Tomás Escobar, CEO and Co-founder of Shorta, has spent his career building digital products that reshape how people access and experience content. From founding Cuevana to now leading Shorta, he has consistently focused on solving real audience friction with strong product thinking, mobile-first design, and a clear eye for scale.
In this interview with Eqvista, Escobar shares how those experiences shaped Shorta’s vision, why vertical fiction is emerging as a major entertainment category, and what it takes to build a global company from Latin America.
Tomás, you founded Cuevana and Acámica at a young age. What patterns do you see across your ventures, and how did those experiences shape Shorta’s approach to mobile-native content?
Cuevana showed me how much appetite there is in the region for great stories the moment you remove the friction of accessing them. The lesson I carry into Shorta is that the combination of distribution, experience and content matters the most. Shorta is mobile-first from the ground up — vertical, quality-oriented, and designed for the way people actually hold their phones and the moments they actually have. And from day one the ambition has been global: we’re building this from Latin America, but we see ourselves at the front of a category that’s only just starting to take shape worldwide.
You’ve been recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the region’s top innovators under 35. How has your background in software development and design given you a unique edge in building entertainment platforms?
Entertainment platforms live or die on the product, not just the catalog. Coming from software and design, I think about the entire experience — how fast an episode starts, how the next one queues, how it feels to come back every single day. A lot of entertainment companies treat the app as a delivery pipe. We treat it as the product. That’s the edge: building a platform where the technology disappears and what’s left is the story.
You have built products with global reach, and now Shorta. What has been the most important lesson you have learned about scaling digital platforms in Latin America, and how are you applying that experience to Shorta?
The real problem we’re solving is structural: the audiovisual industry is in crisis, and less original fiction gets made every year. You don’t fix that by copying a model from somewhere else — you have to build something new. So at Shorta we’re building an ecosystem for audiovisual talent: a platform where creators can produce more, monetize their work, and reach audiences directly. Making fiction profitable again is what generates more opportunities for everyone in the industry. And that takes far more than good content — it takes technology, a real platform, and genuine innovation in the business model and in distribution.
Shorta is positioning itself as a mobile-native series platform focused on vertical stories for young audiences. What market signals or data gave you confidence that vertical micro-fiction would resonate in Latin America, especially given the scale of China’s vertical drama market?
The behavior was already here — Latin Americans are among the most engaged mobile audiences in the world, and they’re consuming serialized vertical stories every day, just not in a home built for it. Second, the Asian vertical drama market proved this can be a real business, not a novelty. But our ambition goes beyond the region. We’re among the first to build this in Latin America, and the proposition itself — cinematic quality, local stories, original fiction with our own voices and faces — is genuinely disruptive on a global scale. We’re not importing a format and we’re not following Asia; we’re a spearhead, building the home for this here first, with local languages and cultures, with a truly global platform as the goal.
As Shorta targets Gen Z, a demographic that increasingly consumes entertainment through mobile-native formats, what behavioral insights have most influenced your product design and content strategy?
Gen Z doesn’t separate “watching something” from everything else they do on their phone — it’s woven into the day, in short windows of attention. So we design for that rhythm: fast, serialized, made to fit the way they actually consume. Two behaviors drive our strategy. It’s creator-led: this generation follows people, not channels, so we build around creators and the talent audiences already trust. And it’s social: they discover, share and talk about what they watch, so the experience has to live inside that dynamic, not apart from it. They also have zero patience for friction and no tolerance for being talked down to — the content has to hook in the first seconds and respect their intelligence. But here’s the key: we move at the rhythm social media demands, and we never sacrifice the quality of our storytelling. The format is short — the craft isn’t.
With TikTok, Reels, and apps like ReelShort creating a crowded short-form content space in Latin America, how does Shorta’s fiction-focused, series-based model distinguish itself from other short-form video platforms?
TikTok and Reels are social feeds built on user-generated content — you scroll endlessly through other people’s lives. That’s a different business and a different need. Shorta is fiction: real series, with scripts, actors, directors and producers — stories you follow, not a feed you scroll. In terms of storytelling and content, we’re much closer to a streaming platform than to a social network. And here’s our real differentiator: we capitalize on the creator ecosystem that social media built — the talent that grew up making content online, plus actors who never had a space to perform — and we give them a place to make real, high-quality fiction. Unlike the players importing the Asian model, our content is original, with a human voice at the center. That’s the line — we’re not a feed, we’re a catalog of stories.
You plan to produce 100 vertical series in 2026. How are you balancing scale with quality, and what is your strategy for building a strong creator pipeline?
We’re producing 100 original series in Argentina by the end of 2026, and the way we balance scale with quality is by being radically data-driven. We work with established creators and emerging talent, and we give them something most platforms don’t: real data on what’s working and what isn’t, episode by episode, plus the speed to iterate fast on top of it. That loop — create, measure, iterate, improve — is how quality compounds at scale. Our ambition is to help creators become the next-generation MrBeasts of fiction: builders of audiences and formats, not one-off projects. And that’s only possible if you give them the right tools and a platform built to keep learning and optimizing what works and what doesn’t. The pipeline is the strategy — the more Shorta becomes the place where the best creators can learn and grow, the more the scale takes care of itself.
The platform emphasizes “no ads, no limits” with instant episode playback and offline viewing. How do you reconcile this user experience with a sustainable subscription business model?
It starts with a reality: we’re not only competing with other streaming services — we’re competing for attention with social platforms like TikTok, Reels and YouTube, which give people a free, frictionless experience. So our job is to match that value proposition and then improve on it. Never less. That’s why the model is built around choice. If you want the full experience — no ads, no limits, instant playback, offline — you subscribe. If you’d rather not pay, you can watch with ads and unlock episodes that way. Both paths are sustainable because both create value: subscribers pay for the premium experience, and the ad-supported tier monetizes the audience that brings us scale. “No ads, no limits” is the reason to subscribe — but even the free experience has to be world-class, because that’s the bar social has set.
Shorta raised a US$6M pre-seed round in April 2026. What milestones did you need to hit to secure this funding, and how does this compare to precedent transactions in Latin American entertainment startups?
We actually extended our pre-seed round to US$7M on the back of strong demand — we set out to raise less and opened it up because the interest was there. That’s a signal in itself: beyond the team, it reflects how much conviction there is around the opportunity ahead. What our backers responded to was a combination of track record and timing — the team behind Shorta, myself, Ariel Arrieta and Armando Bo, has built and backed category-defining companies in Latin America before, and the vertical fiction opportunity is opening right now. We’re now moving into our seed round. Compared to other entertainment startups in the region, what stands out is the caliber of the founding team and the backers we brought together from day one — and the size of the opportunity in front of us.
Can you share how investors and the market are valuing Shorta’s opportunity at this stage, and what metrics matter most in that discussion?
At a pre-seed stage, valuation is about team and opportunity. And the opportunity is a vertical growing at a dizzying pace year over year. What investors are betting on is the chance to build a category-leader in an emerging category that we believe can dominate entertainment going forward. The metrics back that up: the average series in this space has a completion rate under 5%, and ours is at least three times that. We became the most downloaded Entertainment app in Argentina before we’d even been live a month, and we passed 500,000 downloads in under two months. That’s what the market is really valuing — not a catalog, but a habit, and a category we can lead.
You have built ventures with significant reach before Shorta. What has been the most important lesson you have learned about scaling digital products in Latin America, and how are you applying that lesson at Shorta?
The most important lesson is that in Latin America the hardest problems — friction, accessibility, monetization — are exactly where the edge is, if you truly understand the ecosystem. Solving those isn’t a side quest; here, it’s the whole game. And now that we’re focused on local-for-locals content — stories made by and for our own audiences — that understanding matters even more. But here’s the part people underestimate: Latin America demands a world-class experience. Our audiences compare us to the best products on the planet, not to a regional benchmark, and we don’t aim for anything less. That’s the mindset — solve the region’s real problems, deliver world-class quality, and go from Latin America to the world.
Looking back on your journey from a young founder to CEO of a US$6 million-funded startup, what advice would you offer to aspiring Latin American founders building entertainment technology companies today?
Build for the region you actually live in, not the one you read about in Silicon Valley case studies. Our constraints are also our advantage — we understand audiences and behaviors that outsiders simply don’t. Don’t wait for permission or for the market to feel “ready.” The best moment to build the home for vertical fiction in our language was the moment the behavior existed and nobody had built it — and that moment is now. And surround yourself with people who’ve done it before; here, talent and conviction travel further than capital alone.
