The Long Road to Brazil: A Founder’s Story
In March 2014, I was sitting in the back of a cab on the long ride from central São Paulo to Guarulhos International Airport. I was on my way back to New York. And I was able to hold an on-and-off conversation with the driver for the full hour. What was remarkable was that I had arrived in Brazil for the first time just three weeks earlier, knowing nothing about Portuguese. But in that short span, I had met a people so open to communicating and helping me learn their language that—without a single classroom or textbook—I was managing basic conversation.
Speaking five languages today and having lived in eight countries, I can tell you that not every experience has been anywhere near the same. Brazil’s charm stuck with me. When I got back to New York, I enrolled in Portuguese classes. And the rest was history.
The Early Wiring
I’ll admit, this wasn’t my first international journey.
I did my undergrad in international studies at Loyola University Chicago, where I had the opportunity to spend a year in Beijing and six months in Paris. My final college internship was for the Québec Government Delegation in Chicago, working on trade and investment. That experience set the course. I loved building bridges between economies, and I wanted to keep doing it.
I moved to New York in 2013 and began working with foreign companies trying to establish themselves in the United States. In 2016, I joined the Belgian-American Chamber of Commerce,BelCham, where I spent the next few years helping over two hundred startup founders—principally from Belgium, but also from across Europe—as they entered the American market. I saw firsthand how migration and investment go hand in hand. When a founder relocates, capital follows. When capital arrives, communities form. That feedback loop became the lens through which I understood everything that came after.
Discovering Global Mobility
During the same period, I recovered EU dual citizenship through my great-grandmother, who was born in Luxembourg. When I applied in January 2014, fewer than 100 Americans had done so. I received my EU passport that September.
In college, I had studied in Paris as an American citizen and gone through a complex visa process. After finishing my studies, I desperately wanted to stay and work in France—but had no legal pathway to do so. Now, I had the ability to live, work, and build freely across roughly 30 countries. The experience made concrete the optionality that global mobility provides. My life was changed forever.
Another event would shape my path in November 2016. On November 9th, it was widely reported that the Canadian federal immigration website had crashed due to surging demand from the United States. I saw the winds of change and realized I could use my firsthand experience to help others navigate the Luxembourg citizenship process. I launched LuxCitizenship on November 16th, 2016, and by 2019 had gone full-time. Over the following years, I helped more than 3,500 Americans navigate the process and accompanied hundreds of them as they moved abroad.
Along the way, I became known for large-scale open data and demographic research projects on Luxembourg’s new dual citizens in the Americas—work that attracted attention from media, government officials, and diaspora communities worldwide.
Finding Florianópolis
In 2023, one of those research projects brought me to Brazil.
The data was clear: Florianópolis and surrounding Santa Catarina state had the largest concentration of Luxembourg dual citizens by ancestry of any city in the world. I wanted to understand why. My work was helping Americans get Luxembourg citizenship, and here was a city where thousands of Brazilians had already done it.
What followed was one of the most intense periods of my career. Through the Association of Luxembourg Citizens in Brazil, I helped coordinate the first visit by Luxembourg politicians to meet their Brazilian dual citizens—a community that had grown from under a thousand to more than twenty thousand people in fewer than five years. I traveled throughout Santa Catarina, meeting mayors, state officials, and local institutions. At the main event, I spoke in Portuguese—my fourth language—alongside a panel that included the Governor of Santa Catarina and the Mayor of Florianópolis, to a crowd of five hundred. Over those weeks, I met roughly a thousand people.
But what stayed with me was not the scale of the diaspora work. It was what I discovered alongside it.
A Familiar Feeling
Florianópolis has a technology ecosystem I was not expecting. Through my interactions with the diaspora community, I also met founders, tech leaders, and people connected to organizations like ACATE and Sapiens Parque. The city calls itself Ilha do Silício—Silicon Island—and unlike a lot of innovation branding, it reflects something real: startups, universities, venture capital, and serious institutional coordination.
Standing in that environment in 2023, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years. By that point, I had been running my citizenship business full-time since 2019. The work was meaningful and I was proud of what I had built. But the energy I encountered in Florianópolis—the founders, the ambition, the intersection of technology and international connectivity—jarred my memory. It reminded me of my years working with foreign startups, watching founders take the leap across borders every day. I had loved that work deeply, and somewhere along the way, I had moved away from it.
Florianópolis brought it back.
Staying Connected
After that first visit, I didn’t let go. I stayed in touch with people I had met in the tech community. I returned in 2024 to deliver a talk in Portuguese on my demographic research and the history of European immigration to Brazil. In 2025, I spoke at Hacktown, Brazil’s largest independent innovation festival. Three consecutive years on Brazilian stages deepened my connection to the ecosystem and to the country.
As I explored establishing a more permanent presence in Brazil—including setting up an office to hire developers in Florianópolis—I discovered something unexpected. Brazil had an immigration pathway specifically designed for foreign entrepreneurs and investors: a startup investor residency that could lead directly to permanent residency, with a relatively modest capital requirement.
The Gap
I was immediately interested. This was exactly the kind of opportunity I had spent a decade helping others navigate. The legislation was strong, the structure was sound, and the opportunity—permanent residency in the largest economy in Latin America, through entrepreneurship—was genuinely compelling.
But when I went to find someone who could help me through the process, I came up empty. Lawyers could explain isolated legal steps, but no one operated across the full sequence: company formation, capital transfer, banking compliance, Central Bank registration, innovation ecosystem requirements, and immigration adjudication. For Americans in particular, cross-border complexity added layers that almost no one in Brazil understood. Reliable information barely existed. Fewer than twenty people had successfully completed this pathway since it was created.
So I went through it myself. And from the very beginning, I knew I would need to build the solution I wished had existed when I started.
Why StartBrazil
StartBrazil exists because no one should need a decade of cross-border experience—and the network that comes with it—to take advantage of this opportunity. I built it because I saw a gap between powerful legislation and the practical ability to use it, and I was uniquely positioned to close it. My career has been about exactly this: understanding how migration systems work in practice and helping people navigate them with clarity.
StartBrazil is the product of three converging threads in my life:
• A decade helping over 3,000 Americans secure dual citizenship, and personally accompanying hundreds as they moved abroad.
• Years building bridges between foreign founders and new markets, from European startups entering the United States to cross-border trade and investment.
• A data-driven journey that led me to Florianópolis, into the heart of Brazil’s innovation ecosystem, and ultimately through my own startup investor residency process.
The law exists. The economic opportunity is real. The innovation ecosystems—especially in places like Florianópolis—are already functioning. But the operational knowledge required to connect all of those pieces is scattered. StartBrazil is my answer to that gap.
When I committed my own capital to Brazil in September 2025, I wasn’t just placing a financial bet. I was anchoring the next chapter of my life in a country whose future I believe in—and building a company designed to make that path visible and navigable for others.
That is why Brazil. And that is why StartBrazil.
To learn more about Daniel Atz, you can visit his personal website and Linkedin.
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