I'm Ricardo Bonfocchi Ventura. Over eighteen years of engineering, product, and leadership, I've been CTO in Portugal and Japan, co-founded a Danish software company, and led teams in five countries.
I started my career as a Lead Developer at a new-media agency in Lisbon in 2008, building everything from interactive campaign microsites to large e-commerce platforms for clients ranging from founder-led startups to major corporations. Since then, I've worked across startups, scale-ups and publicly listed companies, combining hands-on engineering with technology and product leadership. I still enjoy helping founders turn early ideas into real products. I’ve refined product concepts, shaped product strategy, business models and go-to-market plans, designed architectures and software platforms, and led cross-functional teams from concept through delivery and launch, sometimes all within the same quarter.
My entrepreneurial path led me to co-found Crably, a Denmark-based multi-tenant low-code CMS platform, where I built the product from the ground up and grew its customer base across more than ten countries. I then relocated to Tokyo with Hivelocity, where I worked across service design, CRM deployment automation and APIs, while managing projects involving teams in Japan and Myanmar. That combination of technical execution and cross-functional leadership carried into my role as CTO of Colmena, where I architected an HR and benefits platform from scratch and stayed through its eventual acquisition by Coverflex.
At Capdesk, I returned to zero-to-one product development, helping build a new venture capital platform module on Rails. I left shortly before Capdesk's acquisition by Carta and relocated to Tokyo later that same year to become CTO of Heartcore, bringing together these experiences in a broader leadership role. I recruited and led an engineering team, chose Rust for a new enterprise product where performance and memory safety were critical, managed Gartner analyst relations, and advised the CEO on M&A.
Most recently, I returned to full-time hands-on engineering at Publitas, a Netherlands-based company, benchmarking Rails, JavaScript and Rust APIs while driving engineering-wide improvements in testing and build reliability. Across these roles, I've done my best work when the product question and the technical answer are in the same hands. Whether I'm shaping a product's direction, leading the team that builds it, or deep in the code, I thrive on owning the full journey, from the first conversation about the challenge to launch and beyond, as the product grows.
Close enough to strategy to ask why, close enough to the stack to ship the answer.
Rust performance work and Gartner briefings, same week.
Architecture, GTM, and M&A advisory.
I move between the two without a handoff, which tends to save everyone a meeting.
Strategy, GTM, and business models, from zero to one.
Strategy, roadmap, and the numbers behind them.
Set roadmap and monetization strategy at Heartcore, and handled Gartner relations and M&A strategy there.
Recruiting, mentoring, and leading across borders.
Two relocations. Five countries led remotely.
Recruited and led engineering teams in Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands, the US, and Myanmar, working across cultures and time zones.
From an empty repo to a system a team can trust.
Architecture first, then the roadmap.
Built Colmena and Crably from the ground up, chose Rust at Heartcore for performance and memory safety, and remain hands-on with code, from API benchmarking to eliminating performance bottlenecks.
Machine learning applied to real product and business problems.
Where AI actually changes the roadmap.
I bring machine learning, deep learning, and emerging technologies into product development and business models, not as a buzzword but as a lever.
From freelance developer to CTO twice over — every role, in order.
Three registers, used together more often than separately.