UPDATES | JANUARY 2026

Rodrigo Schmidt Joins Vetto as Co-Founder and CTO

Former Meta Engineering Executive joins Vetto to advance data intelligence for frontier AI.

ATUALIZAÇÕES | JANEIRO 2026

Rodrigo Schmidt se junta à Vetto como Co-Fundador e CTO

Ex-executivo de engenharia da Meta se junta à Vetto para avançar a inteligência de dados para IA de fronteira.

Rodrigo Schmidt joins Vetto

San Francisco, CA —

Vetto today announced that Rodrigo Schmidt, former Meta senior executive and long-time engineering leader, has joined the company as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). His appointment strengthens Vetto's leadership team as the company builds the next generation of data intelligence systems for frontier AI models.

Rodrigo's engineering career spans over 30 years, with about half of it at Facebook/Meta. He joined the company, then Facebook, when it was a startup with a few hundred employees in Palo Alto, 100 million users, and was valued at $15 billion. In his 15 years at Meta, the company grew to over 80,000 employees around the world, 3 billion monthly active users, and surpassed a $1 trillion valuation. Rodrigo held senior leadership roles across Facebook, Instagram, AI, and New Product Experimentation (NPE). He built and scaled multiple multi-billion-dollar products, led organizations of more than 500 people across globally distributed teams, and drove AI-powered personalization, discovery, and engagement at massive scale with billions of users. Prior to Facebook, Rodrigo was an entrepreneur and academic across Europe and Brazil. He holds a PhD in Computer Science with deep expertise in large-scale systems and applied AI.

Rodrigo joins Vetto as a Co-Founder alongside an already strong technical and research team led by former DeepMind staff researcher and engineer Lucas Smaira, and a broader team with experience across frontier AI research labs.

Frontier models now face an inflection point. While there is effectively unlimited demand for data that improves reasoning, coding, real-world task performance, and economic output, the data that drove progress in earlier phases is no longer sufficient to sustain the pace of improvement. Simply increasing volume produces diminishing returns.

"After leaving Meta, I wanted to take some time to explore and search for a truly unique opportunity. I built prototypes, advised multiple startups, investigated many ideas with different teams, and passed on a number of roles at high-profile companies. Everything changed when I started working with Joseph and the rest of the Vetto founding team. We believe there is a massive opportunity to build intelligent data systems that power not only the training of frontier models, but also their quality assessment and the customization required for the multitude of applications being created in this new AI era. We've crafted our vision around that, and we're ready to execute at full throttle."

Rodrigo Schmidt, Co-Founder and CTO of Vetto

"From our very first interactions, we built a powerful connection. Rodrigo's experience and passion for the space have been extremely valuable and we aligned very strongly not only on the company's strategy but also on values and culture."

Joseph Nunes, CEO of Vetto

Vetto's approach treats data as an active training interface rather than a static resource. Instead of delivering one-off datasets, Vetto builds data intelligence systems that continuously evolve: dynamic task generation, research-grade human feedback, adaptive benchmarks, and evaluation loops that reflect real-world use. This allows models to learn from structured experience over time, avoid overfitting to static benchmarks, and improve in capabilities that matter in deployment.

"As models mature, learning depends less on raw scale and more on how experience is structured. Data needs to be dynamic, adaptive, and designed to teach — not just collected."

Joseph Nunes, CEO of Vetto

"High-quality data compounds. Shortcuts don't. Figuring out what data will be useful tomorrow requires research, experimentation, and tight feedback loops. That's the infrastructure Vetto is building."

Rodrigo Schmidt, CTO of Vetto

As CTO, Rodrigo will lead Vetto's research, engineering, and product efforts across data intelligence, evaluation systems, and tooling that enables experts and researchers to collaborate efficiently at scale. His background in building production AI systems complements Vetto's research-driven culture and strengthens the company's ability to translate theory into reliable, real-world impact.

Vetto believes the data layer will become as strategically important as compute and algorithms. Just as advances in compute infrastructure enabled previous leaps in AI capability, advances in data intelligence will determine how quickly models can continue to improve — and where those improvements show up in practice.

About Vetto

Vetto builds research-grade data, evaluation systems, and data intelligence infrastructure designed to improve frontier AI models in reasoning, coding, and real-world task performance. By combining deep research with disciplined execution, Vetto helps AI systems learn from experience that transfers effectively to deployment.