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VC Mx: Nicolás Camhi, Co-Founder Vambe AI
Chilean founder Nicolás is building Vambe AI to redefine how Latin American businesses sell and support customers through conversational commerce.
Mack Meyer
December 23, 2025
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Nicolás Camhi has built his career around one simple principle that technology should reflect how people actually live and communicate. As co-founder and CEO of Vambe AI, he’s creating tools that help businesses across Latin America automate customer engagement through conversational AI, meeting users where they already are: on WhatsApp, Instagram, and everyday chat apps.
The idea came not from theory, but from lived experience. Having run small businesses himself, Camhi saw firsthand how time, talent, and bandwidth constrained growth, and how most tools built abroad failed to adapt to Latin America’s unique rhythms.
In Latin America, people don’t buy silently, they chat. Business is conversational here. That’s what makes this region so unique, and it’s also what makes it so challenging to scale.
Born and raised in Chile, Camhi’s journey from student entrepreneur to leading one of the region’s most promising AI startups shows how grit, timing, and cultural understanding can build something global from the ground up.
How Did Growing Up in Chile Shape His Global Perspective?
For Camhi, growing up in Santiago, Chile meant learning how to dream big from the edge of the world. Surrounded by mountains, ocean, and distance, he learned that success often required crossing borders, physically and mentally.
Chile is beautiful, but it’s far, 12 or 14 hours by plane to anywhere. You grow up realizing that if you want to build something big, you’ll eventually need to leave.
Entrepreneurship wasn’t an abstract concept. It was a dinner table conversation. Both parents ran small businesses, and his childhood memories are filled with the hum of work, phone calls, customers, and constant motion.
In my house, weekends didn’t exist. My dad worked Saturdays and Sundays, but he also owned his time. That made a big impression on me, the idea that freedom comes from building something of your own.
From early on, independence and discipline were twin values. Those roots gave Camhi a mindset that would carry him through later failures, global moves, and eventually, founding Vambe.
What Did Berkeley Teach Him About Building Beyond Borders?
When Camhi won a scholarship to study at the University of California, Berkeley, it was more than just an academic milestone, it was exposure to a mindset that would change how he saw business forever.
At Berkeley, he found himself among innovators from across the world. Instead of theory-heavy lectures, classes were labs for experimentation. The energy of the Bay Area, the open exchange of ideas, the risk-taking culture, left a lasting mark.
Berkeley was hands-on. They taught us to prototype fast, to fail, to pivot. It wasn’t theory, it was movement.
In one of his courses, a global innovation program gathered 30 students from multiple disciplines, engineers, designers, lawyers, and told them to build something real in a semester. The intensity taught him the rhythm of iteration and collaboration.
That year changed everything. I learned to think global, to build fast, and to never fall in love with an idea. You iterate, you pivot, and you keep moving.
Years later, in a poetic twist, Berkeley’s startup accelerator SkyDeck, which he had once visited as a curious student, became one of Vambe’s earliest investors. It was proof that the seeds planted during those early days had finally taken root.
What Was His First Venture, and What Did Failure Teach Him?
Returning to Chile with newfound ambition, Camhi launched his first real company, Fogonaso, a small business selling barbecue charcoal and grilling supplies. What began as a side hustle quickly grew into a national operation, supplying restaurants and private events.
The hustle was intense. He handled everything, sourcing, delivery, logistics, and sales, learning how messy and unforgiving small business operations could be.
It started as a side hustle,just buying and delivering charcoal to restaurants and homes. But it grew fast. I started importing from Argentina and Paraguay. It became a real business.
Then came the pandemic. Overnight, the restaurants that made up the bulk of their customers disappeared. Costs skyrocketed, fuel became unaffordable, and imports froze.
When COVID hit, our biggest clients were restaurants and event suppliers. In Chile, everything stopped for almost two years. Costs went up, demand went to zero. We fought hard, but in the end, we had to let it go.
The closure was painful but clarifying. It taught him the real meaning of resilience, and what kind of venture he wanted to build next.
It hit my ego. We worked for four years and ended with nothing. But it was also the wake-up call I needed. I wanted to build something big enough that I could give it my thousand percent, not my hundred.
How Did Failure Lead to Vambe AI?
After Fogonaso, Camhi briefly joined a Chilean mobility startup where his future co-founder Matías was the first developer. Their shared curiosity about automation and customer behavior led to late-night brainstorming sessions.
They noticed a pattern: whether selling cars, electronics, or even charcoal, businesses in Latin America spent an extraordinary amount of time chatting with customers.
Every business I’d run had the same issue, too many customer messages, not enough people to answer them. Everyone in Latam chats before buying. But scaling that human touch is almost impossible.
Together, they built what would become Vambe AI, a platform that lets companies deploy multiple AI agents to handle customer interactions across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. These agents can qualify leads, provide personalized recommendations, and even schedule appointments, all without human input.
We were building AI agents before ChatGPT made agents cool. The difference is, ours were designed for the real world, for small and mid-sized companies that don’t know what a prompt even is.
Today, the product is used by car dealerships, retailers, and e-commerce stores across Latin America. Setup takes less than a week, and no technical background is required, a core differentiator in a market where digital adoption is still uneven.
How Does Vambe Solve Latin America’s Conversation Problem?
Vambe’s success lies in understanding how Latin Americans actually shop. Conversations aren’t a pre-sale formality, they are the sale. But that cultural strength also creates operational bottlenecks that most CRMs or marketing tools can’t fix.
A car dealership might get hundreds of leads a night from Instagram ads. The problem? Most of them come in after 7 p.m., when nobody’s online. By the next morning, they’re gone.
With Vambe, that gap disappears. When a customer clicks an ad, an AI assistant instantly begins chatting, identifying needs, and offering personalized suggestions.
The AI asks what kind of car you want, your budget, who it’s for, then gives you a personalized recommendation, books a test drive, and syncs to the dealer’s calendar. By the time a salesperson steps in, the lead is warm and ready.
The same approach works for smaller online sellers. For one client selling refurbished MacBooks, Vambe handled repetitive customer doubts that previously clogged inboxes.
Customers kept asking, ‘Why is this MacBook so cheap? Is it a scam?’ The AI explained quality, warranties, and pricing, and even built carts. It turned doubt into trust, and trust into sales.
How Did He Overcome Adoption Challenges in Latin America?
Despite strong traction, convincing small business owners to adopt AI wasn’t easy. Many feared automation or viewed it as an unnecessary luxury.
Chile is very open, people adopt early. But in Mexico or Peru, it’s different. Founders think, ‘Do I really want to pay for this new technology from a startup I don’t know?’
Vambe’s team tackled this head-on through simplicity and proof. Their onboarding process required no technical setup and showed measurable results in days. Combined with the global surge in AI visibility, skepticism quickly turned into curiosity.
Today, even the smallest shop owner feels like, ‘If I don’t learn this now, I’ll be left behind.’ That urgency is real,and it’s helping us grow.
How Did He Build the Team That Powers Vambe?
Every founder knows that a product is only as strong as the team behind it. For Camhi, building Vambe meant surrounding himself with people who could match his intensity and share his ambition.
He and his co-founders made an early decision to hire only A-players, even if they couldn’t afford them yet.
Our first hire was the top engineer from my university, the guy everyone went to for help. He had an incredible job at a big startup, but we asked anyway. He joined. That’s how talent attracts talent.
Each new team member brought not just skill but momentum. Many came from sports backgrounds, blending technical excellence with competitiveness and resilience.
The first ten people could code, sell, and do customer success. They were generalists, elite players who could do everything. That DNA still defines our team.
What Does the Future Look Like for Vambe AI?
Looking ahead, Vambe’s roadmap remains focused on Latin America, a region brimming with opportunity yet underserved by global SaaS giants.
The opportunity here is massive. Businesses don’t self-serve; they need real solutions that just work. They don’t want to build AI, they want to buy it.
Nicolas envisions a multi-year expansion across Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil before taking the platform global. Once the team masters local adaptation, the technology can easily scale to markets where conversational commerce is just beginning to mature.
Once we master this region, we want to export our technology worldwide. Every business, everywhere, should have an ecosystem of AI agents that help them sell, engage, and grow.
What Is He Most Proud Of, and What Has Been the Hardest?
For all the milestones, Camhi’s greatest pride isn’t in funding rounds or product launches, it’s in the people beside him.
Ninety-nine percent of our team is smarter than me. That’s how it should be. They work hard, they believe in the mission, and they’re all in, no nine-to-five, just purpose.
But he’s also candid about the lows, the doubts, the slow progress, the financial strain of the early days.
Finding product-market fit was brutal. We had no cash, no sleep, and constant doubt. Everyone around you says, ‘You’re too talented for this, go get a job.’ You just have to ignore them and keep building.
That persistence, he believes, separates those who talk about startups from those who survive them.
Once you find product-market fit, everything changes. It’s still hard, but it’s the kind of hard that gives you energy. That’s when the real fun begins.
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