I lson Mateus is a self-made Brazilian billionaire who is the founder and chairman of Grupo Mateus, one of Brazil's largest and fastest-growing food retail and wholesale companies. His is a classic rags-to-riches story. He started his career as a gold prospector before opening a small 50-square-meter grocery store in the 1980s in the northeastern state of Maranhão, one of Brazil's poorest regions.

He has since built that single store into a massive retail empire with a network of supermarkets, hypermarkets, and cash-and-carry wholesale stores, primarily concentrated in the fast-growing north and northeast regions of Brazil. He has built his company into a dominant regional player by focusing on serving an often-overlooked part of the country. He took his company public in a major IPO on the São Paulo stock exchange in 2020, a deal that turned him and his family into one of the wealthiest in Brazil.