By his own admission, Brian Reale “always had a bit of a wanderlust.” And in this case, the Founder of ProcessMaker has the receipts – airline ticket stubs – to prove it.
Reale graduated from Duke University in 1993, after which he became a sales executive for the Miami-area company Boca Research. He’d scour the yellow pages for the largest ads placed by Latin American telecoms, figuring they’d be the best customers for modems. One of his customers was Bolivian, and brought Reale to the country with a proposition, which he recalled in a 2023 interview: “Why don’t we start the country’s first Internet service provider?”
Despite knowing nothing about modems except how to sell them, Reale was convinced. In 1998, he moved to the country to found Zupernet, Bolivia’s first Internet service provider. It wasn’t his first foray into South America – he had been a Fulbright Scholar, studying indigenous languages in the Ecuadorian Amazon – but it was the start of a long career at the head of various businesses with ties not just across the Western Hemisphere, but the world.
He returned to America in 2002 to found ProcessMaker, where he’s been ever since, growing the intelligent software provider to serve the globe, establishing offices in Bolivia (obviously), the Netherlands, Colombia and India, in addition to its Durham, North Carolina headquarters. Over 20 years, Reale helped build out a business that now boasts more than 350 customers and is available in more than 17 languages.
But nothing lasts forever, and in 2023, he handed the Chief Executive Officer reins to Alex George, who served as CTO for more than a year after a long career at software development company Astute. Reale’s DNA is inseparable from the company’s, but as it navigates a future without him, he points to Artificial Intelligence as a major factor. He says it will take longer to integrate in different parts of the world but will, ultimately, be “freeing people up to do more interesting, creative work where we need humans working on.” Which they’ll do – all across the globe.