Latitud Podcast

You've probably heard from our friends at a16z that every company will become a fintech. Latin America's one of the most fertile grounds for the providers of new financial products and services. There are over a thousand fintechs in the region. In this fierce competition, the ones that flourished were fintechs offering powerful solutions to huge pain points. By enabling cross-border paym...

Being a startup founder comes with a big ambition. To conquer your dreams, however, you should learn the best practices for launching your business, fundraising, and hiring talent. Taking advice from founders who have either exited or transformed their startups into unicorns will shorten that learning journey. Andres Bilbao from Rappi , Dileep Thazhmon from Jeeves , and Ingrid Barth from Linker sh...

Not many people know or believe that Instagram has a Brazilian as a co-founder . Mike Krieger was not only that – he was also the sole developer for Instagram during its early stages. Between the ideation of a mobile check-in app called Burbn and Instagram becoming one of the most heavily used apps of our days, there's a lot to be shared. At Vamos Latam Summit , our connections and knowledge...

We've talked with Pete Flint before. He's a brit deeply immersed in Silicon Valley startup culture and someone who has ushered in two unicorn companies – one of which, Trulia, was the inspiration behind my business, Viva Real. He's now helping entrepreneurs leverage connections, experience, and capital as a partner at the venture firm NFX . Focused on seed funding, NFX has been inve...

After more than two years of a global pandemic, some habits are here to stay. In Latin America, even more so. The boom in tech adoption has held up more in the region when comparing it to the US. But even with this growth, the potential for tech creation is still huge in LatAm. This is just one of the insights from the newest Digital Transformation Report, which is being published today by the ven...

Alfonso De Los Ríos is 23 years old, but his startup experience goes way beyond what you'd imagine for his age. He's the co-founder of Nowports , a startup that is bringing tech to the international supply chain and helping companies move their containers more efficiently. Nowports rode the logistics startups boom during the pandemic. The company raised its Series A one year into the pan...

James Currier is an expert in a key ingredient behind the success of companies like Meta , Uber , and Amazon . The key ingredient? Network effects . They happen when a company's product or service becomes more valuable as its usage increases. James has not only seen the growth of digital businesses but also created four successful venture-backed startups himself in the past couple of decades....

Jimena Pardo started her startup journey after having a chat with the venture capital fund ALLVP . The Mexican venture capital fund focused on solving the hardest problems in Spanish-speaking Latin America and eventually wrote a check for Jimena's car-sharing startup. Ten years later, Jimena is on the other side of the table. After also spending some years as a product manager at Facebook , s...

Jonathan Gheller went from selling tequeños, or fried cheese breadsticks, to being a founder of companies sold to Facebook and Google . In a world where unit economics became the new king for startups, Gheller is a long-term preacher about building businesses that are scalable and profitable. Now, the Venezuelan entrepreneur not only advises early-stage startups. He also connects Latin American ta...

Out of the billions of VC dollars that poured into Latin America in 2021, only 4% were allocated in seed and pre-seed rounds. For the investors at 17Sigma , that's where the biggest opportunity to find the next big thing lies – and LatAm is the perfect place to find it. 17Sigma was created almost a year ago and is investing US$ 30 million in entrepreneurs and projects in the early stages. It...

When it comes to communicating in Latin America, WhatsApp is king: people use it every day, all the time. But how many times did you sign a contract or had your ID checked via WhatsApp? That's a US$ 3.5 billion potential addressable market according to Truora , a Colombian startup that offers businesses tailored digital authentication solutions like background checks and identity validation....

Pretty much everyone knows Endeavor , which is a thriving global community for high-impact entrepreneurs. What you might not know is that Endeavor also has a co-investment arm called Endeavor Catalyst , which has over US$ 500 million in assets under management and has participated in rounds alongside General Atlantic, a16z and Softbank, among others. Endeavor Catalyst has been active since 2012 an...

Alex Szapiro is a veteran when it comes to working with tech in Brazil. He was part of the early Submarino team and served as the country manager for Palm , Apple and Amazon , where he helped bring its operation to the country and stayed for over 8 years of incredible growth. In April 2021, he left Amazon for Softbank , where he's now Head of Brazil and an Operating Partner . And it's an...

As a founder, you likely go out to raise money a handful of times during your journey. Investors, on the other hand, live and breathe pitches and term sheets everyday. Leveraging your position in the face of asymmetry is not an easy task – but it can be done. Tomi Roggio has over a decade of experience in consulting and investing. He joined Latitud as a founding member , launched our rolling fund...

You might have heard on the news a while back that Latitud raised a $13M seed round co-led by a16z and NfX. Today, we are going to do something a bit different: to celebrate our podcast's 100th episode , I'm going to tell you how we raised said round. I decided to provide an open and candid reflection about the process. Think of it as our on "how I built this" – except we'...

It was early 2019 when Softbank 's official landing in Latin America marked the largest-ever technology fund focused exclusively in the region. LatAm was breaking its own records in terms capital injection, and the firm had already tested the waters with a few juicy checks. So Softbank committed US$ 5 billion to the new Latin American Fund – about the same as all of the region’s venture inves...

Communicating safely and practically is something that interests everyone, from government agencies and big banks to small businesses and communities. That's the concept behind Rocket. Chat , an open source communication platform that began in Brazil in 2015 and now has over 12 million users in 150 countries. Besides being highly customizable, Rocket. Chat offers two server options: you can u...

What if Twitch, AngelList and Shark Tank had a baby? That's the question Ali Moiz decided to address as a business opportunity, and the baby is none other than Stonks . Ali is a self-identified Meme Dealer with two multimillion-dollar company exits, over 75 investments as an angel and solid experience in the live streaming space, so I guess you could say he knew a thing or two about what he w...

I think we can call it: Miami has established itself as one of the most important tech hubs not just in the US, but for all countries south of it. As much as the recent boom seems sudden though, the concentration of LatAm startups and opportunities in the area has been on the rise for years. Ana Paula González moved there in 2016, where she launched the Miami operation of 500 Startups . Originally...

Bolivian entrepreneur Martin Escobari went from growing up in a small town to graduating from Harvard. Upon moving to Brazil, he co-founded one of LatAm’s first startup IPOs in 2005: e-commerce platform Submarino became a huge industry player and went on to merge with local giant Americanas.com. As an investor at General Atlantic since 2012, he now lives between New York and São Paulo and wears th...

Santiago Suarez is the Co-Founder and CEO of the “Buy Now Pay Later” solution, Addi.   Through Addi’s rapid ascent, Santi has been a central figure in the boom in online sales and e-commerce since the COVID-19 pandemic, securing over 500,000 customers and 1,000 retailers with his company. Addi raised USD 340 million last year, having already secured some lucrative clients such as Nike, Puma, Apple...

Matias Woloski is the CTO and co-founder at Auth0 , a developer-first identity platform born in 2013 that became Argentina's 5th unicorn in 2019. With clients in over 70 countries , it grew to become a global leader in the Identity-as-a-Service arena, and was recently acquired by Okta for US$ 6.5 billion in early 2021. Auth0 has over 2 thousand enterprise customers and handles around 42 milli...

Mercado Libre began in a Buenos Aires garage in 1999, when online shopping was pretty much all about eBay auctions. Now the biggest company in Latin America, Meli is valued at over 50 billion dollars and active in 18 countries in the region. Brazil is one of the main markets, with around 1.5 million packages delivered everyday, big investments in logistics, machine learning, hiring, and in its own...

What would you do if you had $1.2M in funding and suddenly realized you need to kill the business? In 2018, Deepak Chhugani had a YC-backed startup in the HR space that wasn't going anywhere. He went back to the drawing board and decided it was time to follow his dad's footsteps into the world of logistics and supply chain. But before pivoting, he offered the money back to each of his in...

Jose Jair Bonilla co-founder and CEO of Chiper , the leading B2B e-commerce platform for independent corner stores in Latin America. He co-founded and led software studio imaginamos in Colombia and served clients in 10+ countries, pioneering the implementation of digital transformation processes across the region and accumulating over 15 years of development experience in the process. He was a par...