About

I am João Montenegro. I live in Lisbon, where I am CEO of Darkmatter, which builds AI for complex industries.

I am a serial entrepreneur. I have started and co-founded companies in automotive, e-commerce, edtech and spacetech. The one I spent longest on is ubbu, which teaches computer science to children: I co-founded it and led product and design there from 2016 to 2022.

I am a self-taught engineer, programmer, designer and AI builder, and an aerospace nerd. Since 2010 I have designed and built a home fitness bike, an appliance that grows food on a countertop, a 3D printer for Beeverycreative that began as my master's thesis, a sports car for Adamastor, a floating solar platform with the University of Aveiro, a research VTOL for parcel delivery, a lunar base concept with Team Lunar at the International Space University, a reusable cargo capsule for Reenter Space, and a spacesuit concept that was one of five winners of ESA's spacesuit challenge. They are all here.

I write about space and AI: what changes when it becomes cheap to bring mass back down from orbit, what a conflict in orbit would involve, whether it is easier to send a copy of a mind to another star than a body.

I photograph the sky from my backyard with a small telescope and publish what the measurements support: four asteroids recovered where they were predicted, one comet signal that held up, one that did not.

Most of it starts as a sketch.