Ex-Meta executive joins Vetto as co-founder and CTO. Rodrigo Schmidt will lead Vetto's research, engineering, and product efforts in data intelligence and evaluation systems. Vetto, a startup founded by Brazilians in Silicon Valley, announced on Tuesday (27) the hiring of Rodrigo Schmidt, former senior executive at Meta and long-time engineering leader, as co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO). His appointment aims to strengthen Vetto's leadership team, which is building the next generation of data intelligence systems for cutting-edge AI models. Rodrigo's career in engineering spans over 30 years, with about half of that time 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 valued at $15 billion. During his 15 years at Meta, the company grew to over 80,000 employees worldwide, 3 billion monthly active users, and surpassed a valuation of $1 trillion. Rodrigo held senior leadership roles at Facebook, Instagram, AI, and New Product Experimentation (NPE). He built and scaled multiple multimillion-dollar products, led organizations with over 500 people in globally distributed teams, and drove personalization, discovery, and engagement with large-scale artificial intelligence, reaching billions of users. Before Facebook, Rodrigo was an entrepreneur and academic in Europe and Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science with extensive experience in large-scale systems and applied artificial intelligence. Rodrigo joins Vetto as co-founder, alongside an already established technical and research team led by Lucas Smaira, former researcher and engineer at DeepMind, and a broader team with experience in leading-edge AI research labs. State-of-the-art models now face an inflection point. Despite nearly unlimited demand for data that enhances 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 yields diminishing returns. 'After leaving Meta, I wanted to take some time to explore and seek a truly unique opportunity. I developed prototypes, advised several startups, investigated many ideas with different teams, and turned down offers from well-known companies. Everything changed when I started working with Joseph and the rest of Vetto's founding team. We believe there is a huge opportunity to build intelligent data systems that drive not only the training of cutting-edge models but also the evaluation of those models' quality and the personalization needed for the myriad applications being created in this new era of AI. We've built our vision around this and are ready to execute it at full speed,' said Rodrigo Schmidt, co-founder and CTO of Vetto, in a statement. 'From our first interactions, we built a powerful connection. Rodrigo's experience and passion for the field have been extremely valuable, and we align very strongly not only on company strategy but also on values and culture,' added Joseph Nunes, CEO of Vetto. Vetto's approach treats data as an active training interface, rather than a static resource. Instead of providing one-off datasets, Vetto builds continuously evolving data intelligence systems: dynamic task generation, research-level human feedback, adaptive benchmarks, and evaluation cycles that reflect real-world use. This allows models to learn from structured experience over time, avoid overfitting to static benchmarks, and improve 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,' emphasized the CEO. As CTO, Rodrigo will lead Vetto's research, engineering, and product efforts in data intelligence, evaluation systems, and tools that enable experts and researchers to collaborate efficiently and at scale. Startups is part of the routine of over 24,000 decision-makers. Will you be left out?