Alessio Alionço

Founder & CEO Pipefy

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Alessio Alionço is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pipefy, a low-code business process and workflow automation platform he founded in Brazil in 2015 and now runs from San Francisco. The company exists because of a specific frustration he identified in process management software: the incumbent tools were expensive, rigid, and controlled by IT, which meant the business teams who actually ran the processes had no ability to change them. Pipefy’s answer was to put workflow construction in the hands of finance, HR, procurement and customer service teams directly, without requiring engineering time. The platform is now used by organizations in more than 100 countries, including IBM, Volvo and Itaú, and the company raised a $75 million Series C led by the SoftBank Latin America Fund in 2021. Alionço is a repeat founder — he started and sold a Brazilian e-commerce marketplace while still an undergraduate — and one of the more visible figures in the wave of Brazilian enterprise software companies that scaled internationally in the late 2010s.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of Pipefy, founded in Brazil in 2015, now headquartered in San Francisco.
• Grew the platform to serve organizations in more than 100 countries, with customers including IBM, Volvo and Itaú.
• Raised a $75 million Series C in October 2021 led by the SoftBank Latin America Fund, taking total funding to roughly $138.7 million.
• Founded Acessozero, a Brazilian local e-commerce marketplace, at age 21 while still at university; it was later acquired by Apontador.
• Chief Executive Officer of Go4 Consultoria, a mergers and acquisitions consulting firm, before starting Pipefy.
• Holds a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and IPMA project management certification, and completed Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management programme.

Professional Journey

Alionço started early. At 21, while still an undergraduate studying business administration at the Universidade Federal do Paraná, he founded Acessozero, a local e-commerce marketplace in Brazil, and led its product development. The company was subsequently acquired by Apontador, one of the largest local search businesses in Brazil, giving him an exit before he had established a conventional career.

He moved next into advisory work, serving as Chief Executive Officer of Go4 Consultoria, a mergers and acquisitions and business consulting firm. That period gave him sustained exposure to how mid-sized and large companies actually run their internal operations, and to the gap between how processes are documented and how they are executed. Alongside this he accumulated the process-discipline credentials — a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and IPMA project management certification — that inform Pipefy’s product thinking.

He founded Pipefy in 2015. The thesis was that business process management software had been built for a different era: expensive to license, rigid to configure, and dependent on IT for every change, which left the operational teams who owned the processes unable to improve them. Pipefy’s low-code approach gave those teams the ability to build and modify workflows themselves. The product found particular traction in shared-services functions — procurement, finance, HR onboarding, customer onboarding — where process volume is high and change is constant.

The company scaled from Brazil into an international business, eventually relocating its headquarters to San Francisco while retaining substantial Brazilian operations. In October 2021 it closed a $75 million Series C led by the SoftBank Latin America Fund, with $50 million coming from SoftBank alone and participation from Steadfast Capital Management, Insight Partners and Redpoint eventures, bringing total funding to roughly $138.7 million. Ananth Avva joined as President and Chief Operating Officer around that period, giving Alionço an operating partner for the US expansion. He has since become a regular commentator in technology and insurance trade press on process automation and the application of artificial intelligence to enterprise workflow.

Education

Universidade Federal do Paraná

Bachelor of Business Administration, Business Administration

Harvard Business School

Owner/President Management (OPM) Program