Diogo Mónica was born in the U.S. state of California, but was raised primarily in Portugal.

[6] While still at university, Mónica presented a paper at a conference in the United States, garnering job offers from Google and Facebook.

He opted to take a job with the startup payment platform, Square (now Block),[3] as lead security engineer.

[8] In 2015, Mónica left Square[3] to become the security lead at the software company, Docker.

[3] Mónica is the president of Anchorage,[11] which has the first federally chartered cryptocurrency bank in the United States[12] and received a valuation of over $3 billion in 2021.