Manuel Villa worked in the financial industry for 11 years, first in Tokyo and later in New York. In 2016, he left finance and entered the investigative journalism masters program at Columbia Journalism School. After graduation, Manuel was a data journalism fellow at The Marshall Project. He was later selected as the first Neo4j data journalism fellow at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), where he worked on the Paradise Papers before returning to The Marshall Project.