Sustainability: the New "S" Word

Manuela Zoninsein is the CEO and Founder of Kadeya, the world’s first closed-loop packaged beverage vending system. Her work supports the planet’s transition to a sustainable and circular economy via solutions that re-imagine the fundamental systems of our lives. Through Kadeya, Manuela is convinced that sustainable solutions done well can be more convenient, better quality, lower cost, and support community and individual well-being.

Manuela began her first company studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2012, ultimately evolving it into an agtech data service. In 2015 the company rolled it into a marketplace selling agricultural inputs to smallholder farmers in Brazil, which is now her home country's largest such online marketplace.

After four years at Palantir and MIT, where she repeatedly found dissatisfied packaged water bottle consumers, Manuela started Kadeya to build a circular solution that outperforms single-use. Kadeya – which means "chain" in Portuguese – re-imagines beverage supply chains and empowers people to start a chain reaction for good.

As a Brazilian-American fluent in Mandarin-Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese, Manuela takes a global and inclusive view in everything she does. She loves to build and lead teams of humble, curious, diverse, ambitious systems-thinkers unified to make the world a more livable place for all.