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"Usually you don't gain access to capital in early stages, like venture capital or angel investors," says Tatiana Moreira (Dentistry ‘25). "So you have to really push your startup with all the resources that you have, and that helps you to really be creative."

She's describing Paraguay, where she grew up, but she could be describing the first year of almost any company. That's the thing about building somewhere without much scaffolding. It teaches you a set of habits that turn out to be exactly the habits an early-stage founder needs.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, we're featuring three NYU founders who learned those habits before they ever called themselves entrepreneurs.

The dentist who built the tool she needed

Tatiana came to NYU Dentistry from Paraguay for the postdoctoral program in aesthetic dentistry. Gem Dental Design, the company she started, is an online platform that helps clinicians use AI to segment and plan their surgical procedures. She is, in other words, her own customer, which is the shortest possible distance between a problem and the person solving it.

"Growing up in Latin America helped me a lot to shape who I am today," she says. "Because of the lack of resources, sometimes you have to be very creative to start something."

She came up through the Leslie eLab, and she went through most of what it offers: NYU Female Founders, the Startup Bootcamp, Leslie Founders. What she got out of it was less about funding than about method. "It really helped me to connect with people from different industries, learn everything I know about AI and develop different tools, understand how to read our customers, how to do interviews, how to develop this product, and how to narrow our project to really be something that could expand and grow."

"One of the best parts about being at NYU was having this extra bonus track of the Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute," she says. "I think that was an amazing part of my journey at NYU."

Built from zero

Marcelo Noriega (Tandon ‘27) came to NYU Tandon from Peru for the Master's in Management of Technology, and he built Instant Care from zero. Not just the product. The business model and the operations too, which is resourcefulness of exactly the kind Tatiana describes, applied to a company instead of a clinic.

Instant Care is a health tech platform that connects families with trusted healthcare professionals. "We are an AI software that automates how healthcare providers get in touch with patients," he says, "and we also improve the experience during and post session."

Asked what he values most as a Leslie founder, he doesn't name a resource or a check. He names his coach. "What I value the most are the mentorships, especially with my coach, Rebecca," he says. "She has been really helpful during the whole process since I started the bootcamp, and also being part of a community of entrepreneurs that wants to create a huge impact."

On where the drive comes from, he's direct: "Growing up in Latin America, and specifically in Peru, with so many challenges, it gives you the willingness to create impactful solutions."

Building for the people still there

Building for the people 

Jamie Stuart's (Stern ‘27) version started on a much smaller scale. "Growing up in Bogotá, I got to see firsthand how underdeveloped ideas came to life," he says. "That is family ventures, selling stuff at school, all these small ideas."

Then he got to New York and saw what the same ambition looks like with money and structure behind it. "It's growing a lot in the United States, and I've been seeing how well capitalized and well managed growing startups are here," he says.

Nodi, the company he started as founding engineer with two more co-founders while majoring in computer science and math, is his answer to that gap. It's an AI-native hiring platform that gives companies a full recruiting stack in one place, run by a proactive AI teammate, while candidates get an AI career agent that finds them roles and coaches them through every step. Unlike Tatiana and Marcelo, Jamie isn't building for a problem he currently has. He's building for the people he grew up around.

"I wanted to create Nodi with two of my co-founders to sort of shed light to the talent," he says, "the amazing talent that is in Colombia and Latin America, and bring it to the United States."

His advice to other student founders is unhurried in a way you don't often hear this early. "Take your time, know when the time is right, and build something that you want to build, something that you're having a problem with and want to come up with a solution for.

And so they grow…

Gem Dental Design is getting AI planning tools into clinicians' hands. Instant Care is growing its network of providers. Nodi is bringing on candidates and companies to test the platform.

Hispanic Heritage Month usually looks backward, at what people carried here and what they made of it. These three are a reminder that it runs forward too. Paraguay taught Tatiana to build without waiting for capital. Peru gave Marcelo a reason to build at all. Bogotá showed Jamie what talent looks like when nobody is funding it. None of that got left behind on the way to New York. It's the reason there's something worth building for. 

For more on Gem Dental Design, contact Tatiana Moreira at [email protected]. For more on Instant Care, contact Marcelo Noriega at [email protected]. For more on Nodi, contact Jamie Stuart at [email protected].