Lucas Castillo
Lucas Gianfranco Castillo Degracia is Director of Consulting at the Pan-American Society of Young Investors. He is eighteen, an investment analyst intern at Panama's sovereign wealth fund, and co-founder of Divenue.
Work at PSYI
As Director of Consulting, Lucas built the society's institutional partnerships with the Fondo de Ahorro de Panama, the Ministerio de Economia y Finanzas and the Superintendencia del Mercado de Valores, alongside private-sector partners Morgan & Morgan and Quantia.
He launched the PSYI internship programme, which places members directly inside financial institutions rather than leaving their exposure to finance theoretical. He also designed and ran the Golden Harpy Investment Challenge, a national stock-picking competition.
Investment work
Lucas is an investment analyst intern at the Fondo de Ahorro de Panama, the sovereign wealth fund built from Panama Canal revenues and one of the few sovereign funds in Latin America. His work there covers Asia-Pacific macroeconomic research and the Total Portfolio Approach. He has published financial analysis in La Prensa.
Robotics
In 2025 Lucas captained Panama's national team at the First Global Challenge and won, taking the country from 141st place to first against 181 nations. It was Panama's first world robotics championship and the first time in the competition's history that the host country won.
He structured the campaign as four specialised squads covering field strategy, pit operations, media and support for rival delegations. He received the Bronze Medal for the Jackie Bezos Award for International Enthusiasm after mobilising international support for Team Jamaica following Hurricane Melissa.
That followed eight years of leading teams. He began competing in 2015 and was team leader for five national WRO championships between 2016 and 2023. On VEX Robotics teams he ran strategy and led the coding group through consecutive national championships.
Divenue
Lucas co-founded Divenue with Fernando De Saint Malo Petrosky, and built the platform the company runs on. Divenue is Panama's all-in-one platform for event and party organisers, covering venues, providers and ticketing.
The idea came out of PSYI-adjacent work. Running financial education events in Panama City, the two found that the hard part was never the content, it was finding somewhere to hold them. Divenue exists to remove that step. You can read his account of why they built it or the company origin story.
Earlier work
By sixteen Lucas was working with companies in Panama, including one of the country's best-known restaurant groups and firms in recruiting and legal technology. At seventeen he travelled to Bangalore, India as technology advisor for Aprender STEAM, meeting more than fifteen companies and advising the organisation's leadership on platform strategy.
What is next
In 2026 he was selected for Y Combinator's invite-only Startup School in San Francisco, one of roughly 5,000 builders chosen from more than 30,000 applicants. Born in Panama, he begins at Yale University this autumn as a member of the Class of 2030, studying Economics and Statistics & Data Science.
His long-term conviction sits at the intersection of neuroscience and machines, that as neural signal reading grows more sophisticated the boundary between the body and the physical world dissolves, and any machine can become a genuine extension of the self.