Rafael Costa

Rafael Costa is a partner in New York. He joined Northwood in 2021, two years after selling his own company, and leads the firm’s investments in Parallax and Juniper.

Rafael founded a fraud detection company in São Paulo in 2010, moved it to New York four years later and sold it in 2019. He knows how hard it is to build machine learning systems that have to be right in milliseconds, and he is most useful to founders working on similar problems: model monitoring, payments risk, data infrastructure. He is candid about what he got wrong as a founder, which tends to make for honest board meetings.

Rafael cooks a large Sunday lunch most weeks and has firm views on how long beans should soak.