Gustavo Barra

Co-founder @ Solitus · Forward Deployed Engineer @ Conducco · Researcher @ FutureLab/UFMG

Founder
Researcher.

I don't just study AI. I deploy it.

Forward Deployed Engineer and partner at Conducco, an AI agents control plane for the operations and distribution layer of corporate benefits. Researcher at FutureLab/UFMG working on model optimization and SLM applications. Co-founder of Solitus.

Focus
AI · SLM · iOS
Now
Conducco · Solitus · FutureLab
Based
Belo Horizonte, BR
Featured · 01
Conducco logo

Forward Deployed Engineer & Partner · AI agents control plane for corporate benefits

Conducco

TypeScriptReactPythonAirflow

01About me

Researcher, founder, and builder.

10
Projects
3
Businesses
2
Finalizing Papers
Gustavo Barra

Gustavo Barra

Conducco · Solitus · FutureLab

ConduccoSolitusFutureLab

I'm Gustavo Barra Felizardo — a Computer Science student at UFMG and Undergraduate Researcher at FutureLab DCC/UFMG in partnership with Morada AI, elected Brazil's #1 AI startup by Top 100 Startups. I work with SLM and LLM optimization techniques such as QLoRA, PEFT, Knowledge Distillation, Fine-Tuning...

I'm a Forward Deployed Engineer and partner at Conducco, an AI agents control plane for the operations and distribution layer of corporate benefits. I'm also the Co-Founder of Solitus, a B2B2C events ecosystem, and shipped Membo to the App Store — with Tino, an AI finance app running fully on-device, on the way. I'm a national olympiad medalist (OBMEP, OBA, ONC) and did a high school exchange semester in Vancouver, Canada.

Journey

2023

Exchange Semester in Vancouver

High school exchange semester at Burnaby Mountain Secondary School in Vancouver, Canada. Sharpened English, broadened perspective, and came back ready to build.

2025

UFMG + FutureLab Research

Joined Computer Science at UFMG and one month later became Undergraduate Researcher at FutureLab, working on LLM optimization techniques and Lead classification for Morada AI — Brazil's #1 AI startup.

2026

Solitus, Membo & Tino

Co-founder of Solitus (B2B2C events platform), shipped Membo to the App Store and preparing Tino's launch (an AI finance app running 100% on-device), while co-authoring 2 papers on LLM optimization and a Lead Classification pipeline.

Now

Forward Deployed Engineer & Partner at Conducco

Joined Conducco as a partner — a VC-backed startup invested by Antler, Funses and the angel funds Anjos do Brasil and FEA Angels — to build the AI agents control plane for the operations and distribution layer of corporate benefits, working next to the operation and turning manual routine into orchestrated pipelines.

02Vision

Technology as a means, not an end.

I believe the world is shaped by people willing to take risks, which is why I like to get involved with ambitious projects that create deep impact in a niche.

Human neuroplasticity decreases over time, the window to build deep skills is shorter than it feels. That keeps me always in motion: exchange in Canada, one of Brazil's most demanding CS programs at UFMG, three businesses in parallel. Each one forced me to think in ways I couldn't before.

Build things that matter.— Gustavo Barra Felizardo

03Projects

Research, startups and engineering.

Here's what I've been building.

01 / 10

Conducco

Conducco logo

Forward Deployed Engineer & Partner · AI agents control plane for corporate benefits

VC-backed startup — invested by Antler, Funses and the angel funds Anjos do Brasil and FEA Angels. Control plane for AI agents across the operations and distribution layer of corporate benefits. I build AI-native and hands-on: I ship and deploy features to production, own the agent control layer — what each agent can run and how it is monitored — and carry the implementations end to end next to the operation itself, turning manual routines — beneficiary movements, eligibility exclusions, carrier layout exports — into orchestrated pipelines. TypeScript/Express REST API over PostgreSQL with TypeORM, a React admin SPA, and Airflow DAGs driving extraction and export.

TypeScriptReactPython
02 / 10

Solitus

Solitus logo

Co-Founding · Events Ecosystem Platform

B2B2C platform for the live events industry. Unifies ticketing, cashless payments, parking management, stock control, consuming-software and behavioral analytics into a single ecosystem spanning a producer app, ticket validation, and consumer-facing app.

ReactNestJSPython
03 / 10

Membo

Membo logo

Founder & iOS Engineer · Bill reminders that insist

Live on the App Store. A bill tracker built around the one thing that actually works: reminders that don't give up. Bills heat up visually as the due date approaches, and 'insufferable mode' nags on a decaying cadence through the day until you pay — designed around the iOS 64-pending-notification ceiling. It also writes the awkward 'you owe me' message with your Pix key and opens WhatsApp for you.

SwiftSwiftUISwiftData
04 / 10Coming soon

Tino

Tino logo

Founder & iOS Engineer · Finance with AI

iOS finance app where AI handles the tedious part of staying in control. The dashboard opens on the number that matters — what's left to spend this month. A CoreML classifier categorises transactions on its own, scanning an NF-e QR code or photographing a receipt splits the items automatically, and OFX/CSV import pulls in whole bank statements with dedupe. On top of that: goals with a deadline and a weekly amount, per-category caps that warn before the red, bill reminders, and four simulators — compound interest, the true cost of a cut, debt payoff and installment purchases. All the intelligence runs on the iPhone, so transactions never leave the device.

SwiftSwiftUICoreML
05 / 10

SLM from scratch

Personal Project · Small Language Model built from the ground up

End-to-end SLM implementation based on Dr. Raj Dandekar's (MIT PhD, ML) teachings. Covers the full pipeline: tokenization, input–target pair construction, model architecture design, pre-training setup and execution, and inference. Also explores the theory behind it: Backpropagation, activation functions (ReLU & GeLU), and the step-by-step reasoning behind each architectural decision.

PythonPyTorchNumpy
06 / 10

Synergy

Full-Stack Social Network in C++

Social network built from scratch in C++11 with SQLite3, using OOP principles and MVC architecture. Features real-time score ranking, bidirectional follow relationships, and gamification mechanics with robust exception handling.

C++11SQLite3OOP
07 / 10

Space Invaders

Space Invaders Game in C

Space Invaders game built from scratch in C, using ALLEGRO library. Features classic gameplay mechanics, enemy movement patterns, and power-up system.

CALLEGRO
08 / 10

XGBoost

FutureLab · Real Estate Lead Scoring

XGBoost model for real estate profile scoring using Target Encoding, Feature Engineering, and 5-fold Cross Validation. This project was for Morada AI, the model was part of a bigger pipeline of lead scoring and was used to predict the profile of real estate leads based on their messages, behavior and attributes.

PythonXGBoostScikit-learn
09 / 10

NeuralNetwork

From scratch · Neural network implementation

Neural network built from scratch with Pytorch for real estate lead profile scoring.

PythonPytorch
10 / 10

LLM Distillation Bibliometric Analysis

FutureLab · Research · Knowledge Distillation

Bibliometric analysis of 12,209 scientific publications on LLM and Knowledge Distillation, sourced from Scopus. Built co-occurrence networks in VOSviewer and plotted publication trends in Python — mapping where the research field is heading and what emerging terms are gaining traction.

PythonPandasMatplotlib

04Posts & Ideas

Writing about AI, code & entrepreneurship.

Perspectives from research, building business, and learning things the hard way — from fine-tuning LLMs to shipping iOS apps.

05Contact

Let's build something together.

Open to research collaborations, startup ideas, technical questions, or any conversation about AI, entrepreneurship, and technology.

gbarra2511@icloud.comEmail me directly

Belo Horizonte · Juiz de Fora, Brazil