Co-founders Lucas Ferreira of Lightning Labs and André Neves of ZEBEDEE will serve as the foundation’s executive director and director of partnerships, respectively.

Vinteum’s mission is to train and fund open-source developers across Brazil and Latin America to work on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, an area that has become critical in recent years as bitcoin matures beyond hobbyist use cases.

The total amount in funds that Vinteum now holds is undisclosed.

In addition to announcing its launch, Vinteum named its first grantee, Bruno Garcia. Garcia is a Bitcoin Core developer and a Brink grant recipient. Garcia will act as Vinteum’s director of education, dedicating himself to educating promising developers while also continuing his technical contributions to Bitcoin, which include reviewing and testing pull requests, extending and improving test coverage, and working on improvements for the peer-to-peer wallet and REST API modules.