Swimsuit

Model and CEO Jessica Perez Stunned During Her SI Swim Photoshoot in Panama

The tech entrepreneur was discovered through the Model Search and made her magazine debut in 2012.

Ananya Panchal

Jessica Perez was photographed by Bjorn Iooss in Panama.

Tech entrepreneur Jessica Perez was featured in two back-to-back SI Swimsuit Issues after being discovered through, and winning, the brand’s Model Search in 2011. The Costa Rica native, who grew up in both Honduras and Ecuador, was photographed in Panama in 2012 by Bjorn Iooss. She returned to the magazine the following year and traveled to Easter Island, Chile, where she posed for David Burton.

The former Victoria’s Secret model is the founder and CEO of Tycoon, an app created to help freelancers and models keep track of their money and invoices.

“When we started to build the app I was inspired by these paper booklets I used in my very early days of modeling. They called them vouchers. They had fields for a client name, date, a timeframe, a total amount for the job and then a signature box. I created a system where when I would receive a paycheck from my agency, I would go to my voucher book and check off the job that had been paid. This would help me know which payments were still outstanding,” she explained in an interview with Forbes. “When the modeling industry entered into the digital era, these booklets became obsolete but nothing was developed to replace them. The idea for how to approach building the app came from me thinking about how simple and effective these little notebooks were and how to create that for these new, young models and other freelancers. What would their notebook be? That is Tycoon.”

Below are seven of our favorite photos from the Perez’s SI Swimsuit debut.

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Ananya Panchal
ANANYA PANCHAL

Ananya Panchal is a writer on the Lifestyle and Trending News team for SI Swimsuit. Before joining SI Swimsuit in 2022, she worked at Bustle, the San Francisco Chronicle and the TODAY Show. When she is not writing or doom-scrolling on social media, Panchal can be found playing sudoku, rewatching One Tree Hill or trying new restaurants. She's also a coffee and chocolate (separately) enthusiast. Panchal has a bachelor’s in communications and journalism from Boston University.

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