Louis Devaleix: The Entrepreneur Who Started Polo at 39 and Ended Up on Netflix

Who Is Louis Devaleix? Start Here

Louis Devaleix is a French-born entrepreneur, polo patron, and co-founder of Dazos, a behavioral health technology company based in Boca Raton, Florida. He rose to broad public attention as a featured subject in Netflix’s Polo documentary, which premiered December 10, 2024, produced by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Archewell Productions. He is married to Pamela Flanagan Devaleix, a polo player and attorney, and is the founding patron of La Fe Polo Team.

Look — if you just finished the Netflix series and opened a new tab to figure out who Louis actually is, the answer starts not on a polo field but inside a healthcare software company most people have never heard of.

Louis Devaleix did not grow up playing polo. He came from business and finance, earned a degree from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and was well into scaling Dazos when he sat on a horse for the very first time in 2020. Polo was the surprise second act. And it moved fast.

He was born in France around 1981, making him approximately 44 in 2026. Multiple sources place his age at 39 when he picked up the sport, which aligns consistently across profiles. He’s currently in his mid-forties — not the typical age at which elite competitive careers begin.

According to Netflix’s Polo (2024) and multiple verified profiles, Devaleix co-founded Dazos in 2018, took his first polo lesson in 2020 without any prior riding experience, and within a year had won the East Coast Open in Greenwich — one of the most prestigious 20-goal tournaments in American amateur polo. His business journey and personal life are both documented in the Netflix series. The show premiered December 10, 2024, with all five episodes releasing simultaneously.

Early Life: France, Brazil, and a Golf Club Upbringing

Louis was born in France and moved to Brazil as a baby. His family settled in Rio de Janeiro, living on a golf and polo club — an environment that put him next to both sports from an early age, even though he wouldn’t formally try polo for decades.

Golf was his game. He excelled at it. His parents enrolled him at the Benjamin School in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in 1996, where he competed as a varsity golfer and swimmer. Precision, patience, individual performance under pressure — those athletic foundations didn’t disappear when he switched sports.

After the Benjamin School, Devaleix attended Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business starting in 1999, studying accounting and finance. He later completed advanced study at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

That’s two business schools. Finance ran deep.

The golf background is worth noting not just as biography but as context for how he approaches polo. Both sports reward discipline over raw athleticism, reward investment in equipment and technique, and punish impatience. When Louis describes his polo development, the language is always strategic — building the right team, finding the right horses, competing at the right level at the right time. It’s a golfer’s mindset applied to a team sport.

Dazos: The Behavioral Health Company Behind the Polo

According to Dazos company reporting and BuzzSplatter (February 2026), Dazos is a Boca Raton–based behavioral health platform built specifically for mental health clinics and addiction treatment centers. Devaleix co-founded it with David Farache in 2018, drawing on direct operational experience inside the behavioral healthcare sector. In 2025, the company closed a $25 million Series A funding round led by Radian Capital — a meaningful institutional signal for a niche software company.

Here’s the thing: behavioral health software is a sector most people outside the industry haven’t thought about. But the operational gap it fills is enormous. Mental health clinics and rehab centers have historically run on generic healthcare systems that weren’t built for their patient workflows, billing complexity, or marketing needs. Dazos addresses that with purpose-built tools: a CRM, analytics platform (Dazos IQ), revenue verification (iVerify), and marketing automation (iCampaign).

I’ve seen conflicting data on Devaleix’s official title at Dazos — some profiles from 2024 describe him as CEO, while a more recent BuzzSplatter piece from 2026 uses COO. My read is that his title may have evolved as the company scaled and formalized its executive structure, which happens often after a significant funding round reshapes leadership. Either way, he’s one of the two co-founders actively running the operation.

The $25 million Series A matters beyond the headline number. For behavioral health tech, that kind of institutional backing from a firm like Radian Capital doesn’t happen without demonstrated revenue retention and real customer traction. That funding round — and everything it implies about Dazos’s growth — is almost certainly the financial engine behind La Fe’s horses, the U.S. Open dreams, and the lifestyle the Netflix series documents.

Or maybe I should put it this way: the polo is downstream of the software working.

Quick Comparison: Dazos vs. Generic Healthcare SaaS

La Fe Polo Team: What the Name Means and How It Started

La Fe. The name comes from a farm in Argentina owned by Roberto “Robi” Bilbao — the Argentine professional who became Devaleix’s first polo partner and a key figure in building the team.

In 2020, Louis walked into Sunset Polo Club in Loxahatchee, Florida, for a first lesson with instructor Carlos Gonzalez. “It was my first time riding a horse,” he told ClickPolo. “As soon as I hit the ball one meter I fell immediately in love with the sport.” He and Bilbao partnered, founded La Fe Polo as a competitive entity, and entered the Gauntlet of Polo.

Within a year, La Fe won the East Coast Open in Greenwich. That’s not a minor tournament.

Quick note for anyone new to the sport: a “patron” in polo is both the team’s financial backer and a participating player. Patrons fund the horses, pay the professionals, and compete on the field themselves — they’re not passive sponsors sitting in the stands. A patron typically carries a low handicap (0–2 goals), which reflects amateur-level play, while the pros on the team carry 6–10 goals. The team’s total combined handicap determines which tournaments they can enter.

To become a polo patron in the U.S., the path looks like this:

1. Take introductory lessons at a USPA-licensed club.
2. Register with the United States Polo Association to receive an official handicap.
3. Form a team by partnering with professional players.
4. Enter USPA-sanctioned tournaments at your team’s handicap level.
5. Invest in horses — initially leasing, then breeding for long-term depth.

Devaleix followed that path at unusual speed. La Fe has since competed at the U.S. Open Polo Championship and on the Argentine circuit. The team has included players like Lucas Escobar, Francisco Elizalde, and Bilbao. Louis has also invested heavily in horse breeding — an area where, by his own account, his wife’s expertise in bloodlines has been critical.

Most guides focus on La Fe’s tournament results. What they skip is how deliberately this team was constructed — and how much of that construction runs through Pamela.

Pamela Flanagan Devaleix: Wife, Attorney, and Rescue Polo Project Founder

Louis Devaleix’s wife is Pamela Flanagan Devaleix. She’s a practicing attorney, a competitive polo player, and the founder of the Rescue Polo Project — an organization that saves horses from slaughter in Mexico and Canada. She is also the sister of Kelley Flanagan, the attorney who appeared on Season 24 of ABC’s The Bachelor in 2020.

They met in January 2022 at International Polo Club (IPC) in Wellington, Florida, during the tournament season. Pamela was competing with Hawaii Polo Life, the team that won the Women’s U.S. Open Polo Championship that year. Within three months they were engaged. They married in June 2023. Their daughter, Alina Kelley Devaleix, was born on July 12, 2024 — her middle name a tribute to Pamela’s sister.

“Getting engaged in three months was not really something that was aligned with my personality,” Pamela said on camera in the Netflix series. She wasn’t understating it.

One thing the show surfaces clearly: Louis had a son, Ames, from a previous relationship. He mentioned it openly in the first episode — “the first thing I told her was that I had this awesome little man.” This is almost certainly where the “Louis Devaleix ex wife” searches come from. Viewers notice Ames, assume a prior marriage, and search. The answer is simple: there is no documented ex-wife. Pamela is his only wife on record. The prior relationship that produced Ames has not been publicly discussed beyond that mention.

Kelley Flanagan’s appearance in Episode 2 — where she helped organize and run Pamela’s baby shower — gave the series an unexpected second audience. Bachelor Nation noticed. The show’s reach expanded well beyond the polo world, which was probably not an accident given Archewell Productions’ instinct for storytelling that crosses fandoms.

What most coverage misses is Pamela’s independent standing. She’s not a polo wife who took up the sport to be supportive. She competed at Women’s U.S. Open level before she ever met Louis. The Rescue Polo Project — her initiative, not his — is a functioning organization actively saving horses from slaughter. Her legal career runs independently. Their partnership in polo is genuinely collaborative: she manages bloodlines and breeding, he funds the team and competes.

Netflix’s Polo: What the Documentary Actually Captures

Polo premiered December 10, 2024 on Netflix. All five episodes dropped simultaneously. Produced by Archewell Productions — Harry and Meghan’s production company — the series features six central subjects across multiple team stories: Adolfo Cambiaso, Poroto Cambiaso, Louis Devaleix, Timmy Dutta, Keko Magrini, and Nacho Figueras.

Louis is the only featured patron in that group. He is, by definition, not the best polo player on screen. But he carries one of the most accessible narratives: a businessman who got obsessed with something he was genuinely bad at, invested serious money to improve fast, and then tried to compete at the sport’s upper level while managing a new marriage, a newborn, and a company scaling through a major funding round.

Some argue that centering a wealthy patron in a documentary about elite polo risks making the sport look like an aristocratic hobby rather than a legitimate athletic competition. That’s a fair criticism of how the sport is sometimes perceived. But the show’s tension with Louis isn’t about his money — it’s about the gap between wanting to win and having the skills to deliver it, which is a universal feeling regardless of context.

Prince Harry appears in one episode during a charity polo match. His presence is consistent with his documented involvement in the sport and with the Archewell production model — he and Meghan participated actively in their previous documentary project, Heart of Invictus (2023).

The 2024 U.S. Open Polo Championship in Wellington, Florida, serves as the season centerpiece. La Fe competed. They didn’t win it.

But showing up at the U.S. Open four years after your first riding lesson is its own result.

Voice Search Q&A

Who is Louis Devaleix from the Netflix Polo show?

Louis Devaleix is a French-born entrepreneur and polo patron featured in Netflix’s Polo (December 2024). He co-founded Dazos, a behavioral health software company in Florida, and is the founding patron of La Fe Polo Team, which he started in 2020 after his very first riding lesson.

What does Louis Devaleix do for a living?

He co-founded Dazos, a behavioral health technology platform based in Boca Raton, Florida, which closed a $25 million Series A funding round in 2025. He also invests across multiple ventures and funds La Fe Polo Team as its patron.

Who is Louis Devaleix’s wife?

His wife is Pamela Flanagan Devaleix. They met in January 2022, got engaged three months later, and married in June 2023. Pamela is a polo player, practicing attorney, and founder of the Rescue Polo Project. She is also the sister of Bachelor alum Kelley Flanagan.

Does Louis Devaleix have an ex-wife?

No, Louis Devaleix has no documented ex-wife. He has a son, Ames, from a previous relationship — mentioned openly in the Netflix series — but Pamela Flanagan is his only wife on record. They married in June 2023.

How old is Louis Devaleix?

Louis Devaleix was born approximately 1981 in France, making him around 44–45 as of 2026. He was 39 years old when he took his first polo lesson in 2020 — an age at which most competitive athletes are retiring, not starting.