Heritage

Serogi’s founder is the great-grandson of Dr Ayres do Sacramento Menezes — the first Black doctor of São Tomé and Príncipe, and the man whose name the country’s main hospital still carries.

Dr Ayres do Sacramento Menezes (1889–1946)

Born in Guadalupe, São Tomé and Príncipe in August 1889, Ayres do Sacramento Menezes was schooled first on the islands and then in Lisbon, and qualified as a physician at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon. He returned to serve as sub-director of the Health and Hygiene Services of São Tomé and Príncipe, and became a significant public-health and political figure in the early twentieth century — campaigning, through bodies including the League of African Interests, for the rights and welfare of African populations under colonial rule. He died in Dondo, Angola, in April 1946.

He is still honoured in São Tomé today. The country’s principal hospital, in the capital, is the Hospital Dr Ayres de Menezes, and there is a statue of him on the site. It is a rare thing to build something that is still doing its job, under your own name, eighty years after you die.

He built infrastructure that outlasted him — and did it as an independent figure, arguing for his own people rather than waiting to be granted anything.

The same instinct, a different material

Serogi was founded by his great-grandson, Sergio de Carvalho Neves. The connection is not decorative, and it is not a claim to inherited credit — it is the reason the company is shaped the way it is.

Infrastructure, not products

A hospital is not a service you rent; it is a thing that exists and keeps working. Serogi builds the layers underneath — the search index, the reasoning, the voice, the map — rather than renting someone else’s and putting a name on the front.

Independence

He worked as his own man in a system not built for him. Serogi is independent, unfunded by the platforms it competes with, and paid for by the people who use it rather than by advertisers.

Evidence as a duty

Medicine is the discipline where being confidently wrong has a body count. That is the standard the search engine is held to: sources attached, provenance carried, and an honest "we do not know" over a fluent guess.

Dignity by default

He argued for the rights of people who were not being asked. Privacy at Serogi is architectural rather than promised, for the same reason: the people using it should not have to trust us to behave.

One built physical infrastructure for a nation’s health. The other is building cognitive infrastructure — tools for how people think, search and remember. The material is different and the century is different. The standard is not: the work has to be good enough to still matter after you are gone.