Our Story

The Rumi team came together over our shared passion of decentralized finance. Most of us started our journey during 2020’s DeFi summer: we’ve farmed, staked, chased airdrops, racked up our degen scores and got rekt…but just like DeFi, we’ve now matured, and we think the sector must change to reach its full potential.

We dream of replacing the old, rigged and broken financial rails of the world with the efficiency and transparency of DeFi. We want everyone to have access to the best financial products, tailored to their needs, whatever their budget. That means DeFi needs to think BIGGER.

It is from this shared dream that Rumi was born.

Diego

Entrepreneur, tech executive and investor. Diego’s professional career spans start-ups, scale-ups and large global enterprises in a variety of leadership roles across different industries such as finance, consumer tech, e-commerce and web3. Following his MBA, he started a career in finance as a FIG Investment Banker for UBS Bank in London, where he advised governments, banks and insurance companies during the 2008 financial crisis and beyond. More recently he was also a member of Just Eat’s executive team in the UK, where he led the business development and last mile logistics departments. Based on his success there, he co-founded and launched Bezos.ai, a venture-backed AI enabled logistics platform for e-commerce. After three years he stepped back from his day-to-day role as co-CEO and moved to Portugal to focus fully on Web3.

Before launching Rumi Finance, Diego co-founded Blue Swan, a Web3 Venture Studio. He is also a co-founder of the Decentral Art Pavillion, the first Web3-focussed digital art exhibition at the Venice Biennale art fair. He also does angel investments in Web3 and Fintech focus. Some of his investments include Unmapped Digital Mining, Altitude, and Simplefi. Diego is also an LP at Rally Cap VC.

Jose (Pepe)

Pepe has 17 years of experience building technology. He began his career working at Unico Inc., developing tech for the industrial automation sector where he first found his passion for engineering. After this, he embarked on entrepreneurial career, first founding and then exiting TecnoJAR, an industrial automation company to Regal Beloit Corp. Following this success, he co-founded Eprezto and Moveo Ventures to invest and develop technology that advances the financial industry in Latin America.

For the last 4 years he has focused on developing blockchain-based products and building technology for the financial industry. He holds a degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Monterrey Tec and an MBA from EGADE Business School.

Raphael (Raph)