Leonardo Passos da Cunha is a seasoned global executive whose career has been defined by orchestrating growth where complexity meets opportunity. Over seventeen years, he has built and led cross-functional teams across Europe and the Americas, guiding organizations through mergers and acquisitions, post-merger integration, and large-scale transformations that convert strategy into measurable value. A dual Brazilian-Portuguese national now splitting his time between Toulouse and Charlotte, Leonardo brings an uncommon blend of boardroom acuity, operational rigor, and multicultural fluency to every mandate he accepts.
Today, Leonardo serves as Director of M&A and Integration for North America at Sibelco, where he steers value creation plans and integration roadmaps across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. His remit spans inorganic growth, synergy capture, and geographic expansion, with a particular emphasis on the glass recycling platform. Under his leadership on the Strategic Materials Inc. (SMI) integration, the business executed a disciplined deployment of operational and commercial synergies that contributed to a doubling of EBITDA—a result achieved not by chance, but by methodical alignment of people, processes, and priorities. He complements that work by supporting joint ventures in glass recycling that unlock scale advantages and market access across multiple states.
Before relocating to the United States, Leonardo served as Sibelco’s Global Director of Growth & Optimization based in Antwerp, where he owned the end-to-end M&A lifecycle—from target screening and due diligence to negotiation, closing, and integration. In that capacity, he completed bolt-on acquisitions, led two integrations, and oversaw due diligences across Europe and the Americas. He also managed major greenfield and capacity-expansion investments, building the foundation for growth in a circular economy where the economics of recycling and the realities of industrial operations must harmonize. This chapter of his career sharpened his instincts for governance, risk, and the capital discipline required to scale sustainably.
Leonardo’s governance perspective is informed by active board service. He represents Sibelco on the board of Jundu, Latin America’s preeminent silica sand mining company, where he contributes to oversight of strategy, compliance, and long-term value creation. He complements this with volunteer board engagements and advisory work that keep him close to entrepreneurial ecosystems and ESG initiatives. His boardroom presence is as pragmatic as it is strategic: he asks incisive questions, presses for clarity on risk, and ensures that investment theses are anchored in customer value and cash-flow reality.
Prior to Sibelco, Leonardo shaped market strategies at Borealis in Vienna as Senior Global Marketing Manager within the Energy and Communications segment. There he launched innovative product lines and sustainable grades for fiber-optic and energy-cable applications, growing volumes and profitability in a fast-moving environment. He also co-founded a sector alliance to accelerate sustainability, underscoring his belief that industry progress is most durable when it is collaborative. The Borealis experience broadened his commercial lens, linking polymer science, customer economics, and regulatory trends into coherent growth plays.
Earlier, at Imerys across Brazil and France, Leonardo evolved through roles that bridged corporate development and market leadership. As South America M&A Manager, he built and managed a pipeline that produced completed transactions and partnerships in carbonates and perlite while honing a practical, valuation-driven approach to inorganic growth. As Global Marketing Manager and later EMEA Marketing Manager, he served as a linchpin between science & technology and the commercial front lines—accelerating new product development in talc, mica, and wollastonite, and cultivating applications in automotive, packaging, and conductive polymers. The throughline in these experiences is his facility for translating technical potential into commercial traction.
Leonardo’s formative years at DuPont and Braskem grounded him in the disciplines of business development, operational excellence, and customer-centric innovation. At DuPont Sustainable Solutions, he built a project portfolio from the ground up, focusing on process safety, operational excellence, and environmental management—capabilities that continue to inform his integration playbooks and transformation agendas. At Braskem, he managed high-value polymer portfolios and orchestrated market entries in telecommunications and energy, experiences that sharpened his sensitivity to pricing power, supply dynamics, and the practicalities of scaling new offerings.
Beyond the corporate arena, Leonardo invests in impact and education. He co-founded Instituto Regeneração Global, an NGO dedicated to social and environmental regeneration, and has partnered with buildOn to help construct schools in Senegal, Malawi, and Nicaragua. These commitments deepen his perspective on sustainability—not as a slogan but as an operating constraint and a leadership responsibility. He is equally at home in a board strategy review and on the ground where community outcomes are measured in access and opportunity.
A committed educator, Leonardo teaches at Toulouse Business School, offering courses in negotiation, valuation, M&A, and strategy. His classrooms are laboratories for real-world problem solving, where he brings cases from active integrations and growth projects to test ideas against practice. He is fluent in Portuguese and English, with professional proficiency in Spanish and French, and he leverages this linguistic dexterity to build trust across borders and functions. His writing and speaking extend to publications and conference contributions, particularly on industrial materials, biodiesel business models, and UHMWPE applications.
Academically, Leonardo pairs an Executive MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management with a Mechanical Engineering foundation from UNICAMP, augmented by specialized programs in venture capital, M&A, and commercial excellence from institutions including Berkeley, Fundação Dom Cabral, FGV, and Insper. This blend of engineering rigor and managerial breadth equips him to interrogate the assumptions behind a spreadsheet and to design operating systems that actually deliver on strategic intent. He is equally comfortable in a data room as on a plant floor or in a customer’s boardroom.
As his career continues to broaden, Leonardo has added health-tech advisory experience and European M&A professional affiliations to his portfolio, reflecting his curiosity and adaptability. Yet his professional north star remains constant: build resilient businesses by aligning strategy with execution, and do it through disciplined governance and teams that are empowered to solve for the customer. Whether scaling a recycling platform, consolidating a fragmented materials market, or advising founders at the frontier of science, he brings the same ethos—clear vision, methodical execution, and a belief that growth and stewardship must advance together.
Character:
Leonardo leads with integrity anchored in accountability; he sets clear expectations and holds himself to the same standards he asks of others. He is steady under pressure, preferring evidence and transparency to shortcuts or spin. He cultivates trust through consistency—doing what he says, when he says, and owning outcomes in full.
Knowledge:
His expertise spans the full M&A continuum, industrial operations, and market strategy, enriched by hands-on integration leadership across multiple geographies. He couples engineering literacy with financial acumen, enabling precise dialogue from process design to capital allocation. Continuous learning—through teaching, affiliations, and publications—keeps his perspectives current and practical.
Strategic:
Leonardo frames choices in terms of value creation, risk, and time, building theses that translate into operating plans with measurable milestones. He designs portfolios that balance core optimization with adjacencies and options for future growth. His strategies are execution-ready, with governance and incentives aligned to outcomes.
Communication:
A multilingual communicator, he bridges executives, operators, and customers with messages tailored to context and culture. He is a patient listener who turns insights into crisp decisions and clear next steps. In the boardroom and the classroom alike, he simplifies the complex without losing nuance.
