Education Soul Co-founder & EdTech Advocate,
Colombia

Juan Manuel is an International business executive with 31 years of experience in consulting services of technology and education, with a special focus on public & private alliances for Fortune 500 tech companies such as Motorola and Unisys in the United States and Latin America. He has worked in more than 30 countries and speaks five languages.

Since 2007, he has been a serial entrepreneur in different business sectors such as food, IT services and EdTech. He has created seed money funds, developed entrepreneurship public policy projects, and fostered acceleration programs. He is frequently invited as an entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation speaker in Latin America.

As Education Soul Co-founder, his most recent startup, he has been devoted for the last 5 years, to close the digital gap at underserved areas, reaching +28,000 students in Colombia, in 52 cities and 59 low-income public schools, in terms of reading comprehension and open-source code programming that creates music, art and robotics. Using EdTech platforms based on adaptive learning, his company has helped students to develop their own skills in a personalized way and at their own rhythm and speed, assuring follow up and concrete results, to make social impact possible.

Since 2021, Juan Manuel is a member of the 21 st Century Skills Coalition led by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington DC that supports the implementation of a new generation of education and training policies in Latin America and the Caribbean and promotes the development and strengthening of transversal skills in the region.

He holds a B.S. in Business Administration (Los Andes University – Colombia) and an Executive MBA from Boston University.