Latitud Podcast

Caetano Lacerda and Raphael Dyxklay scaled their fintech from $1M to $40M in revenue in just two years. And they did it all out in the open. Barte is a financial control center that helps medium to large companies manage their cash flow. Co-founders Caetano and Raphael decided to build this in public as soon as they found product-market fit. Since then, they’ve shared their wins, their failures, a...

This chat is one I have wanted to share for a while. Back in 2022, we at Latitud met and invested in Fabrício.    He had just left his corporate job. He also had a precise diagnosis. Healthcare insurers in Brazil were losing 20 to 40 percent of their revenue to fraud, waste, and abuse.  And he knew what the next step was. What happened next is a masterclass in early-stage execution.  Fabrício and...

Fintech is the most mature startup segment in Latin America. But we still have a long way to go.  Tomás Mindlin had an insight — companies that scale their user base need a payment network that can walk alongside them. And that’s how tapi was born.  In just three years, the Buenos Aires-born fintech became the largest payment network in Spanish-speaking Latin America. A year ago, it raised a 22 mi...

Santiago Rosenblatt has been hacking since he was a kid growing up in Uruguay. Curiosity turned into a career: as an ethical hacker, Santi led cybersecurity efforts at companies like AstroPay and PedidosYa, now part of Delivery Hero. But he had a hunch that this pain was actually massive, and faced by businesses of all sizes, sectors, and headquarters. Chats with company leaders proved that they w...

Jorge Vargas Neto is now on his third journey as a fintech founder – and we had the pleasure of being not only one of their first customers, but also their first venture capital check. In three and a half years, the fintech achieved a $20M ARR and went from -696% to 63% gross margin. BHub now supports over seven thousand companies in Brazil, through backoffice services powered by AI. Jorge’s back...

When it comes to pulling off successful acquisitions in tech, few people in Latin America have a playbook that’s as refined as Dennis. The CEO of TOTVS has been at the forefront of one of Brazil’s most aggressive expansion strategies, leading about 50 acquisitions. It all started 25 years ago, when Dennis co-founded an auction website that would compete with giants such as DeRemate and Mercado Lib...

Belo was born from a simple vision: making crypto as easy to use as any other tech or currency. Today, half a million people use the app to store, spend, and send money. Leveraging stablecoins, they protect themselves against inflation and unlock financial freedom.  Crypto is more accessible and impactful than ever across Latin America – and Belo is a sizable part of that movement. The vision migh...

From a family of entrepreneurs, Matias Gath wanted to be part of the change brought by startups. After an exit to the delivery conglomerate Glovo, Matias joined co-founder Agustin Iglesias in a new endeavor.  In this episode, Matias shares the journey of taking Pulppo from a PowerPoint to an operating system for real estate agents, freeing them up to become home-buying advisors. We chat about: – W...

While the US is facing SaaS fatigue, the story of software as a service is still on page one in Latin America. The region has leapfrogged the on-premise stage, with companies looking for digitalization fixes that are easy yet personalized. This is where Vertical SaaS comes in.  Here at Latitud, we’ve seen how some software as a service have traded market size for market share, aiming to lead by fi...

DOWNLOAD THE FULL STUDY HERE: https://www.latitud.com/latam-tech-report We just launched the newest edition of The LatAm Tech Report, our annual deep dive into the region’s startup ecosystem. It's a powerful reminder that LatAm founders aren't just building solutions. They're building unique innovations for the global stage. This year, we focused on key trends, opportunities, and ch...

What’s the best way to make employees have skin in the game? Giving them a true chance at ownership. This is what employee stock ownership plans are all about.  An impressive 85% of Latin American startups have already set up an ESOP. That’s the headline of a study by Caravela Capital, Norte Ventures, and Credit Saison . But there’s still a lot to be done. This episode is all about tactical advice...

From his first days at university, Rodrigo realized he wasn’t going to follow a traditional path. An internship at the Brazilian payment company Stone was enough to inspire him to create his own startup.  Through a mix of expense management software and financial services, Conta Simples now helps tens of thousands of companies stay on top of their finances and unlock their full potential. Conta ha...

Groupon, VivaReal, Nomad: Lucas Vargas spent over a decade sharpening his growth playbook for startups in Latin America. The end result is the true embodiment of founder mode. Be it product or marketing decisions,  Lucas went against the grain and trusted his intuition on the road building Nomad, a bank for Brazilians who include dollarization in their financial life planning. 2 million customers...

If you're Brazilian or have lived in Brazil but you've never heard of Dr. Consulta, you've probably been living under a rock. So many people in the world don't have access to healthcare plans, and this is definitely the case in Brazil. Over a decade ago, Thomaz Srougi started working on this problem. And now, Dr. Consulta has already supported over 6 million Brazilians. Thomaz...

Download Atlantico’s Latin America Digital Report 2024: https://www.atlantico.vc The new edition of Atlantico’s Latin America Digital Report is out today — and it’s all about how LatAm does it best when it comes to creating winners in tech. Ana Martins, Julio Vasconcellos, and I sat down and chatted about the biggest findings from the report, and what they mean for founders and investors in the re...

Lautaro Schiaffino and Ezequiel Sculli are two startup founders with a clear mission: enabling small and medium businesses to compete with players of all sizes.  Working with these SMBs for over a decade in Latin America, they've conquered both an exit and a new frontier to work on: artificial intelligence.  Darwin AI brings companies not only software, but an employee capable of making decis...

The Latitud Podcast is back with a new season — but that’s not all. We’re entering a new phase: Tomas Roggio will join me, Brian Requarth, as we uncover the playbooks used by founders and investors transforming Latin America. We hope you’ll leave each episode with a new approach to take your startup to 0, 1, and beyond. We couldn’t have found a better first guest than André Penha — the computer sc...

Scott Hartley was a researcher and went on to work with product and operations at companies like Facebook and Google. But the most well-known part of Scott’s journey began when he hit Sand Hill Road. Scott went on to become a co-founder of Two Culture Capital and Everywhere Ventures. Across these two VC firms, he invested in over 300 startups around the world — Latitud and LatAm included. In a wor...

Back in 2018, Santiago Gomez and Alejandro Casas were just two young and hopeful founders, fresh into YC. However, with a team of 25 working on an e-commerce business, they struggled to find funding.  "There's no founder-product fit", the investors would say. After a while, it clicked that their passion was elsewhere. They were challenged by a mentor to kill the startup and start bu...

Over a decade ago, Matias Recchia created a startup to take home maintenance services online. IguanaFix expanded across Latin America, and eventually attracted the Brazilian unicorn Madeira Madeira. After the sale, Matias dived into a new challenge: bringing more efficiency to the US real estate market. Keyway uses data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to improve how American...

AI has been the talk of the town for a while. But have you seen it in your run-of-the-mill bank yet? Well, Hyperplane is changing that. About a dozen banks in Brazil are already getting all the information they have, running it by the startup's artificial intelligence, and then predicting customer behavior and building personalized experiences. The startup finally came out of stealth a few we...

Unicorn stories generally look at the beginning and the end of the journey. There's not a lot out there about the messy middle, filled with patience and hard work. That's why we invited the co-founders of Pismo, 99, and Upload Ventures to our most recent Vamos Latam Summit. By the way, you can already click this link to pre-register for our next, incredible edition of VLS . In this episo...

Most of the time, the road to startup success is not a straight and short one. Founders can face unexpected roadblocks and then take detours – especially in Latin America. Kristen Durham, the VP of SMBs and Startups at Zendesk, chatted with the founders of GetNinjas, Madeira Madeira, and Silverguard in our most recent Vamos Latam Summit. They shared the obstacles seen in their long journeys as ent...

Fundraising the right way to end up with a healthy cap table isn't usually a top-of-mind priority for startup founders. But it should be. Making a dilution mistake in the earlier stages can bring you and your startup a lot of problems when it's time to raise new rounds. That's why we called experts from BZCP, Carta, Campbells, and Gunderson Dettmer. They shared the best cap table ma...

A Series A is a crucial moment for every venture-backed business. Raising this round is a turning point for startups, from validation to scale. So at our most recent Vamos Latam Summit, we invited investors from Latitud Ventures, Canary, Valor Capital Group, and Fintech Collective to share their perspectives on the path to a Series A. By the way, you can already click this link to pre-register for...