The new curated program brings together builders, open-source contributors, and technical leaders. Mel is part of the launch cohort from Mexico City.
Nebius launched its Fellow Program, a curated initiative for AI builders, open-source contributors, and technical community leaders who are already working inside the ecosystem.
The program page presents it as a way to support builders with access, visibility, resources, and community, while creating stronger connections between Nebius and the broader technical ecosystem.
The first cohort includes profiles from Israel, the United States, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Mexico, Argentina, the United Kingdom, and other hubs. Among them is Ángel “Mel” Meléndez Córdoba, founder of Pokta Labs, listed from Mexico City.
Nebius describes six areas of value for fellows: early or exclusive access to products, credits, and technical resources; visibility through speaking, content, and community; a network of builders, founders, and engineers; opportunities to collaborate with the DevRel team; direct support from the team building the platform; and a curated community of AI builders.
The important part is not only the benefits package. It is the kind of relationship Nebius is trying to build: less mass marketing, more collaboration with people who already create, teach, maintain communities, or build technical projects.
Participation is not defined as one narrow task. The program mentions meetups, workshops, local builder gatherings, tutorials, demos, blogs, videos, open-source projects, support for other builders, product feedback, and representation inside technical communities.
That design leaves room for different profiles. One fellow may be strongest at technical content, another may operate a local community, another may contribute from infrastructure, and another may work through open projects.
The launch cohort has a clear bias toward infrastructure and builder communities. Profiles in the group work across distributed inference, Kubernetes, GPU virtualization, MLOps, practical agents, technical communities, educational content, and product labs.
That mix matters because AI is becoming less a conversation about isolated demos and more a conversation about operational capacity: deployment, inference, costs, data, evaluation, developer experience, and adoption inside real organizations.
Mel's inclusion in the cohort connects Frutero with a global network of AI builders from Mexico. Nebius presents him as founder of Pokta Labs, a frontier tech studio focused on accelerating healthcare and education, with experience in design, implementation, and training for teams adopting technology.
For Frutero, the signal is concrete: regional work can be in conversation with global infrastructure without losing its local base. The opportunity is not just “being on the list,” but turning that access into learning, collaborations, and useful projects for technical communities in LATAM.
The open operational question is what can be built, documented, and shared from this cohort so more builders in the region can participate in the next layer of AI infrastructure.
