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YC LatAm Top Companies, Partnerships for Financial Inclusion & Highlighting Female Leaders
Welcome to Tech Latino! This is Stanford Latino’s biweekly newsletter where we capture the emerging trends, biggest deals, and exciting ideas in the LatAm technology environment.
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In the past two weeks…
🍊 YC releases its 2022 Top Companies list, which includes 10 Latin American companies. Amongst them are Rappi, Frubana, Kovi, and Platzi.
💳 Visa partners with Tribal to expand offerings for SMEs: Visa, the largest payments processor and Tribal, the LatAm fintech that provides payment options for small businesses, have partnered to expand credit lines, update encryption and safety measures, and improve card distribution in small and medium businesses across Latin America.
💬 Slang raises $14 Million in Series A round: Slang, a startup that helps its users become proficient in English by tailoring to their individual needs and their career path, recently raised $14 million in a Series A led by DILA Capital and Acumen LatAm Impact Ventures. Slang is currently available in 10 countries, and offers 130 courses.
💸 Softbank leads funding for two Brazilian startups: This week, Softbank led funding rounds for Brazilian startups Glorify ($40 million) and Trela ($25 million). The former is an app that started in 2020 and allows its users to engage with Christian activities such as meditation, prayers, and readings on their phone. Trela, which was also developed in the midst of the pandemic, is a platform that lets people buy groceries without intermediaries, making food purchasing 20-60% more affordable.
Spotlights : The (Five) F’s!
Every week, we spotlight one of each: a firm, a fund, a founder, and a food item. This week, we add one more F: Female 💓 ! In honor of Women’s History Month, we want to focus on a few of the incredible female leaders we are inspired by, and are so important for the tech ecosystem to thrive.
👩🏼🍼 Firm Spotlight: Theia
A Brazilian healthcare startup founded by Flavia Deutsch and Paula Crespi in 2019, Theia aims to help women between 25 and 45 years of age navigate their health through the prenatal, birth, and postnatal stages of motherhood. The product aims to be transparent in its recommendations, augment autonomy for mothers, and complement digital services with face-to-face consultations. Right now, the company operates in São Paulo, Brazil and plans to use funding by Kazsek and Maya Capital to expand to more cities in 2022.
🤝 Fund Spotlight: Canary, Izabel Gallera
Canary is a venture capital fund headquartered in Brazil, which finances first-round tech companies in Latin America. The fund has invested in more than 100 companies throughout LatAm, including Clara, Facily, and Elevva. Today, we want to highlight Partner Izabel Gallera, who plays an important role in representing women with check-writing power and championing female representation in the Latin American tech ecosystem. Canary recently closed on its third fund that has an estimated 100$ million in commitments.
💡 Founder Spotlight: Mariana Costa Checa
Mariana Costa Checa is the Co-Founder and CEO of Laboratoria, a social enterprise that allows Latin American women from low-income backgrounds to build a career in technology. Laboratoria not only empowers underserved women in Peru to triple their income by gaining technical skills, but provides diverse talent for the Latin American technology industry. Originally from Perú, Mariana holds a BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a Masters Degree in Public Administration from Columbia University in New York. Although she studied abroad, she recalls always being driven by an endeavor to bring more opportunity and increase diversity in her country of origin. Further, Mariana has been recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of the most innovative people in Perú.
👀 Watch Mariana’s TED Talk and shared panel with Mark Zuckerberg and former President Barack Obama!
🍴Food Spotlight: Pupusas
The Salvadorian dish consists of a griddle flatbread made with rice or cornmeal flour. Pupusas are El Salvador’s declared national food item and have a specific day to celebrate them 🇸🇻! Toppings include cheese, chicharron, and refried beans.
Opinion: ¿Dónde están las mujeres? 👩🏽
Author: Michelle Vinocour
Over the last ten years, the prominence of the startup scene in Latin America has exploded; not only have 45+ innovative companies like Rappi, Nubank, and QuintoAndar become unicorns, but the region has gained recognition from funds and investors, with Sequoia Capital highlighting “LatAm is the ideal setting for the internet economy to disrupt the real economy.” Although seeing the excitement and the rising investments in Latin America makes me extremely proud and hopeful for the future, one thing is very disheartening, especially as a young woman: the extremely low number of female founders.
As I began my research on the LatAm startups with the highest valuations and most disruptive products, I realized that most of the top 20 startups that were praised by countless amounts of reports and blogs were led by men, with a few exceptions. Although I had a hypothesis as to why this was the case, I was very curious to find the root cause to the problem.
I originally ‘met’ Priscila Chaves while listening to Marianne Hütt-Cabezas and Jimena Esquivel’s ¡Qué Intensas! Podcast. Priscila, a Costa Rican leader in innovation and technology advancement, is the Co-founder and Executive Director of 10x Impact, a four-time TED Speaker, Ambassador for Women in AI, and Singularity University Leader, with extremely interesting experiences in the technology industry. After my cold Instagram DM, she kindly agreed to have lunch with me. Throughout our conversation, we discussed how to leverage the public system to disrupt education, her experiences in training the next generation of entrepreneurs, and some of the expectations we have for the future of Latin American innovation. Reaching the end of our conversation, I mentioned the sobering statistics above, and naively asked why she thought that was the case. Was there a difference in the way we educate women and men? Was it the case that women are trained to be more hesitant about risk-taking? Was there a gender gap in the resources we give founders? The answer was yes to all the above, and there is a lot more where that came from.
Solving the Root Problem(s)
Priscilla quickly enlightened me on where the core problem behind the lack of female representation in the startup world was coming from, and I have summarized what I learned from our conversation and some further research on the matter down below.
Funding and Female Investors
The following statistics come from this Techcrunch article, written by Claire Diaz-Ortiz:
💰 Statistic #1: “Boston Consulting Group reports that for every dollar a female founder or co-founder raises, she generates 2.5X more revenue than a male founder” .
👨🏿💻 Statistic #2: “In 2019, investments into mixed female-male founding teams represented 16% of dollars invested in Latin America. [...] The women-only teams made up 4% of investment deals in 2019”.
What are we missing then? Why are these smart people not investing in the ventures that will give them the highest return?
The Boys’ Club
As humans, we are pattern-seekers; especially in situations where risk is involved, we like to bet on what we recognize based on experience. For tech founders, this conversation begins at the table, where it is too often the case that we can’t find any women. In Latin America, ‘only 7% of VCs with check-writing ability are women’ (Techcrunch). With such lack of diversity in investment teams, it is nearly impossible to reach equity, with investors failing to remotely understand the importance of female participation on teams, starting with their own. We need women on the team to not only add a different perspective in discussions, but to empower and believe in other women.
Although we believe progress has been made, ‘bro culture’ is a real problem in the startup world; men are very comfortable networking and introducing each other to friends who may be interested in their fields, they’re comfortable sharing their ideas because criticism to their ideas is not criticism to their identity. Women are often left out of the loop, even by friends who mean nothing but good, because they are prematurely ruled out as being uninterested. With less representation in the industry, it is much harder to find connections and see ourselves represented in roles that we wish to attain.
The good news is female VC partners are 2x more likely to invest in female founding teams. This is another big incentive for VC firms to hire women, as their hiring practices have a direct effect on the amount of female founders that are supported with funding. As we see more women investing and in parallel, more women startup founders, more young women will be inspired to pursue an entrepreneurial path.
“One small step for VC partner diversity equals one giant leap for female entrepreneurs and the entire startup ecosystem” — West, Sundaramurthy
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This newsletter was brought to you by:
Michelle Vinocour
Jaime Eli Mizrachi
Manuela Murra