Accion Venture Lab, Mountain Nazca Colombia, Invictum Capital, and several Colombian angel investors made an undisclosed seed investment in ESCALA Educación, a social enterprise that offers savings plans for higher education as an employee benefit with the goal of increasing access to education and ultimately reducing income inequality. This is the startup’s first institutional investment and Accion Venture Lab’s first investment in Colombia.

The period January-June 2017 marked a milestone for Colombia venture capital. For the first time since LAVCA began capturing VC data, Colombia became the second most active market in terms of VC dollars with US$67m invested across six deals. In November, LAVCA participated in Smart Capital Colombia, hosted by Ruta N and Capitalia Colombia. READ LAVCA’s update on the Colombian startup ecosystem and download LAVCA’s presentation.

Komal Dadlani founded Lab4U in Chile in 2013 to disrupt the way science is taught in classrooms across Latin America and the world. In this interview, Komal Dadlani talks about the US$37.8b edtech market and how she benefited from both local government funding in Chile (from Startup Chile and CORFO) and how winning WeXchange in 2016 helped better connect her with the investment community in the region and the Bay Area.

Mariana Costa, Herman Marin, and Rodulfo Prieto founded Laboratoria, an organization to teach low-income women in Latin America programming and web development skills. More than 400 female developers from Peru, Chile, and Mexico have passed through Laboratoria’s program since 2014; 75% have found jobs, with a 3X average increase in their starting salary. In this interview we learn about Laboratoria’s mission to close the coding gender gap and graduate the best tech talent in Latin America.

In this interview with {reprograma} founder & CEO Mariel Reyes, we learn about how she bootstrapped the organization and forged a partnership with Facebook on her mission to close the gender gap in Brazil’s technology sector. {reprograma} teaches unemployed Brazilian women how to code and has graduated 88 junior front-end engineers in 18 months, with a 97% completion rate and 63% job placement rate.

LAVCA spoke with Benoit Verbrugghe, Member of the Executive Committee, Ardian about their regional strategy for Latin America, including the opportunity in infrastructure and renewable energy and staffing and opening an office in the region in the near-term.

Mediação Online, a legal dispute mediation service for Brazilian businesses and consumers, recently received R$500k in investment from 500 Startups, having previously been accelerated at Wayra Brasil. In this interview with founder & CEO Melissa Felipe Gava, we learn about Brazil’s “stratospheric” number of litigation proceedings, and how Mediação Online is working to lower the cost of mediation services…

DataGran is an ad optimization startup in New York that raised an undisclosed amount of capital from Wayra Colombia and Quake Capital earlier this year. In this interview with founder & CEO Carlos Mendez, we learn about DataGran’s traction to date, why they are expanding globally, and what’s next for adtech (hint: it involves AI and blockchain)…

Company: Kingo Founder: Juan Fermín Rodriguez Investors: ENGIE, FCP, FMO, Proparco, and H-Reff, PeopleFund Kingo, a Guatemalan startup providing pre-paid solar energy kits to almost 50,000 low-income households across Central America, raised…

LAVCA’s 2017 Venture Investors Annual Meeting during LAVCA Week saw record attendance on September 28 in New York. From Latin America to Silicon Valley, investors, entrepreneurs, angels, accelerators, and tech companies gathered to bridge connections and discuss portfolio updates and key trends in global and regional VC.

Company: GuiaBolso Co-Founders: Benjamin Gleason, Thiago Alvarez Investors: Vostok Emerging Finance, the IFC, QED Investors, Ribbit Capital, KaszeK Ventures, Omidyar Network, Valor Capital, e.Bricks, Endeavor Catalyst GuiaBolso is a mobile personal finance…

Cultura Colectiva is a digital media company creating content for Spanish-speaking millennials that raised MXN$72.4m from Dalus Capital earlier this year. In this interview with co-founder and CEO Luis Enríquez, he shares insights into how they built a content platform reaching 70 million people per month, and how Spanish-speaking millennials consume content (HINT: they’d rather share than click).