Gastón Taratuta

In June 2022, an entrepreneur born in Núñez took the stage at Monaco’s Salle des Étoiles and received the EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year award, a prize often described as the world championship for entrepreneurs. He competed against fifty national winners from forty-one jurisdictions and became only the second South American to win it in twenty-two editions.

Gastón Taratuta had founded his company seventeen years earlier in Miami with US$5,000 and a simple intuition: the major internet platforms would concentrate on the forty countries that generate most of the world’s GDP, and someone would have to take care of the other 140. That someone became Aleph, which now operates in more than 130 markets and generates US$2 billion in annual revenue.

From the movie theaters of Núñez to the offices of Miami

There is a story Taratuta often tells when asked about his childhood. At ten, he would go to the movies with his father and, instead of watching the screen, count the seats in the theater. It is an anecdote that fits a man who eventually built a career around measuring audiences across 130 countries.

His father made shoes. Taratuta grew up in Núñez, attended Sholem Aleijem for high school and studied marketing before making the decision that would shape everything that followed: moving to the United States. He arrived in Miami with US$300. He found a job while continuing his studies, earned a master’s degree in International Marketing from Florida International University and later attended graduate programs at Stanford. By around 2000, he was already working in digital advertising, a category that at the time accounted for less than 1% of corporate marketing budgets.

He was working for UOL when the turning point came. Taratuta has told two versions of that moment, and both are true. The corporate version is that he was offered the opportunity to start his own firm and commercially represent the company. The version he gave to Perfil Córdoba is sharper: a boss told him they no longer needed him and that his future was entrepreneurship. Either way, IMS was born in 2005 with US$5,000 in starting capital.

The gap he found in the digital business map

The thinking behind Aleph fits into a single paragraph. Around forty countries account for the overwhelming majority of global GDP. The other 140 share a much smaller portion and therefore tend to fall outside the commercial focus of large Silicon Valley platforms, which prefer to place teams and infrastructure where returns are immediate. Taratuta offered to cover that empty territory.

The model is to open a local office, sell the platform’s advertising inventory, educate advertisers who do not yet understand the product and handle the unpleasant part of the business: collections, taxes, credit risk, currency restrictions and converting local currencies into dollars. Then the money goes wherever the platform wants it sent. Twitter was the first major partner in Latin America; Spotify, Waze, LinkedIn and Snapchat followed. Netflix entered Argentina in 2011 through his company, when streaming was still an exotic category.

Buying competitors until no one was left

Between 2015 and 2024, Taratuta did something very few Latin American entrepreneurs have managed: he turned a regional business into a global consolidator. During that period, he sold his company to Sony for US$100 million and, instead of retiring, went shopping.

Httpool, Wise.Blue, Social Snack, Ad Dynamo and Connect Ads were gradually added to the holding company, which adopted Aleph as its corporate brand in 2021. The acquisitions opened Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In 2024, Aleph completed three deals worth around US$80 million: Entravision Global Partners —its main regional competitor, which added two hundred people—, Asia-based MediaDonuts and Argentine fintech Local Payments, operating in sixteen countries.

That last acquisition offers a clue to where the company is headed. Aleph had already been processing corporate payments for two decades. With its own payment service provider, it can charge an end user directly for a streaming subscription or pay a content creator in local currency. Selling the advertising and collecting the payment generated by that consumption, all within the same structure.

The numbers grew alongside the business. Revenue was around US$1.2 billion in 2021. By October 2022, Forbes Argentina reported that the company operated in 93 countries, had more than 15,000 clients and 1,500 employees, and was valued at more than US$2.4 billion, backed by investments from CVC Capital, Mercado Libre, Sony, Twitter and Snap. Two years later, its figures showed US$2 billion in revenue, 25,000 advertisers, more than fifty platforms as clients and eighty-nine offices of its own.

Monaco, June 2022

The EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year award has been presented for more than two decades and works much like a world championship for entrepreneurs: each country nominates its national winner, and an international jury chooses a single global winner. At Monaco’s Salle des Étoiles, Taratuta prevailed over more than 350 participants and fifty national winners from forty-one jurisdictions. He was only the second South American to win the award in twenty-two editions.

The jury, chaired by AMS founder Rosaleen Blair, highlighted his role in opening markets that had previously been inaccessible to entrepreneurs in emerging countries. That same night, EY presented Stella McCartney with its sustainability award, while Bono took the stage to speak about leadership.

When accepting the prize, Taratuta did something that says quite a bit about his public style: he devoted much of his speech to his team and mentioned Ignacio Vidaguren, his partner in running the holding company. Days later, back in Miami, he said he had been nervous because he wanted to bring the title home to Argentina, comparing the feeling to the final minutes of a World Cup final.

Education as strategy, not philanthropy

Digital Ad Expert is Aleph’s free training program in digital marketing and advertising. The numbers grew quickly: by the end of 2024, around 290,000 people in 130 countries had received training through short and longer courses offered in four languages; roughly 28,000 had completed the three-month program.

The logic behind it is not purely altruistic, and Taratuta says so openly. Moving global consumption from offline to online requires millions of people who know how to operate digital tools, and that workforce does not yet exist. Training people in six to eighteen months instead of through a six-year university degree is both an act of inclusion and an investment in the future demand of Aleph’s own business. In November 2024, Universidad Siglo 21 recognized him as Empresario Líder in Córdoba, and Taratuta used the occasion to argue that distance education in Argentina fills a space the public system does not currently reach.

For Argentina, his formula has a name: “digital soy.” The idea is to train people who can export digital services to the world, reproducing in technology what agriculture achieved with commodities.

Formula 1 as a global showcase

Taratuta’s relationship with sports went from emotional to strategic. A declared Racing supporter, he placed Digital Ad Expert as the main shirt sponsor of Argentina’s national team until mid-2024. But the bigger move came in March 2025, when Aleph announced a partnership with Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber, joining Globant and Mercado Libre in the growing Argentine presence in Formula 1.

In January 2026, Aleph renewed and expanded that position, becoming an official partner of Audi Revolut F1 Team as the German automaker entered the grid. The choice follows the company’s own logic. Few platforms offer global reach and market-by-market local activation at the same time, which is exactly the territory where Aleph operates. Taratuta sums it up with a phrase he often uses in presentations: a “glo-cal” approach.

A businessman who talks politics without being a politician

As an Argentine who left the country nearly three decades ago, Taratuta still follows its politics closely. He described Javier Milei as “an entrepreneur who became President” and said he does not regard him as a politician: rather, as someone with technical training in a specific field who started from zero and, facing century-old political structures, reached the Casa Rosada.

His support, however, comes with reservations. Taratuta worries that the public discussion has become exhausted by macroeconomic adjustment while almost nobody talks about how to grow the economy, an omission he attributes both to the government and to the private sector. His concrete proposal for Argentine businesses is that companies share a percentage of their profits with employees, arguing that the resulting productivity gains more than compensate for the cost. When someone told him the idea sounded socialist, he replied that it was pure capitalism and cited Citibank in Peru as an example. He raised the idea with Milei in Miami; the President’s response was that it would not be enough.

What his story says about leadership

Taratuta’s career challenges some comfortable assumptions about Latin American entrepreneurship. There was no garage and no brilliant prototype, but rather a clear reading of a market imbalance followed by twenty years of execution around that insight. Nor was there much attachment to geography: from Miami he built a company that is Argentine in identity and global in structure, arguing explicitly that remaining tied to an inflationary economy would have destroyed it.

His advice to entrepreneurs follows the same principle. If the service is good and the value proposition is unique, he says, it makes sense to think beyond national borders, build a mix of currencies and only then move into more stable markets. In an ecosystem where recognition from peers can matter as much as the numbers, Marcos Galperín and Guibert Englebienne publicly congratulated him after his award in Monaco. Taratuta replied that the gesture meant as much to him as the trophy.