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).

Tbit is an agtech startup that raised R$1m from BR Startups, a fund whose investors include Monsanto, Qualcomm, Algar, Microsoft Participações Brazil. In this interview (in Portuguese) with co-founder Igor Chalfoun, we learn about Tbit’s vision for helping to guarantee food security on a global level.

Tienda Nube provides over 16,000 merchants an omnichannel e-commerce platform, with integrations for credit card and offline payment, shipping and logistics, and distribution in the region’s major online marketplaces. In this interview, co-founder and CEO Santiago Sosa shares insights into the challenges online merchants face in Latin America, and how Tienda Nube is innovating around them.

Yogome es un startup mexicano de edtech que levantó una ronda de US$6.6m serie A. En nuestra entrevista con Manolo Diaz, CEO y co-fundador de Yogome, nos explica cómo se construye una marca global de edtech, la razón por la cual dirigen su marketing hacia los padres, y los planes que tienen para lanzar productos para escuelas y maestros.