Afonso's career spans 19.5 years of marketing, design, tech consulting in corporate entities before becoming a full time entrepreneur since 2018, when he founded innovation consultancy Saint Brand focused on building corporate ventures, after holding senior roles in companies such as WPP, Adidas & LinkedIn.
Under Saint Brand Afonso has built 8 corporate startups for corporate entities such as EDF Luminus and Telenet (Liberty Global), as well as 2 corporate startup accelerators. One presently being built and run by Afonso for AREA42, focusing on trade tech solutions. Alongside being a venture builder, Afonso has been sharing his methodology with accelerators such as Maze Impact and Fabrica de StartUps in Portugal as a startup pitch instructor, and with the ICT Hub in Serbia and Innvest Albania as a corporate innovation trainer, where he contributed to the launch of the Serbia SuperCluster (Srbija Inovira Superklaster) combining Startups, Corporate Entities, Regional Government and Academia.
Agile certified and with an MBA from INSEAD, Afonso is also advisor to 1 startup in destination management marketing in the UK, an active partner in cremation on demand startup CREMAR and the Blue Beat Group where he is in charge of marketing, namely for The Reef Company, and ultimately aims to build a perpetual circle of blue economy venture building.