Alfonso Cobo

Alfonso Cobo (born 1992, Canary Islands, Spain[1]) is a Spanish businessman. He is best known as the founder of Unfold, which was acquired by Squarespace in 2019.[2]

Early life

Alfonso was born in the Canary Islands, Spain and spent much of his childhood in Madrid before moving to the United Kingdom at 17.[3]

Career

As a university student, Cobo studied design and architecture.[4] After working as an architectural designer in London,[5] Cobo received a scholarship to Parsons School of Design and moved to New York.[3] Cobo has a master's degree in strategic design and management from Parsons School of Design and a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Brighton.

In 2017, Cobo recognized there was no software or app that could create a portfolio of his work on an iPad. Later that year, he launched his portfolio layout app, the first one to exist for iPad.[6]

Cobo founded Unfold in 2018 and was later joined by Andy McCune as a co-founder.[6] Unfold, a mobile application that allows users to create Instagram Stories posts using a variety of templates and other tools.[4][7] In 2019, Unfold was acquired by Squarespace. By then, it had 16 million users. In 2023, Unfold had over 60 million downloads, and over 1 billion stories were created using it.[8][1][9] In 2020, Cobo launched Bio Sites with Squarespace, a tool that allows users to share relevant links.[10]

Cobo received a Gaingels award in 2023.[3] He also launched Hypelist, a social mobile application allowing for the curation of a recommended products list, in 2023.[11][12]

Personal life

As of 2019, Cobo lives in New York City.[5] He is gay.[13]