Brazilian proptech QuintoAndar reached unicorn status with a US$250m Series D investment from SoftBank, with participation from Dragoneer Investment Group, and follow-on from KaszeK Ventures and General Atlantic. General Atlantic led…

Grupo Pegasus invested US$10m in Colombian cosmetics retailer Blush-Bar. (Press Release) Blush-Bar, the pink cosmetics retailer in Colombia, receives investment from Grupo Pegasus, a private business group that develops, manages…

TheVentureCity, the IFC and Ventech made a US$22m investment in RecargaPay, a Brazilian mobile payments platform, with participation from FJ Labs, DN Capital, and various angel investors (through AngelList and…

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.

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…

MESA 24/7 is a Peruvian startup that wants to revolutionize the way restaurants interact with their diners including online booking servicea, mobile payment, and analytics. In this interview with CEO Pedro Callirgos, we explored the evolution of the operation, the business opportunity, and the growth plans of MESA 24/7, which already raised half a million dollars through friends & family and angel investors. Interview in Spanish.