Technology policy in Brazil has spent years concentrating on the question of who has internet access. It is an important question, but it is not the only one. A connected device that cannot run current applications reliably is, for its user, only marginally more useful than no device at all. The computing performance available to a person — shaped largely by the age and condition of their hardware — determines how much the internet can actually offer them. That is the problem Arlequim Technologies was set up to address when Haroldo Jacobovicz established the company in 2021.
The solution Arlequim delivers is built on virtualisation. Cloud infrastructure takes on the processing demands that older local hardware would struggle to meet, allowing a device well past its commercial prime to function with the kind of responsiveness associated with newer, costlier equipment. The user’s experience changes without their physical hardware changing at all. What makes this technically possible is the same cloud infrastructure that has reshaped enterprise computing over the past decade — Arlequim’s contribution is applying it to a problem that enterprise-focused cloud providers have largely left unaddressed.
Haroldo Jacobovicz’s route to founding Arlequim ran through several distinct phases of Brazil’s technology industry. Early in his career, he worked extensively with software and hardware services, gaining operational experience across both public and private sector clients. That was followed by more than a decade building a telecommunications operator, a process that involved constructing digital infrastructure in markets where it had not previously existed. Across both periods, the same pattern was visible: the organisations and individuals most in need of capable technology were consistently the least well served by what the market offered them.
Arlequim’s three target markets — corporate, public sector and consumer — each represent a context where that pattern holds. Businesses managing large fleets of mixed-age computers face ongoing pressure to maintain productivity without the resources to refresh hardware across the board. Public institutions carry some of the oldest equipment in active use anywhere in the Brazilian economy, kept running through necessity rather than choice. And within the consumer segment, the gaming community presents a case study in unmet demand: a market where enthusiasm for digital experience is high, but where hardware costs create a ceiling that many users cannot reach.
Brazil’s gaming population has grown rapidly across demographic groups that do not fit the profile of early adopters or high-income consumers. The appetite for interactive digital entertainment is there; the hardware to support it, for many players, is not. Virtualisation addresses that specific constraint in a way that is both technically sound and commercially straightforward to deliver.
What ties Arlequim’s work across these different segments is a consistent argument about where digital inequality is actually located. It is not only in the absence of connectivity. It is in the gap between what a person’s device can do and what they need it to do. Haroldo Jacobovicz founded Arlequim Technologies on the conviction that closing that gap is both a viable business and a contribution worth making to how digital life in Brazil actually functions.