she witnessed at Unicamp and in other environments.
The university graduate decided to start her own business through Alicerce Educação, a social impact company that works to rapidly develop basic education for people of all ages and in all social contexts, offering tutoring classes mainly in Portuguese and mathematics. Based on this experience, the entrepreneur identified ways to help people in vulnerable situations and, at the same time, meet the needs of the market.
“Doing for others what they did for me,” said Matsui about the main motivator that led her to change careers and undertake in the area of educational impact, following a path that led her to become CEO at Generation Brasil.
“I have been a scholarship student my entire life, since my school days, in the preparatory course for university entrance exams, at Unicamp. I also did an MBA with a scholarship. All of this was essential and transformative in my life,” he emphasized.
A Generation Brazil
Generation Brasil works with the purpose of promoting, quickly and through the training of people in situations of social vulnerability, social impact and socioeconomic mobility.
Access to the programs is completely free and, according to Unicamp's subsidiary, more than 3.500 students have already been served. Generation Brasil also estimates that 90% of its students are young people between 18 and 29 years of age, of which approximately 40% are women and 44% are black. According to the company's data, around 80% of the students who went through the program got a job within six months of graduating and around 70% obtained, through these jobs, enough income to be able to save and make some investments, such as moving to a better place to live or even buying their own home.
“The work carried out by Generation Brasil has a transformative social impact, as these are young people in situations of social vulnerability, without work or education, often in families of up to eight people. So, when these young people get a job, the family income doubles and this transforms the lives of everyone around them.”
Kátia Kishi, communications supervisor at Inova Unicamp, the area responsible for holding the UV Annual Meeting and the Unicamp Entrepreneur Award, highlighted the strengthening of the University's entrepreneurial ecosystem through the event, which also promotes intense entrepreneurial activity. networking between subsidiary companies.
“These meetings between entrepreneurs that we promote further qualify the ecosystem fostered by Inova, because, through these communication actions, we promote the culture of entrepreneurship and strengthen a network of entrepreneurs and Unicamp spin-off companies, which connect and can establish new partnerships on various fronts”, commented Kishi.
According to Matsui, one of the reasons for registering Generation Brasil as a spin-off company of Unicamp is to get closer to the entrepreneurial ecosystem promoted by Inova, in addition to reconnecting with the University. Another objective is to form partnerships with other spin-off companies of the University, working so that these ventures can be destinations for professionals trained by Generation Brasil.
“Generation Brasil operates in several cities, and Campinas is one of them. Since there is an entrepreneurial ecosystem of Unicamp spin-off companies, we have in mind the creation of a relationship so that these spin-off companies can recruit our graduates, in order to further increase the social impact, something that can be provided not only by Generation Brasil, but by this entire entrepreneurial ecosystem fostered by Inova Unicamp”, stated the award winner.
Article originally published on the Inova Unicamp website.
Read more:
19th Annual Unicamp Ventures Meeting showcases diversity of Unicamp spin-off companies
Unicamp Ventures announces new advisors
Waldemar Felippe takes over as president of Unicamp Ventures
