Access LAVCA’s Annual Review of Tech Investment in Latin America, an 8-page report with insights on the major markets and sectors, top deals by amount, most active investors and new players, co-investments, and more.
Upcoming
In response to an evolving venture environment in Latin America, LAVCA facilitates educational, peer-to-peer, and networking programs for the venture community to engage with local and global investors, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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)…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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Cultura Colectiva Raises Round from Dalus Capital to Create Content for Spanish-Speaking Millennials
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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Weex es un Operador Móvil Virtual que cuenta con más de 150k usuarios activos y un crecimiento de doble dígito mensual. Ricardo Suárez, co-fundador de Weex, nos explica de qué manera la compañía está cambiando el sector de telecom y generando acceso a información a la juventud mexicana.
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LAVCA spoke with Johanna Posada, Founder & Managing Director for Elevar Equity about the opportunity for investing and exiting impact in Latin America and LP priorities when committing to an impact fund.
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After participating in Y Combinator, Hogaru, a subscription cleaning service for small businesses in Colombia, is consolidating operations in Colombia, where it already operates at profitability, and eyes potential expansion markets.
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Since launching in September 2014, Aliada now provides 50,000 services monthly, and expects to reach over 60,000 services by the end of 2017. In this interview with founders Ana Isabel Orvañanos and Rodolfo Corcuera, we explore how Aliada is trying to impact the lives of thousands of Mexicans while combating the social stigma associated with domestic labor.
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Apli is a Mexican startup connecting workers to flexible job opportunities that just raised US$1.5m. In this interview with Co-founder and Co-CEO Vera Makarov, we learn how Apli is innovating the traditional recruiting process for service and retail jobs in Mexico, and why she thinks improving turnover and absenteeism in small businesses is a US$100b opportunity in Latin America.
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Despite its status as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, Peru has traditionally ranked lower than its Latin American counterparts in terms of the development of the venture capital ecosystem. In fact, until recently Peru had almost no country-dedicated VCs and between 2011-2015 consistently captured fewer venture investment dollars than Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, according to LAVCA Data. Where does Peru stand as of 2017, in terms of a mature VC ecosystem?
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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.
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Intellibrand is a digital trade marketing platform that received a R$5m investment from DGF Ventures to fund international expansion. In this interview with LAVCA, Co-founder & Chief Commercial Officer Francesco Weiss talks about the digital marketing landscape in Brazil and Intellibrand’s expansion plans. Interview in Portuguese.
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SpaceDat brings big data to agriculture with a drone enabled digital platform. Guillermo and his Co-founder & CEO, Cesar Urrutia, have 10+ years of experience in aerial imagery analysis and startup strategies, but agtech is underfunded in the region because the life cycle of the product is correlated to the life cycle of the crop.
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Nibo is a fintech startup empowering small businesses to navigate Brazil’s complicated accounting and tax landscape. With 2,000 accountants on the platform, and integrations with over sixty major accounting software solutions in Brazil, Nibo raised a R$20m Series A from Swedish investor Vostok Emerging Finance, with participation from existing investors Redpoint eventures and Valor Capital, to scale their platform.