Obsolescence is built into the technology industry. Devices are manufactured, sold, used for a period and eventually replaced — a cycle that works well for manufacturers and for users with the means to participate in it regularly. For everyone else, the cycle creates a widening gap between what their hardware can handle and what modern digital life increasingly requires. Arlequim Technologies was founded in 2021 with a model designed to interrupt that cycle rather than accept it as a fixed condition of computing.

The company delivers computer virtualisation services that allow older devices to draw on cloud-based processing power, effectively decoupling performance from hardware age. A machine that a user has owned for several years, and that may have become noticeably slow under the demands of current software, can be brought back to functional relevance without any physical modification or replacement. The computing environment improves; the device itself stays the same.

For Haroldo Jacobovicz, the founding of Arlequim represented a continuation of questions he had been working through across his entire career in Brazilian technology. His professional history covers software services, hardware solutions and the construction of a telecommunications operator that spent over a decade serving corporate clients before being acquired in 2021. Each of those experiences placed him at the interface between digital capability and the practical limits of what organisations and individuals could realistically afford. That vantage point made the hardware performance gap — and its consequences for digital participation — a familiar problem well before Arlequim came into existence.

The company operates across three markets: businesses, public sector bodies and consumers. Each presents the same underlying issue in a different form. Corporate environments often carry equipment across a wide range of ages, creating internal performance disparities that affect productivity. Public institutions face procurement constraints that make regular hardware renewal difficult to sustain, leaving civil servants, teachers and administrators working with machines that fall short of current demands. Consumer users, including Brazil’s substantial gaming population, find that the experiences they seek are gated behind hardware specifications that carry a significant price.

That last point speaks to something notable about the shape of Brazil’s digital culture. Gaming has become one of the country’s most widely shared digital activities, reaching users across age groups, income levels and geographic regions in a way that few platforms manage. The desire to participate in that culture is not concentrated among wealthy households — but the hardware capable of supporting a quality gaming experience often is. Arlequim’s virtualisation service makes that experience available to users who would otherwise be priced out of it.

The coherence of Arlequim’s approach across its different markets lies in the simplicity of the argument at its centre: that computing performance should not be a function of how recently someone purchased their device. Acting on that argument means building a service that is technically reliable, commercially sustainable and accessible enough in cost to reach users for whom hardware replacement is not a live option.

Haroldo Jacobovicz built Arlequim Technologies around that argument, and the breadth of its target markets reflects how widely the problem it addresses is felt across Brazilian society.