The founding of Arlequim Technologies in 2021 marked a deliberate pivot for Haroldo Jacobovicz. Rather than moving into an adjacent field, he identified a specific gap in the technology market — one where the cost of hardware replacement was preventing individuals, businesses, and public organisations from accessing the computing performance they needed. Arlequim’s response to that gap is cloud-based virtualization: a service that upgrades the effective performance of existing devices without requiring users to invest in new equipment.
That framing — solving a real problem at the point where cost and access intersect — is consistent with the way Jacobovicz has approached technology throughout his career. His early work in the 1990s involved bringing computerised systems to public sector clients at a time when government agencies were still navigating the practical and bureaucratic challenges of adopting IT infrastructure. The solution he developed then, a rental model with scheduled hardware refreshes built into the contract, was designed to sidestep the asset management obstacles that made outright purchases difficult for public institutions. Decades later, Arlequim operates from a comparable logic: removing the financial and logistical barriers that would otherwise prevent users from accessing capable technology.
The company targets three markets. Corporate clients represent one strand, with businesses that rely on ageing infrastructure standing to benefit from performance improvements that do not require capital expenditure on new devices. Public sector organisations form a second strand, a market Haroldo Jacobovicz knows well from his years running technology contracts with municipalities across Brazil. The third strand — retail consumers, with particular emphasis on gamers — reflects how significantly the performance demands of consumer software have grown.
Brazil’s gaming sector provides useful context here. The country has developed into one of Latin America’s most active gaming markets, with a broad and demographically varied player base. Modern titles, particularly in the multiplayer and cloud gaming categories, require low-latency connections and processing capabilities that many users’ current hardware cannot reliably deliver. For those users, a virtualization service that brings their existing machine closer to the performance standard of newer equipment addresses a practical need without the expense of a hardware upgrade.
The decision to establish Arlequim Technologies followed a period of transition. After building Horizons Telecom from the ground up in 2010 and developing it into an established name in Brazil’s corporate telecommunications sector over the following decade, Jacobovicz stepped back from that operation and turned toward a new project. The venture he chose was grounded in technology he had been observing and thinking about for some time — cloud computing and virtualization — applied to a market where the gap between what people own and what current software demands of them had become a meaningful problem.
For Haroldo Jacobovicz, the founding of Arlequim Technologies was less a departure than a continuation. The specific technology is new; the underlying interest in making computing accessible to a wider population, and in building business models that make that accessibility financially sustainable, has been a thread running through his work for more than thirty years.