Leadership · Creativity · Global
A bilingual AI-powered leadership, creativity and technology fellowship preparing Latin America's next generation for global impact.
Del talento latinoamericano al liderazgo global.
A bilingual AI-powered leadership, creativity and technology fellowship preparing Latin America's next generation for global impact.
Del talento latinoamericano al liderazgo global.
Visionarium is a foundation building an open bilingual ecosystem that develops the next generation of Latin American leaders in artificial intelligence, creativity, and emerging technology — with a flagship selective fellowship at the center and free access for every young person who wants to grow.
Founded in 2015 by Maria Clara Garcia as a Leadership and Creativity incubator in New York for high school and college students from Latin America, Visionarium now enters its formalization phase: structured as a foundation, expanded with a Miami headquarters, and re-launched with a native AI technology platform that brings personalized bilingual mentorship to every young person who joins — whether they become a selected Fellow or simply register as an open community member.
We combine four things that no existing program combines: (1) an open ecosystem free to any young person aged 16–22 across the Americas; (2) a selective Fellowship at the top of the funnel for 40 exceptional young leaders per cohort, modeled on the best startup accelerators; (3) a bilingual leadership, creativity, and soft-skills formation that prepares participants for the US and global arenas; and (4) a native AI mentor layer that gives every participant a 24/7 personal coach from day one — at ecosystem scale, not only at fellowship scale.
The open ecosystem launches in Fall 2026 with no enrollment cap. The first formalized Fellowship cohort launches in parallel from Miami — the natural gateway between Latin America and the United States — with 40 Fellows selected from across the region. Both are fully sponsor-funded and free to participants. In-kind technology is provided by Digit2ai, the platform company founded by Manuel Stagg behind the RinglyPro CRM ecosystem and multiple AI voice systems deployed at scale.
Latin America holds the largest pool of ambitious, underleveraged young talent in the Western Hemisphere. The US economy is starved for bilingual technology leadership. Artificial intelligence has collapsed the cost of personalized mentorship by an order of magnitude. No existing institution has stitched these three forces together. Visionarium is that institution.
Three structural forces are converging. Each one, alone, would justify a new institution. Together they demand it.
Latin America is home to more than 660 million people, with a median age of 31. Over 160 million are under 25. A disproportionate share of this cohort is ambitious, digitally fluent, and actively seeking pathways beyond their local markets — but they lack structured, credentialed bridges to US and global opportunities.
For the first time in human history, personalized mentorship — once available only to the children of the elite — can be delivered at scale. A well-designed AI mentor can give a high-potential 17-year-old in Cali, Colombia, the kind of daily feedback, practice, and encouragement that previously required a private tutor in Manhattan.
This is not a future trend. The technology exists today. What is missing is an institution that wraps it in a selective, credentialed, human-mentored program. Visionarium is that wrapper.
US technology companies are increasingly desperate for bilingual English/Spanish leadership talent — not just engineers, but product managers, founders, operators. Meanwhile, LATAM's best young minds overwhelmingly build in Spanish, for local markets, often without a credible bridge to Silicon Valley, Miami, New York, or Austin. Visionarium builds that bridge, cohort by cohort.
The scarcest resource in the US technology economy over the next decade will not be capital or compute. It will be bilingual leaders who can operate fluently across the Americas. El recurso mas escaso de la economia tecnologica estadounidense en la proxima decada no sera el capital ni el computo. Sera el liderazgo bilingue capaz de operar con fluidez en las Americas.
Visionarium Thesis StatementBy 2035, Visionarium will have developed 10,000 bilingual technology and leadership fellows across the Americas — a recognizable alumni network whose graduates hold leadership roles in the companies, institutions, and ventures shaping the bilingual future.
To identify, develop, and launch the next generation of Latin American leaders in artificial intelligence and emerging technology — through a selective, bilingual, AI-native fellowship that combines technology mastery, leadership formation, and direct access to global opportunities.
The ecosystem is open to every ambitious young person. The Fellowship is selective because transformation compounds with depth. Scale and excellence are not trade-offs — they are tiers of the same system.
Nobody remembers the lecture. Everybody remembers the thing they built. Every fellow ships real work, not homework.
English and Spanish are equal operating languages. Not translated content. Not English with Spanish support. Truly bilingual by design.
We use AI to make human mentorship more valuable, not to replace it. Every fellow has a personal coach. Every mentor has a force multiplier.
We measure placements, startups, scholarships, and transformations — not hours delivered or content produced.
The fellowship ends after nine months. The network lasts a lifetime. The graduates are the product and the proof.
A serious foundation begins by telling the truth about who is already working on the problem. Visionarium's wedge is not that no one has tried. It is that no one has combined our three elements.
| Organization | Focus | What's Missing vs. Visionarium |
|---|---|---|
| The Knowledge Society (TKS) | Emerging tech for teens, North America | English only. Not LATAM-focused. No bilingual operating layer. |
| Praxis | Alternative-to-college apprenticeship, 18-22 | No LATAM footprint. No AI mentor layer. English-dominant. |
| Kairos Society | Global young-entrepreneur network, 18-25 | Network over development. Episodic summits, not sustained formation. |
| Laboratoria | Women in tech, LATAM bootcamp model | Narrow gender focus. No soft-skills or leadership layer. No AI mentor. |
| Platzi | Spanish-language tech education, LATAM | Content platform, not ecosystem. No mentorship. No cohort model. |
| Endeavor | Scale-up entrepreneur support, LATAM strong | For existing founders, not youth formation. |
| Interact / Z Fellows / Neo | Selective US fellowships for young technologists | US-centric. No LATAM pipeline. No bilingual infrastructure. |
| Thiel Fellowship | $100k to skip college, under 22 | Capital grants only. No program, no community-of-cohort, no LATAM. |
No existing organization combines all four of the following simultaneously:
Visionarium is the first foundation built specifically to convert Latin America's highest-potential youth into the bilingual technology leaders the US and global economies are starved for — using AI to make the formation process 10x more intimate and 10x more scalable than any predecessor.
Visionarium is an open ecosystem with a flagship Fellowship at its center. Every young person can enter. The top of each cohort graduates into the most selective tier. The model scales access without diluting excellence.
The open tier gives Visionarium massive reach and a continuously refreshing pipeline. The selective Fellowship gives Visionarium proof-of-impact stories that fund the entire system. Sponsors get both: scale ("we reached 25,000 young people this year") and depth ("and we transformed these 40 into global leaders"). The AI mentor layer is what makes open-tier scale economically possible — the same Lina system serves 40 Fellows and 25,000 Open Community members without 625x the human staff.
AI fluency, automation, modern development, product thinking, digital leverage. Fellows build and ship real systems, not tutorials.
Communication, public speaking, executive presence, etiquette, emotional intelligence, negotiation, cross-cultural fluency.
Capstone project. Sponsor-briefed challenges. Demo Day with investors and executives. A portfolio that opens doors.
| Day | Activity | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Technology Lab | Virtual, 90 min, hands-on AI/building |
| Wednesday | Leadership Forum | Virtual, 60 min, expert speaker + Q&A |
| Friday | 1:1 Human Mentor | Virtual, 30 min, assigned mentor |
| Daily | Lina Mentor (AI Coach) | Async, bilingual, voice + chat, unlimited |
| Monthly | Cohort Showcase | Virtual, fellows present work in progress |
| Quarterly | Miami Immersion | In-person, 3-4 days, all fellows together |
Every fellow ships a capstone project in months 7-9: a real AI-powered tool, a startup prototype, an open-source contribution, or a sponsor-briefed solution. Capstones are presented at Demo Day in front of sponsors, executives, investors, and press. The best capstones receive seed funding, internship offers, or direct hiring.
Visionarium's platform is built on a multi-tenant architecture that serves the foundation today and scales to an institution tomorrow. Eight layers, one system, two modes of operation.
95% of the platform is shared between foundation and institution modes. Only the money layer, admissions flow, and reporting surface change. This means the same technology stack that launches the free Visionarium Fellowship in 2026 can power a tuition-based or government-funded Visionarium Institute in 2030 without a rebuild.
Lina is the difference between Visionarium and every other youth program in the world. She is not a feature. She is a founding team member.
Lina is Visionarium's native AI mentor — a voice-and-chat bilingual coach assigned to every fellow from the moment they enroll. She is built on Digit2ai's production voice AI platform, the same infrastructure behind the RinglyPro ecosystem's voice agents serving thousands of users daily.
Lina is not a generic assistant. She is purpose-built as a Visionarium mentor: trained on Visionarium curriculum, tuned to the three pillars, aware of each fellow's goals and progress, and held to a mentorship persona designed by Lala and the program staff.
Every fellow at Visionarium has something most Ivy League undergraduates do not: a dedicated, bilingual, always-available mentor who knows their goals, their pace, and their name. Cada becario de Visionarium tiene algo que la mayoria de los estudiantes de la Ivy League no tiene: un mentor bilingue, dedicado y siempre disponible que conoce sus metas, su ritmo y su nombre.
Visionarium Design PrincipleAny foundation can hire a curriculum designer and rent Zoom. Only a foundation whose technology sponsor is a production-grade AI company can offer a real bilingual AI mentor to every fellow from day one — with voice, with memory, with integration into the program's operational data. Visionarium does not pay for this capability on a per-seat SaaS basis. We own it, through Digit2ai, in-kind, valued as a founding in-kind contribution.
Foundations fail when they measure activity instead of outcomes. Visionarium commits, from day one, to a public, quantitative impact framework that sponsors can audit.
| Metric | Definition | Cohort 1 Target |
|---|---|---|
| Completion Rate | % of accepted fellows who complete the 9-month program | ≥ 85% |
| Internship Placement | Fellows placed in paid internships during or within 6 months of program | ≥ 60% |
| Capstone Shipped | Fellows who ship and present a working capstone at Demo Day | 100% |
| Bilingual Proficiency | Fellows demonstrating professional fluency in both English and Spanish at exit | ≥ 90% |
| AI Fluency Certification | Fellows completing validated AI/technology skill certifications | ≥ 80% |
| Sponsor Engagement | Fellows engaged in at least one sponsor-briefed project or interview | 100% |
| Seed Funding | Fellows whose capstones receive follow-on seed or grant funding | ≥ 3 fellows |
| NPS Score | Net Promoter Score from fellows at program exit | ≥ 70 |
A public Impact Report is published at the end of each cohort cycle, including anonymized fellow outcomes, sponsor attribution, financial transparency, and raw data downloads. Every sponsor receives a customized impact dossier showing their specific contribution and the fellows and outcomes their dollars supported.
Visionarium commits to tracking every fellow's career progress for ten years post-program, anonymized and aggregate-reported. This is the true measure: not what fellows achieve during the fellowship, but what they achieve with it.
School Director and Teacher, Grades K–12. Founder of Visionarium (2015), a Leadership and Creativity incubator in New York for high school and college students from Latin America — the foundational program this white paper formalizes and scales.
"Committed to fostering student's self-respect, respect for others, and love of learning."
Manuel Stagg is the founder and CEO of Digit2ai, a production artificial intelligence platform company headquartered in Tampa, Florida. Digit2ai builds and operates multi-tenant AI systems across voice, CRM, education, healthcare, logistics, and industrial analytics — serving thousands of users daily across the Americas.
As Founding Technology Sponsor, Digit2ai contributes Visionarium's entire technical infrastructure in-kind — including the Lina AI mentor layer, the fellow portal, the admissions platform, the sponsor dashboard, and ongoing platform engineering. This contribution frees every sponsor dollar for direct fellow impact.
Visionarium will operate as a US 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit foundation, with eventual Fundación equivalents established in priority LATAM jurisdictions to enable direct local fundraising and tax-deductible giving.
Visionarium is fully sponsor-funded. Fellows pay nothing. Sponsors fund cohorts, programs, and named fellowships — and in return receive brand presence, talent pipeline access, impact attribution, and ESG/CSR reporting.
| Tier | Contribution | What You Receive |
|---|---|---|
| Founding Sponsor | $250,000+ / year | Board observer seat, named fellowship(s), prominent recognition across all materials, custom impact dossier, first-access talent pipeline, Demo Day speaking slot |
| Lead Sponsor | $100,000+ / year | Named cohort track or pillar, logo on all program materials, custom impact dossier, sponsor-briefed capstone challenge, Demo Day presence |
| Program Sponsor | $25,000+ / year | Logo recognition, aggregate impact report, mentor slot invitations, talent pipeline access |
| Supporter | $10,000+ / year | Name recognition, aggregate impact report, mentor slot invitations |
| In-Kind Partner | Services, technology, mentors, travel, workspace | Tier equivalent based on valued contribution; same recognition ladder |
A sponsor may fully underwrite a named fellow for $25,000, covering a single fellow's full program, travel, stipends, and portion of shared infrastructure. Named fellows retain the sponsor's connection for program lifetime and alumni tracking. For corporate sponsors, this is the most emotionally resonant and publicly attributable form of contribution.
Multi-generational wealth with a mission to elevate the next generation of Latin leadership. Natural Visionarium patrons.
Banks, telecoms, and energy/consumer-goods groups with ESG mandates and bilingual talent needs.
Fortune 500s with significant Hispanic customer bases and formal CSR programs targeting LATAM/Hispanic communities.
Knight Foundation, IDB Lab, Inter-American Foundation, and aligned grant-makers focused on Americas youth and economic mobility.
Sponsors are not donating — they are investing in outcomes at both scale and depth:
The 2035 vision depends entirely on what happens in the next eighteen months. Below is the quarterly execution plan, with specific commitments at the 3, 6, 12, and 18-month marks from today.
Eighteen months is the window in which Visionarium must prove three things: that Fellows transform measurably, that sponsors see clear ROI on their contributions, and that the model is ready to scale. Everything in the 2035 vision depends on nailing these four milestones. Sponsors who join in this window fund the proof itself — and earn the permanent founding association that follows.
A decade of deliberate expansion, from 40 fellows in Miami to 10,000 alumni across the Americas.
Every foundation is built by its founding sponsors. The partners who join Visionarium in its formalization year will be permanently recognized as the institution's original backers — with name attribution across all future cohorts, impact reports, and public communications.
We are actively engaged in conversations with organizations that match one of four profiles:
Founding Sponsor status is available only during the formalization year. After Cohort 1 completes in May 2027, all subsequent sponsors join at the standard Lead, Program, or Supporter tiers. The organizations that commit between now and October 2026 — and only those — become part of Visionarium's founding story forever.
Visionarium will succeed or fail based on who joins in its founding year. We are actively seeking three kinds of partners.
We seek three to five founding-tier sponsors to underwrite Cohort 1. If you represent a family foundation, a corporate CSR program, or an institutional funder aligned with bilingual youth leadership development, we invite a conversation.
We seek founding mentors across AI, product, leadership, and entrepreneurship — ideally with bilingual fluency and lived experience bridging LATAM and the US. Mentors commit to approximately two hours per month during the program year.
Applications for Cohort 1 open in Q3 2026. We invite high-potential young people ages 16-22 from across Latin America and Hispanic communities in the United States. If you know a young person who belongs in the first class, nominate them.
To engage as a sponsor, mentor, partner, or prospective fellow, write to us at the contact channels established at launch. The founding year is the most important year in the organization's history. The partners who join now will be remembered for a generation.