The Argentine entrepreneur and investor, with more than three decades in the internet industry, will share how fiction designed for the phone is produced, measured and funded.
Ariel Arrieta has worked in internet and online media since 1994. He has been an entrepreneur, built one of Latin America’s leading ad networks and, for fifteen years, invested in startups across the region through NXTP Ventures. Today he is co-founder and chairman of Shorta, Latin America’s first platform for serialized fiction in vertical format.
On Thursday, October 29, at 5:30 p.m., Arrieta will be one of the keynote speakers at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 in Konex’s Gran Sala. His talk, “Las series verticales desde adentro” (Vertical series from the inside), poses a concrete question for media outlets and producers: how a story designed for the phone from day one is written, produced and measured.
Ariel Arrieta, from the internet to venture capital
In 2003, Arrieta co-founded Digital Ventures and InZearch, which grew into one of Latin America’s leading ad networks. In 2011 he co-founded NXTP Labs, now NXTP Ventures, a seed-stage fund focused on Latin American technology companies.
Through the fund, he was an early investor in companies such as Auth0 and Vercel. According to his Web Summit Rio speaker profile, NXTP’s portfolio exceeds 190 companies and includes more than six unicorns. Arrieta is a Kauffman Fellow and completed Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management Program.
Shorta: serialized fiction designed for the phone
The idea for Shorta took shape as Arrieta was closing his chapter at NXTP. In 2025 he traveled to China with Tomás Escobar, the creator of Cuevana, where they saw the microdrama boom up close. They were joined by Armando Bo, winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Birdman.
The platform launched on March 30, 2026, on iOS, Android and the web, with more than 40 original series. Each title has between 30 and 90 episodes of one to three minutes, is shot in six to ten days and costs between USD 30,000 and USD 50,000 on average. The model combines a free, ad-supported tier, a premium subscription and a branded content unit, which produced with Naranja X Latin America’s first branded vertical series.
Shorta closed a pre-seed round of more than USD 5 million, backed by investors such as Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Matías Woloski (Auth0) and Emiliano Kargieman (Satellogic). Its goal is to surpass 100 series in Argentina during 2026 and 500 across the region before the end of 2027, with production in Mexico and Spain.
What he brings to Media Party Buenos Aires 2026
Media Party Buenos Aires 2026 is built around the theme “Storytelling in the age of agents” and calls for defending cognitive sovereignty. Arrieta’s experience brings another angle to that conversation: how storytelling changes when format, device and viewing data are designed together.
Before producing, the Shorta team tested dozens of micro-stories on social media and tracked in real time where audiences stopped watching. Today the platform measures every episode and can rewrite or replace those with lower retention. For Arrieta, the difference from social media lies in narrative: “We compete on story, cliffhangers and continuity.”
For journalists and editors, the keynote offers insights into mobile audience retention and new narrative formats. For entrepreneurs and product teams, it adds the perspective of someone who funded startups for fifteen years and is now building his own platform. Those who want to dig deeper into funding and creators can join the Media Party Sandboxes 2026. The same Thursday, Marco Túlio Pires, from Google, and Sevgil Musaieva, from Ukrainska Pravda, also take the stage.
From October 29 to 31, the question of how to tell stories on the screens we use most also takes the stage at Media Party Buenos Aires 2026. Ciudad Cultural Konex.
Register here to be part of it.
