About the newsletter
Startups Mexico — from Mexico and beyond.
Startups Mexico is an independent, opinion-led newsletter about technology, startups, capital, founders, and power shifts viewed from Mexico City.
The newsletter looks at the startup world through a Mexico City lens, but not only at Mexico. It follows what is happening across Mexico, Latin America, the United States, Europe, and beyond, with a focus on how global technology shifts show up in this market and why Mexico increasingly matters in the next chapter of innovation.
Startups Mexico is written by Sahra-Josephine Hjorth, a Danish AI founder and operator based between Mexico City and Copenhagen. She has lived and worked across several countries and considers herself a global person, but writes about Mexico with the awareness that she is still, in many ways, an outsider looking in.
The goal is to make the startup and technology sector more accessible. Not only for founders, investors, and executives, but also for normal people who want to understand what is happening, why it matters, who is building the future, and how technology changes money, work, culture, opportunity, and power.
Startups Mexico goes beyond announcements. It tracks the deeper signals: what is being built, who is funding it, which markets are moving, how AI is changing business, and what Mexico can teach the rest of the world about creativity, resilience, ambition, and execution.
It covers AI, startups, venture capital, founder stories, creator economy, business transformation, media, education, and the power shifts connecting Latin America, North America, and Europe. It is a founder-led view of the ecosystem: independent, opinionated, practical, and written for readers who want to understand what is actually happening.
Mexico City · Copenhagen
Bio
Sahra-Josephine Hjorth
Sahra-Josephine Hjorth is a Danish founder, AI operator, investor, human rights activist, and advisor based between Mexico City and Copenhagen. Her work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, business transformation, media, education, democracy, women's economic power, and culture.
She is the co-founder of CanopyLAB, Pavoreal.ai, and Ganax, an Expert in AI & Purpose at Singularity University, and an Obama Foundation Leader. Across these roles, she builds companies, advises leaders, designs AI systems, and studies how technology changes access, visibility, money, influence, and power.
Sahra-Josephine has worked through several major shifts in artificial intelligence, from machine learning and NLP to generative AI and now agentic systems. That long view shapes how she thinks about technology: not as hype cycles, but as structural change. AI changes how companies operate, how people learn, how content is created, how decisions are made, and how power moves.
Her perspective is shaped by more than a decade of building technology companies and working across Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Asia. She has built with teams and partners in Denmark, the United States, Mexico, and Vietnam, and has lived in Australia, Russia, the United States, and now Mexico. That international experience gives her a practical understanding of how technology lands differently depending on culture, infrastructure, capital, regulation, and trust.
Based between Mexico City and Copenhagen, she writes about the companies, people, capital, and ideas shaping Mexico's startup and technology ecosystem, with a wider lens on Latin America and the world.
Mexico has become central to Sahra-Josephine's work because it combines urgency, creativity, ambition, and contradiction in a way few markets do. It is a country where talent often moves faster than infrastructure, where founders are forced to be commercially sharp, and where technology can have an immediate impact on business, education, media, commerce, and opportunity. For her, Mexico is not an emerging market footnote. It is one of the most interesting places to understand what the next phase of AI, entrepreneurship, and transformation will actually look like.
CanopyLAB
CanopyLAB is a venture-backed AI learning company operating from the United States and backed by Sparkmind.vc. The company builds AI-powered learning technology used by organizations, educators, and learners in more than 90 countries.
Sahra-Josephine co-founded CanopyLAB and has led work across AI, product development, learning design, international growth, and strategic partnerships. At CanopyLAB, she helped build one of the early AI synthetic content generation engines for digital learning, supporting automated course creation, tagging, assessments, and adaptive learning flows.
CanopyLAB is also where her AI work became deeply practical. It was not about abstract technology. It was about building systems that produce outputs, evaluate quality, adapt to users, and work in real learning environments across countries, languages, and institutions.
Pavoreal.ai
Pavoreal.ai is an agentic AI boutique agency helping companies move from AI hype to operational reality. The agency designs AI agents, workflows, automation systems, and transformation strategies for companies that want AI to become part of how they actually work.
Sahra-Josephine co-founded Pavoreal.ai and works across client strategy, AI use-case design, agentic workflows, product thinking, executive advisory, and market positioning. Her role is to help companies identify where AI can create real business value, where human judgment still matters, and where the noise needs to be cut.
Pavoreal is built around the idea that the next phase of AI is not just chatbots. It is agents, workflows, decisions, and systems that change the operating model of a company. The work sits close to leadership, operations, data, and transformation: where AI either becomes useful, or stays stuck as a demo.
Ganax
Ganax is an AI-powered influencer marketing and creator economy platform co-founded by Sahra-Josephine Hjorth and Mexican entrepreneur Rodrigo Herrera Aspra. Built in Mexico, Ganax connects brands with nano and micro influencers and uses semantic models, AI approval flows, data systems, and structured campaign intelligence to make influencer marketing more transparent, measurable, and scalable.
Ganax was built around a simple but important idea: put more money in the hands of influencers, while giving brands more data, structure, and transparency. For influencers, the platform creates access to paid campaign opportunities, education, and clearer feedback on how to improve. For brands, it creates better matching, stronger briefing, more transparent campaign workflows, and clearer insight into content quality, performance, and brand alignment.
Sahra-Josephine worked across Ganax's product strategy, AI architecture, semantic models, campaign workflows, influencer education, and AI approval systems. Her work focused on how AI can classify, match, evaluate, and improve content at scale, including brand alignment, campaign performance, content quality, compliance, and structured feedback.
Ganax gives her a close view of Mexico's creator economy, consumer brands, youth culture, digital influence, and how AI is reshaping the relationship between brands and creators. It also reflects a broader belief in women's economic power and access: that digital platforms should not only optimize for brands, but also create real earning opportunities for the people producing the work.
Singularity University
Singularity University works with executives, founders, companies, and institutions on exponential technologies, innovation, leadership, and the future of business.
Sahra-Josephine is an Expert in AI & Purpose at Singularity University. She lectures and advises leaders on the societal, strategic, and human implications of artificial intelligence and converging technologies. Her current role is broader than her earlier work in the future of learning: it focuses on AI transformation, responsible innovation, systems change, and the relationship between technology, power, and human progress.
For years, Sahra-Josephine taught with Singularity University at the iconic NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. The experience was not only classroom-based. It involved taking students, executives, and leaders across the wider San Francisco Bay Area to see where ideas that now shape the world were first formed, tested, funded, and scaled.
That work shaped her view of innovation as something physical, cultural, and social, not just technical. New ideas do not appear fully formed. They are hatched in labs, campuses, garages, accelerators, research centers, investor rooms, and strange conversations between people who see the world before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
Her work at Singularity connects company-building with larger questions: how leaders adapt to technological change, how organizations make sense of AI, and how exponential technologies reshape business, labor, education, governance, and society.
Obama Foundation
The Obama Foundation supports leaders working on democracy, civic innovation, social impact, and public leadership around the world.
Sahra-Josephine is an Obama Foundation Leader and part of a global network of leaders focused on democracy, rights, innovation, and systems change. This work informs her interest in how technology affects power, access, education, media, women's economic agency, and democratic life.
For Sahra-Josephine, AI is not just a business tool. It is also a question of who gets represented, who gets excluded, who gets paid, who gets visibility, and who gets to build the future.