From Colombia to Dublin: The Story Behind Immersify

Starting a company is never particularly straightforward. Starting one thousands of kilometres from where you grew up adds a few extra layers. Felipe and Lina, husband and wife and the founders of Immersify, know this well. Both grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, and today they call Dublin home. Felipe comes from the world of technology. Lina comes from marketing and brand, with a Master’s in Global Brand Management.

Almost two years after the idea of Immersify first started taking shape, we wanted to go back to the beginning and ask Felipe and Lina how it actually happened. Not the polished version you normally find on an About Us page, but the real one. And the real one includes a few unexpected turns.

Before Dublin, there was Colombia. And Japan.

Long before Immersify existed, Felipe already knew that at some point he wanted to build something of his own. That part was never really in question. The much harder question was what exactly he was going to build.

A lot of that thinking started with Macromet, his family business in Colombia. Working there gave Felipe an early view into the reality of running an SME and, particularly, how differently smaller businesses experienced technology.

Then came Japan. Around 2012, Felipe moved there to work for NEC, and he lived in Japan for two and a half years. Working inside a large, highly organised Japanese company made the contrast with businesses like Macromet very clear. It was during those years that an idea began to take shape, one that would stay with him for more than a decade and eventually become part of the thinking behind Immersify.

“I remember writing something down when I was in Japan: ‘Small businesses do not have technology.’ I had seen how something as simple as Dropbox could make a difference at Macromet, and I kept thinking there had to be a way to bring that kind of technology to smaller businesses.”

In November 2016, Felipe and Lina moved from Colombia to Dublin for their studies, attracted in part by Ireland’s technology ecosystem. Felipe went on to work at Dropbox and LinkedIn, while Lina joined a growing Irish SME, where she is now Head of Marketing.

In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, Felipe and Lina got married in Dublin, and they celebrated again in Colombia that December.

Strangely enough, Felipe often found her job more interesting than his own. Watching a smaller business solve real problems with fewer resources reminded him of Macromet, and he remembers telling Lina that he was a little jealous. Somewhere along the way, that feeling became harder to ignore, and in 2023 Felipe decided it was time to leave big tech and finally try to build something of his own.

Then came the bicycles. And the keratin.

The experiments started that same year. Knowing that you want to start a company is unfortunately not the same as knowing what company you should start. Before consulting was even on the table, Felipe was convinced the answer was electric bicycles.

Eventually, Felipe and Lina did what every good entrepreneur should probably do and looked properly at the numbers. A shop meant rent, bicycles meant inventory, and making the whole thing work required considerably more investment and volume than expected. Then, after years of talking about bicycles, Felipe made an even more fundamental discovery: he did not actually want to repair bicycles. Lina still laughs about it. After all that time, his conclusion was essentially that he loved bicycles; he just did not particularly want a bicycle business.

Then came keratin, because bicycles were not enough experimentation for one chapter. Felipe was helping a friend with a hairdressing business and ended up importing keratin products from China and going salon by salon around Dublin trying to sell them.

It was not the beginning of an international beauty empire, but it gave him confidence that he could walk into an industry he knew almost nothing about and make something happen.

More importantly, he noticed something interesting. Wherever he went, he kept ending up in conversations that had very little to do with keratin. He would sit with business owners and start talking about how they could sell more, how they were running their businesses, what technology they were using and what they could improve. He was supposed to be selling a product, but he kept finding himself helping with the business.

Finding the problem, and finally finding Immersify

The idea that became Immersify started with a very practical problem. The company where Lina works needed a CRM, but choosing one and making it work for a growing B2B business was proving harder than expected. From the inside, Lina could see the problem clearly. The business had good foundations and a managing director with the right mindset, but its systems were disconnected, and expensive software providers offered very little real training or guidance. For Felipe, this was the moment something clicked. As he remembers thinking at the time, “These guys do not know how to do this. And there are no companies dedicated to helping them.”

That was the seed. Consulting with other Irish businesses helped confirm that the problem was not unique, and discovering Zoho through one of those projects showed Felipe what a more connected approach could look like. For Lina, after years of bicycles, keratin and other experiments, this one simply made sense. They had found a real problem, Felipe knew how to help solve it, and there was a market for it. This was the path.

Lina also brought something that no consultant can learn from a book: she had been the client. She knew how it feels when a system does not fit the way a business really works. Today, Lina works with Immersify as a marketing consultant. She sets the direction for its brand and marketing, supports the team and works closely with Felipe on important decisions.

From Lucky Dog to Immersify

Felipe remembers sitting down one Thursday in 2024 and finally putting the idea into a deck: what the company would do, who it would help and what would make it different. Now it just needed a name. The first attempt was Lucky Dog. There was even a logo, and both were eventually given the retirement they deserved.

Felipe went back to the slides and to an idea he kept returning to: immersive consulting. The idea was simple. Before recommending any software, you first immerse yourself in the business. You learn how the team works, how they sell, where information gets lost and what the owners are trying to build. Only then do you choose the tools.

That is where the name comes from. In English, the ending “-ify” turns a word into an action, like simplify, clarify or amplify. Immersify is the action of immersing: going deep into a business before changing anything. It describes not only what the company does, but how it does it. This time, it stayed.

Making it real

The first client came naturally: the company where Lina works. It started as a project Felipe was helping with, and when Immersify became a company, it turned into a formal proposal for a very specific need.

Then the team started to grow. The first person to join was Santiago Altamar, a developer based in Colombia. Next came Laura, from Bolivia, who today works in sales and marketing, followed by Santiago Majul, from Argentina, who works in project management.

Different countries and different backgrounds, but the same way of working: curious, close to every client and always ready to go deep into each business. They are the faces behind Immersify, and the reason the company is much more than two founders with an idea.

Choosing Ireland, without leaving Colombia behind

When we asked why they decided to build Immersify in Dublin, Lina gave the most practical answer first: they lived here. By then, Ireland had become home.

But there was something more personal behind the decision. Ireland was the place that welcomed them when they left Colombia and gave them the opportunity to build a life, grow professionally and eventually create something of their own. For Felipe, there is something special about Immersify now being able to give a little of that back by helping Irish businesses grow and contributing, in its own small way, to the country they now call home.

At the same time, building Immersify in Ireland never meant leaving Colombia behind. As the team has grown, it has created opportunities to work with talented people back home, with the hope that one day some of what Immersify is learning and building here can create an impact in Colombia and across Latin America too.

That mix of both places has naturally become part of who we are: a Latino team building an Irish company, grateful for where we came from and very happy to call Ireland home.

What they would tell someone starting today

When we asked Felipe and Lina what they would tell someone thinking about starting a business, the conversation came back to where their own story began. Lina had a particularly practical way of looking at it:

“Entrepreneurship has become such a romanticised idea. Everyone talks about wanting to start a business, but a business doing what? Take your time to find something you genuinely enjoy, something that makes sense and that can actually work as a business.”

Felipe spent years knowing he wanted to build something before finding the thing that genuinely made sense. Looking back, none of the detours feel wasted. Macromet introduced the problem. Japan showed him the gap. His technology career gave him experience. The bicycles showed him what he did not want to build. The keratin gave him confidence. And consulting finally brought the pieces together.

Their advice is less about taking a dramatic leap and more about giving yourself time to find something worth building. Find a real problem, make sure there is a market for solving it and make sure you care enough about the work to keep doing it when the novelty disappears. Once you find it, surround yourself with good people and enjoy building it with them.

That is probably the biggest lesson from the story so far. Some things worked and some absolutely did not. There were ideas that lasted years and went nowhere, difficult decisions, good timing, bad timing and plenty of figuring things out along the way. Almost two years later, we have a much clearer idea of what Immersify can become, but there will almost certainly be things we are doing today that we will laugh about in another two years.

For now, we are still building, still learning and still very much in the middle of the story. If your business is facing similar challenges, we would love to hear from you, let’s talk.