Building Trust Before the Proof Exists with Manuela Zoninsein, CEO and Cofounder of Kadeya

This is the final episode of our Hispanic Heritage Month 2026 season of Moneda Moves. All month, we’ve been asking one question: who gets trusted in the U.S. economy right now, and how is that trust built?

We’re closing the season with Manuela Zoninsein, a founder who won over investors, employers and the U.S. Air Force before her product had commercial proof.

Manuela is the CEO and cofounder of Kadeya, a network of low-waste, high-margin micro bottling plants. Each station is a bottling plant in a box the size of a vending machine. It fills a stainless steel bottle with your drink in seconds, then washes and sanitizes the bottle when you bring it back. She calls it Divvy bikes for bottles.

Kadeya has raised more than $10 million, including over $1.3 million in Air Force research grants. This year, the company is deploying its first commercial stations.

Kadeya is her third company. She launched an agritech data service in China that was acquired by a partner. She built another in Brazil, funded by the Brazilian government, that grew into the country’s third-largest online marketplace for smallholder farmers. She worked in international business development at Palantir and has backed more than 30 women-led climate startups as an angel investor.

Before any of that, she spent nearly a decade in China as a correspondent covering climate and infrastructure for Newsweek and Engineering News-Record. Most recently, she spoke on the TEDx Chicago stage.

She’s a proud Brazilian immigrant who moved to the U.S. at seven. She’s the daughter of a Marxist economist and a feminist anthropologist, and she speaks Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese.

In this conversation, Manuela shares how growing up in a family of planners and activists taught her to think in systems. She talks about the rock bottom that pushed her into entrepreneurship. She also explains why she built Kadeya around one rule: no single-use containers.

She walks us through how she sold the same product to the Air Force under two different administrations by changing the story to fit the audience. She also shares the simplest way she knows to build trust as a founder: tell people what you’re going to do, then go do it.

We also get into the gap between the big vision and the day to day. That includes how far this year’s deployment goals have moved, and the decision to expand beyond industrial workplaces.

Recorded live in Chicago in partnership with SevenThirty Goods. Thank you for spending this season with us.