In Brazil, the distance between having a device and having a capable device is considerable. Millions of individuals, businesses and public bodies work with machines that are technically functional but practically limited — too slow for modern applications, too outdated for current demands, yet not broken enough to justify immediate replacement. It is a gap that rarely makes headlines but shapes daily digital life for a significant share of the population. Arlequim Technologies, founded in 2021, was created specifically to address it.

The company’s core service uses cloud-based virtualisation to improve the computing performance of older hardware. Instead of purchasing new equipment, users gain access to processing power delivered remotely, allowing their existing machines to handle tasks that would otherwise be beyond them. The approach removes hardware age as a fixed ceiling on what people can do digitally, and it does so without requiring capital expenditure that many users, particularly in the public and consumer sectors, cannot easily justify.

The thinking behind Arlequim Technologies traces back through a long career in Brazil’s technology industry. Haroldo Jacobovicz has been building and operating technology companies since the early 1990s, working across software, hardware services and telecommunications. Over that period, he developed a close understanding of how access to capable technology — or the absence of it — determines what organisations and individuals are able to achieve. When the time came to establish a new venture, that understanding pointed toward a market where the need was clear and the existing solutions were insufficient.

Arlequim operates across three segments: the corporate market, the public sector and individual consumers, with gaming occupying a prominent position within the latter. Brazil’s gaming population has expanded rapidly in recent years, with surveys suggesting that close to three-quarters of Brazilians engage with online games. The demographic reach of gaming in the country is broad, extending well beyond the high-income households most likely to own current-generation hardware. For users who want a quality gaming experience but are working with older machines, virtualisation offers a functional path forward that does not begin with a significant purchase.

The public sector angle is similarly grounded in practical reality. Schools, municipal offices and government agencies across Brazil carry substantial volumes of ageing equipment. Budget constraints make full hardware replacement cycles difficult to sustain. A solution that upgrades performance without replacing physical machines maps directly onto how those institutions actually operate. It is a dynamic that Haroldo Jacobovicz understood well from previous work supplying technology solutions to Brazilian public authorities.

Across all three of its target markets, Arlequim Technologies operates on a consistent underlying logic: the value of digital access diminishes sharply if the hardware required to act on that access remains beyond reach. Bringing performance within reach, at a cost that works for users who are not starting from a position of financial comfort, is the problem the company was built to solve. Haroldo Jacobovicz established Arlequim with the stated aim of delivering the best of digital life to the largest possible number of people. The markets the company serves reflect how seriously that aim was taken when the business was being designed.