Most conversations about digital inclusion focus on connectivity — whether people have internet access, how fast it is and how reliably it works. Less attention goes to what happens after someone gets online. If the device being used is too slow to run modern applications properly, access alone does not deliver much. That second layer of the problem is where Arlequim Technologies enters the picture, and it is the layer that Haroldo Jacobovicz chose to build a company around when he founded it in 2021.

Arlequim applies virtualisation technology to give older computers the ability to perform tasks that current software demands. The processing happens in the cloud, which means the physical condition of a user’s hardware is no longer the binding constraint on what they can do. A machine that would otherwise be considered past its useful life becomes, through virtualisation, a functional tool for work, study or entertainment. No new device required.

That framing — doing more with what already exists — reflects a perspective that Haroldo Jacobovicz developed over a long period of working inside Brazil’s technology sector. His career began in the early 1990s with software and hardware services, continued through the creation and eventual maturation of a telecommunications company, and brought him consistently into contact with the uneven ways in which digital capability is distributed across the country. Some organisations had the resources to stay current with technology. Many did not. The gap between those two groups shaped a great deal of what he observed about how digital inequality actually operates in practice.

Arlequim was designed to be useful to both sides of that gap, serving corporate clients, public institutions and individual consumers. Within the consumer market, the gaming segment holds particular strategic relevance. Brazil has developed one of the most active gaming communities in Latin America, with the player base cutting across regions and income levels in ways that few other digital activities do. The demand for a good gaming experience is widespread; the hardware capable of delivering one is not. Virtualisation makes it possible to close that distance without making a high-cost purchase the prerequisite for participation.

Public sector users face a related but distinct version of the same problem. Government departments, public schools and municipal services across Brazil carry equipment that has aged beyond the point of comfortable use, yet replacement programmes are slow and resource-intensive. A virtualisation service that restores capable performance to machines already in circulation fits the operational and financial reality of those institutions far better than a procurement-led solution would.

What gives Arlequim Technologies its coherence as a business is the consistency of the problem it addresses across those different contexts. Whether the user is a gamer, a government worker or a corporate employee, the underlying constraint is the same: hardware that limits what technology can do for them. Haroldo Jacobovicz built the company on the view that removing that constraint should not depend on the ability to spend heavily on new equipment.

That principle connects everything Arlequim does, and it explains why the company’s reach extends across markets that might otherwise seem unrelated.