If everything is possible, the only differentiator is what you choose to do, and what you choose not to do - Laura Rodríguez, Humara

‍Laura Rodríguez is the Co-founder and CEO of Humara, a Galician software company that rebuilds how waste and recycling plants are designed and operated. After more than a decade in the waste management and recycling industry, she is now focused on finding more efficient ways to optimise the use of resources and is doing so together with her co-founders and a growing team, scaling the business internationally and attracting important partners and investors.

Humara is a software solution for a very traditional industry, and Laura’s background in waste management gives them a critical advantage - knowing what problems players in this area have and how to talk about these problems and present their solution.

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“We are pragmatic; we show the tool running on a real plant, no smoke and mirrors. The moment an engineer sees their own materials, their own scenarios, their own numbers on the screen, we're already speaking the same language.

‍The hard part is almost never technical. It's organisational. In large corporations, decisions travel through many layers, and that takes time. But once you sit down with the engineer who lives with the problem every day, the conversation changes entirely.

That's where it clicks. Traditional engineering in this sector generates enormous uncertainty, the kind that keeps you awake at night when you're making decisions about multi-million-euro infrastructure that will operate for 25 years. What we bring is coherence: one place where everything connects, where changing one variable propagates through all the others. A single source of truth.

You don't sell that by explaining it, you sell it by showing it.”

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Focusing on the tech layer is probably one of the biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make when pitching to a legacy industry company, she highlights. 

“<<We have AI, we have physics-based simulation, we have digital twins.>> Nobody cares. Or worse, it puts them on guard.

A lot of the people we talk to have spent decades running simulations on the back of a napkin, and built plants that have been operating for 20 years on those napkins. They have every reason to be sceptical of someone walking in claiming to reinvent how they work. 

Honestly, before founding Humara, I would have been a tough sell in that room myself. I'm deeply sceptical and data-driven. I understand exactly the look we get in those first meetings.

‍The question we hear most often is: "Are you here to take our jobs?" The answer is no. We're here so you can make better decisions based on data, instead of spending half your day crunching numbers across an infinite spreadsheet. Your expertise is still the main asset. What changes is how far that expertise reaches when you stop burning it on repetitive tasks.”

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Having gone through the same pain is what really makes the difference, Laura adds. Knowing what real-life scenarios your users actually go through is what sets the foundation of a strong solution.

“There's a scene that repeats itself in this sector: you've been working on a deliverable for weeks. You're hours from the deadline. Then one input changes, the waste composition, a recovery ratio, whatever, and you have to redo half the proposal. Everything you calculated is invalid. Something in you breaks. It's the fear of making a wrong decision that will shape infrastructure for the next 25 years, with all the accumulated exhaustion and the deadline bearing down on you.

We've lived through that. Many times, in the front row. And when you sit across from an engineer, that shows. We're not speculating about their problem from a meeting room. We know exactly what kind of night awaits them if things go sideways. So when we tell them we can take that moment out of their life, we've already won them over.”

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Humara is a platform that grows continuously. They started with a solution that helped customers designed better plants and then have added an intelligent assistant to help them make better decisions. Laura talks about how they chose what features to add and how to develop the platform so they are not just following a trend, but add real value.

“As engineers, we've built the platform we wish we'd had ourselves, and that cuts both ways. Designing waste treatment plants involves many technical layers, and keeping the MVP mindset is hard when the problem is that rich. More than once, we've caught ourselves building an ocean liner when a scooter was what the moment called for.

Three things I try to keep front of mind:

• First: listen to the customer, but with a filter. This is a double-edged sword. Our customers always want more customisation and flexibility, which pushed us from rigid models to flexible ones, we even integrate with users' own databases now. But "customer-oriented" can't mean "whatever the customer asks for." It means understanding the problem behind each request, which isn't always what they're actually asking for.

• Second: ruthless prioritisation. Developing software is now a commodity. Anyone can build anything. If everything is possible, the only differentiator is what you choose to do, and what you choose not to do. That's the competitive advantage right now, and most teams underestimate it.

• Third: be willing to kill your darlings. When you're building a new standard, you take three steps forward and two back. We've invested months in product branches we've had to abandon. I say "kill your darlings" deliberately, because that's exactly how it feels. Letting go hurts. But being willing to do it is part of the job, not an exception. This is the way.”

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Humara was launched in 2021 with a very small team and have now reached 10 people and they are still growing. In this phase, Laura says that the most important role they want to hire for this year is a commercial lead who will evolve into CCO.

“Humara has grown on the back of a very strong technical team. We've built the product, closed complex customers, and proved the problem we solve is real. The next bottleneck isn't technical, it's commercial. And selling in this sector isn't easy: long cycles, many stakeholders, organisations where a decision moves through five layers before it closes.

We're looking for someone who raises the bar. Someone who builds a proper commercial engine, not just closes deals. Someone who knows how to navigate complex enterprise sales in this kind of account.

One important caveat: the founders are staying very involved in sales. We're not hiring someone to take that part of the business off our hands, we're hiring someone to sharpen it. At this stage, sales belong to the founders. That's not incompatible with bringing in the right person to build what comes next.”

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Laura and her team are building what they call a standard operating layer of the waste industry - “the system on which plants are designed, simulated and operated in real time”. In three to five years, she hopes that every new plant in Europe will be designed and operated on Humara, “the same way nobody designs a building today without Revit, or runs a factory without an MES. It's a vertical software layer for an industry worth hundreds of billions that has operated without that standard until now.

In the short term, my focus is concrete: execute the Humara Operate pilots flawlessly and close them before the end of the year. That's the next milestone. My priority is operations – helping plant operators make better decisions every day with a single source of truth. We're changing this sector brick by brick. Every pilot done well is one more brick laid.”

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Finally, we wanted to know what she thinks impact-driven entrepreneurs need most in order to grow and succeed. Laura says it’s two things:

“The first is capital that understands slow industries. Legacy industries don't move at the pace of a classic B2B SaaS. Selling into waste, energy, or water means long cycles, layered decision-making, and a very high cost of error for the customer. 

Too much capital still expects hockey-stick growth curves that don't match how these sectors actually transform. What we need most is investors who understand that changing a 100-year-old industry takes more than 18 months.

‍The second is for the impact sector to stop competing with itself. There's a strange tendency: because there's less capital around, impact founders treat each other as competition, even when they're solving adjacent problems. But we're all pushing against the same inertia: the status quo. 

‍We need more collaboration, less guarded behaviour, more honest sharing of the brutal lessons without sugar-coating them. The "lone founder against the world" narrative doesn't serve us. At this scale, the competition was never between each other.”

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Thank you, Laura Rodríguez!