The Peruvian Engineer Betting That Latin America Should Build Its AI, Not Rent It

From Lima, Mariano Suquilanda Gallo built an AI coding agent that thinks in Spanish and never takes anyone's code. Today he leads Ad Astra Technology, the parent company aiming to turn that thesis into an industry.

There's a question Mariano Leonidas Agustín Suquilanda Gallo asked himself before writing the first line of Theus, and it organizes everything that followed: why should a developer who thinks in Spanish have to work with tools that think in another language, hosted on servers they don't control, under decisions they can't audit?

The conventional answer was that there was no alternative. Suquilanda Gallo's answer was to build one.

Today he is CEO and Founder of Ad Astra Technology, the Peru based company behind Theus, an AI coding agent that operates natively in Spanish, runs from the developer's own terminal, and keeps the code, the project index, and the working memory inside the user's machine. Theus runs natively on macOS, Linux, and Windows, and provides access to a catalog of more than sixty AI models from over a dozen providers under a single subscription.

An Uncomfortable Thesis: Dependence Is Technical, Too

The regional conversation about technological sovereignty usually stops at infrastructure, where the servers are and who administers the data. Suquilanda Gallo takes it one layer deeper, into the behavior of the software itself.

"When a tool has to take your code to someone else's server in order to help you, you've already given up something you won't get back," he says. "And when you also can't see why it made the decision it made, you've stopped being the engineer. You've become a spectator of your own project. We built Theus the other way around. The project stays on your machine, every decision is on the record, and the tool speaks to you in the language you think in."

That inversion explains the three rules the company imposed on itself from the design stage: that the user's project remains under their control, that every system decision is auditable, and that the tool thinks natively in Spanish rather than functioning as the translation of a product conceived in another language.

Two Proprietary Components, Built From Scratch

The bet rests on two proprietary technology components, both developed entirely in Lima.

Ñaupa, named after the Quechua word, is the code intelligence engine. It builds a complete map of the project directly on the user's own machine, parsing up to 158 programming languages and allowing Theus to understand in seconds a codebase that would otherwise take a developer hours to grasp. That the map never leaves the user's equipment is not an implementation detail. It is the condition for the entire proposition.

TITAN is the model router. It analyzes each task and determines which of the catalog's more than sixty models is best suited to resolve it, leaving an auditable record of which model was used and why. For the user, the practical effect is that they stop administering separate subscriptions and stop guessing which model fits which job.

The Customer Nobody Was Looking At

The product today serves three profiles from the same foundation: independent developers, companies whose core business is building software for clients, and the segment Suquilanda Gallo cares most about, development teams embedded inside companies that are not technology companies.

Banks, insurers, manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics organizations often operate under internal information security policies that prohibit code from ever reaching third party servers. For many of them, that alone placed AI development tools out of reach.

"That team isn't evaluating which tool is fastest. It's evaluating which one it can use without breaking its security policy, and for a long time the answer was 'none,'" he explains. "We showed up with an architecture that already met that requirement before anyone asked us for it, because we built it that way out of conviction, not out of compliance."

From One Product to a House of Products

In 2026 the company formalized its structure with Ad Astra Technology as the parent company and Theus as its first product brand. The decision reflects a broader roadmap.

The company is developing a desktop version of Theus, designed to bring the same technology to people inside enterprises who do not write code, including operations, administrative, and business teams, without requiring them to use a command line terminal. In parallel, it is preparing new specialized service lines for enterprise clients across multiple industries, each operating under its own identity within the corporate structure.

The strategy allows Theus to remain focused on its original mission: becoming the reference tool for anyone who writes code, regardless of scale.

Lima as a Starting Point, Not a Ceiling

The company's next phase of growth is geographic. It is bringing a proposition already validated in Peru to Spanish speaking developers across Latin America. Because Theus was designed in Spanish from the beginning, there is no need to adapt the product for the region. It was already built for them.

For Suquilanda Gallo, that idea reaches beyond his own company.

"For years the conversation was whether Latin America could adopt artificial intelligence in time. That's the wrong question. The question is whether we're going to build it or rent it," he says. "A country that only rents its technology doesn't negotiate its terms. Theus exists to prove that it can be built from here, at the level the international market demands, and without asking anyone's permission."

About Ad Astra Technology

Ad Astra Technology is a Peruvian technology company that develops products and specialized service lines in applied artificial intelligence. Theus, its first product brand, is an AI coding agent for developers and software development companies. Ad Astra Technology is headquartered in Lima, Peru.

Learn More

To learn more about Theus and Ad Astra Technology's vision for building secure, Spanish first artificial intelligence in Latin America, visit theus.pe or explore astratech.pe.