Swalé Nunez’s story began in a small fishing village along the southern coast of Belize called Hopkins. Nunez is Garifuna — he is the modern-day representation of the Garinagu people. “A people more synonymous with culture than technology,” Nunez says. The Garifuna are people of the earth, fishermen, farmers and educators who live off the land. But, Nunez recalled, he always had a knack for innovation; his ingenuity as a child, he says, was a product of the circumstances he grew up in, in a developing country where the innovations and cutting edge technology we take for granted in the U.S. are almost imaginative concepts from their perspective. “Ingenuity played a role because growing up in an environment where there wasn't a lot of technology, you just wanted to build things for yourself,” he recalls. “And building meant breaking things in order to realize innovation, if I close my eyes I can see the frustration on my mom’s face.”
What he wanted to do was study computer engineering. But he needed the escape velocity for that academic pursuit, and he ran into some friction when it came to getting a scholarship from the Belize government to do so. “The government didn’t initially see a need for technology,” he recalls. “At the time the country’s focus was more towards agriculture and fisheries, which was both innate skills knowing my Garifuna Heritage. But I was trying to push for something else—not only for me, but for my country.” Eventually, though, Nunez found a way to attend college, and afterwards, he found himself working in tech. “Technology generally has this stigma of isolation and social awkwardness, being disconnected from the rest of the world, your only real relationship was between you and the technology you were developing in the confines of a cubicle, but that wasn't me. And then the companies I ended up being a part of, saw my gift, ‘Hey, you need a platform to showcase your charisma that will allow you to spread technology in this unique way —let's put you on stage and get you in front of the world. And for a huge part of my life, I was a technologist. I was sharing technology literally across the world,” he says.
Going back to Nunez’s origins, he has been fascinated by innovation his entire life. He didn’t really consider himself a technologist—he thought of himself more of a creative, whose creativity takes shape in the form of technology. “My paint brush isn’t the literal one, but I make art through technology, art that can solve real world problems,” he says.
Nunez found himself working in enterprise tech spaces. “What was so gravitating about being on the enterprise side was that I could build technology that was purposeful, technology for good, that would make the working lives of the people who were out saving the world easier, like first responders” he recalls. As he started working with B2B companies, he again found himself in front of the camera, on main onstages, and a part of global technology rollouts. But then he hit a turning point in his career yet again. Because of his upbringing, Nunez always placed emphasis on community and the importance of people. He’d always been fascinated by human-centered design.
“At this point, I was the head of developer relations, I was the lead innovation consultant for one of the largest mobile phone companies. But there was a moment when I realized that I didn't feel fulfilled. It was a profession centered around chasing profit and product over people. And I didn't like that. Right after the birth of my second daughter, I decided to take a leap of faith to get into entrepreneurship,” he recalls. He left his last corporate job on the last day of 2020.
“There’s a dichotomy that exists in who I am that’s difficult,” he says. “I'm a futurist, I'm a technologist, my professional life forces me to live in the future and see things as they could be. And then personally, I practice mindfulness that encourages me to be present in the moment—and these things are on opposite sides of the spectrum. I find myself teeter tottering between those two points.”
Nunez is also the inventor of the patented beltbar, an adaptable belt keeper and fashionable fix for belt flap, which he built a retail brand around. In developing this product and getting a more intimate understanding of his customer’s journey through e-commerce, he realized that the shopping cart abandonment solutions available for brands like beltbar are essentially customer surveillance tools. Consumers are monitored before they know what they want to buy; they are tracked as they browse through online stores.
“I knew there was a way to realize value in the identity of consumers and leverage it to enhance their online shopping experience. And I set out to do that,” he says. Then Nunez hit a roadblock. “Over the course of a year, I realized that as much as we are privacy and data conscious as users, there's this thing we do in our head, where we weigh the pros and the cons of convenience over privacy and security of our own personal data. And you see it in how we interact through social logins. I know if I log into my Facebook account, Facebook is going to track and monitor how I interact with these other applications. But it's so convenient, though. It takes away the hassle and effort needed to remember all these passwords,” he says.
Instead, Nunez says, he wanted to re-architecture the current relationship model in ecommerce the one built on brand advertising and consumer targeting. He wanted to give users control over the access of their digital identity when interacting with online retail brands, and package that as checkout on demand—when you want to check out, your information is readily available to you, and you don’t need to go through anyone else, and it’s private and secure, and only the data that’s absolutely needed to complete the transaction is shared.
With his experience in enterprise spaces, Nunez innately understood the importance of identity and security. Enter Nunez’s venture: Iuncta. Its mission is to help users realize value in their online identity and in their digital interactions. Its initial offering is the junction between consumer desires and the brands that can fulfill them, leveraging the value in identity to eliminate the uncertainty in online shopping that leads to abandoned carts.
Nunez describes Iuncta as the “Amazon Prime for all e-commerce brands.” Iuncta offers a better online shopping experience, making consumers comfortable enough to buy and enhancing brands' effectiveness to sell. Putting shoppers in full control of their checkout process, Iuncta partners with brands to put privacy first, streamline their checkout and foster customer loyalty through deeper discounts and faster free shipping for consumers. “In reality, you can really think about it this way: brands want to sell their items. And you just want to buy it. We really see it as being that simple, anything else is unnecessary friction. We haven't lost what we are at our core: we are a privacy first identity platform that realizes the value that exists in user identity online,” he says.
Iuncta is part of the Company Ventures Boost Founder Fellowship, our 4-month pre-accelerator program working with 20 founders from historically underserved communities who are leading venture-scalable tech startups, like Nunez’s Iuncta. From his first interviews, Nunez says he knew Boost was different. “I've interviewed with lots of VCs before. And I remember having to pause in the middle of my interview for Boost. And I said, ‘I've never had an experience as a founder in this scenario where minorities were the majority in the room.’ So here we are, we had three black men, and a woman, and it was refreshing. At that point, I thought, the interview was already a success, no matter the outcome. At least I was able to experience something that was a rarity. And that in itself spoke to me.”
What happened was that Iuncta was selected to join the inaugural Boost cohort in February. “The team is inclusive, resourceful, and they care enough to want to put you in the position to set you up to be successful. I've already made connections through Company Ventures’ network—I’m excited about and I'm grateful for the people I've met in my cohort,” he says.
Nunez believes that one’s purpose is a selfless act. “I feel like there's going to be a point in the near future where as a society there’s a realization of the value of digital identity and the power that it holds, not for the companies who have already been profiting but from the individual users” he says. “And if I can be one of the trailblazers to help to pioneer decentralized identity and return the value in identity to the people, especially as we transition into this more immersive internet, an all digital world…that is motivation enough, to be able to provide some value to society and humanity that is greater than just myself.”