Marcos Ciarrocchi is a co-founder of Graphite, the growth agency and software company that works on SEO, content, and conversion for brands such as Notion, n8n, and BetterUp. Born in Venezuela and trained as an engineer in Caracas and Turin, Italy, he worked in network research and then in product and growth at the recipe app Yummly before starting Graphite. In 2018 he co-founded Code for Venezuela, a nonprofit that puts Venezuelan technologists abroad to work on software for their home country.
From Venezuela to Optical Networks
He lists San Juan de los Morros, a city in central Venezuela, as his first home, followed by Caracas, Turin, Milan, San Francisco, and now Miami, Florida. He studied electrical engineering at Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas and earned a master's degree in computer and communication networks, summa cum laude, at Politecnico di Torino. "The way I view the world and approach problems is heavily influenced by my engineering training," he writes on his personal site.
According to his Graphite author page, he was a network engineering researcher at Alcatel-Lucent, now part of Nokia, where he worked on energy-efficient routing algorithms for optical networks, research later published by the IEEE.
From Yummly to Graphite
He moved into product and growth work at Yummly, the recipe app that Whirlpool acquired in 2017, and later advised companies such as MasterClass on growth. In a 2025 interview with All About AI he said organic search had worked so well at his first company that other firms began asking for help. "This led us to start Graphite initially as a consulting agency," he said.
Graphite later turned the tools it built for clients into a software platform organized around topics, clusters of searches that share one intent, rather than single keywords. He said he picked the name for its link to pencils and craft. He also said the firm wanted to show that SEO "can be an elegant, impactful channel for growth" and not a hacky one.
Founding Code for Venezuela
With engineers Rafael Chacón and Jose Montes de Oca, he started Code for Venezuela as the country's economic crisis pushed millions of people to emigrate. In April 2019 the group ran hackathons in San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Barcelona, and Bogotá. "It went beyond our expectations, to be honest," he told KQED, which counted more than 200 participants.
"One of our goals is to keep developing local talent in Venezuela," he told Americas Quarterly the same year. Its best-known projects are Angostura, a data platform that informs humanitarian response, and Curita, a telemedicine service that began as a COVID-19 screening tool.