Brazil’s innovative Link School of Business to launch in Miami, drawn by the area’s rising

May 18, 2026

After six years of success, Brazil’s top college for entrepreneurship is opening its first U.S. campus, preparing to welcome students in Miami this August.

Link School of Business offers an award-winning, customized program that gives each student a business mentor, mind mentor and wellness coach to help them develop not only a startup but also, their personal mindset and body. The school also features its own venture-capital fund and access to lawyers, accountants and other business services to help students develop sustainable companies.

The mix of classes for entrepreneurship and personalized support has helped Link students since 2020 to launch more than 200 ventures that have raised more than $80 million to date, says Alvaro Schocair, the serial entrepreneur who founded Link and is championing its expansion.

“We’re probably the most entrepreneurial college in the world, if you consider the number of students who have businesses. Seventy percent of students become entrepreneurs while in college,” with many obtaining venture-capital backing, Schocair told Refresh Miami.

Choosing Miami over more established tech hubs

Link aims to accept its first 25 undergraduate students this August in Coconut Grove at a small space at 2982 Grand Ave., “in a walkable area, above a Pura Vida café and in front of CocoWalk,” Schocair said.

The school’s leadership team considered more established tech hubs in Palo Alto and Boston for the U.S. launch, but opted for Miami for several key reasons.

First, Miami has a large Latin American community, which may already know Link, or likely would be open to a top school from South America. Second, it’s faster to fly from Brazil to Miami than to the U.S. west coast or northeast.

“Third, the city was shining in terms of entrepreneurship. We see people moving to Miami, companies establishing in Miami. We feel a different energy, compared to what’s happening in California, Massachusetts or New York,” said Schocair. “And it helps that it’s easier to get an operating license for a school in Florida.”

Catalyzing the U.S. campus is Pedro Gomes, a Brazilian lawyer and serial entrepreneur who had been running the entrepreneurship program at Northeastern University in Miami for two years. He’s excited to join an innovative school specialized in “building future builders.”

“There’s an uncertainty level in people now, whether they’re going to have a job or not,” Gomes said, referring to concerns that Artificial Intelligence will slash employment. “With entrepreneurship, you’re building that better future.”

Gomes, as head of ventures, will develop Link’s incubator, accelerator and venture-capital fund in Miami. Those will be “primarily for Link students but will also be open to the community and South Florida tech ecosystem,” Gomes said.

The story behind Link School of Business

Schocair never set out to build a school for entrepreneurs. No one in his family had even started a business before. Growing up in Brazil, his father worked as an executive with a French company and his mom as a teacher.

He earned his bachelor’s at the prestigious Getulio Vargas business school and noticed nearly all of his classmates sought careers as executives with top-tier multinationals, investment banks or management consulting firms.

Yet in college in the mid-1990s, he co-founded an online marketplace for the chemical industry, ChemHunter.com. That startup was soon acquired by a venture-capital group.

“I put a lot of money in my pocket at the age of 20. I was on the front cover of the business newspapers in Sao Paulo, and … it was very cool to see that everyone was using what I had created with some friends of mine,” Schocair said. “So, from that point on, I decided that I would not seek any job, and I would be an entrepreneur.”

Schocair used cash from his startup sale to open an asset-management company, Tarpon Investment Group. By 2007, his group had $2 billion in assets under management and sold shares in an initial public offering.

Inspired by Babson College and other U.S. universities

Some of the assets Schocair managed came from the endowments of U.S. universities, including Duke and Stanford. Schocair visited those schools to see clients, and he prospected at other U.S. universities.

He liked to sit in on classes and soon realized that some US business schools provided a more hands-on, real-world approach to learning than schools in Brazil. Those schools had startup founders and top executives teaching classes and students working on projects for companies. After visiting entrepreneurship-oriented Babson College in 2017, he decided to offer something similar in his homeland.

In 2018, Schocair gathered 100 leaders in Brazil from business, academia, the arts, sports and other fields to seek ideas on what a modern business school should offer. He figured he’d invest in the new school, but soon, fell so in love with the venture he left finance to develop Link.

Opened in 2020, Link now operates on a custom-built, high-tech campus in Sao Paulo [pictured above and below] next to the central park of that mega-city. The school uses AI-powered, face-recognition cameras to count students in classrooms, eliminating the need for time-consuming roll calls. Its main building, designed by Perkins + Will, sports ceiling-to-floor windows for natural light, a garden, systems to save water and energy, plus other eco-friendly features.

Link now employs some 80 staffers in Brazil plus nearly 140 teachers, who are mainly entrepreneurs, Schocair said. It offers four-year, bachelor’s degree and 18-month, master’s degree programs, plus courses for high school students. It currently serves about 1,100 students, each with their own mentors for business, mindset and physical health.

“In five years, we’ll probably reach the same size in the United States,” said Schocair.

Of course, customized education costs. In Miami, Link has set undergraduate tuition at $98,000 per year, including the personal mentoring, business support and classes ranging from finance to empathy and etiquette.

Education for entrepreneurs has payoffs too. In Brazil, Gomes says, some students have covered tuition from successful startups, applying the lessons they learn at Link.

*Link School of Business campus in Sao Paulo (also pictured at the top of this post.)*

*Rendering of Link School of Business’s future Miami campus.* *Photos provided by Link School of Business.*

Doreen Hemlock

Doreen Hemlock is a journalist who worked years with the South Florida SunSentinel newspaper and before that, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Peru, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. She holds an MBA from Columbia University, thanks in part to a Knight-Bagehot fellowship. Reach her at [email protected].

Latest posts by Doreen Hemlock (see all)