Welcome to rounds of the week. In recent days, VC firms invested in a number of Latin American startups: Colombia’s Morado, Uruguay’s Strike and Floki, InstaCasa and Sofi, from Brazil.
Week after week, at least one Colombian startup appears in our rounds roundup, as the South American country stands out in terms of projects that attract venture capital in early stages.
Statista data put Colombia as the third country in Latin America with the most venture capital investment, with 7.18% of the total in 2021, only behind Brazil, which took 57.7%, and Mexico, with 19.27%.
On the other hand, the most recent data from the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America (LAVCA) puts Colombia a little lower than the top three of the most outstanding countries in venture capital investments. Brazil leads the list with 50.5%, followed by Mexico with 22.7%, Chile with 9.1% and Colombia with 8.2%.
The fact is that venture capital continues to flow through the region. Let’s see where the Seed investments were allocated in Latin America this week.
Floki
Floki, a Brazilian foodtech that uses artificial intelligence to automate the purchasing process of small companies in the food sector, received a seed round of 50 million reais ($10.6 million), led by the NFX and Valor Capital funds.
Sofi
The fintech Sofi, from Brazil, has just received angel investment contributions of $200,000. The startup seeks to promote the financial health of the population and already operates in Uruguay, Brazil and Peru. Investors from Anjos do Brasil, a non-profit organization created to encourage angel investment and support innovative entrepreneurship in the country, sign the check for $168,000. The check for $44,000 will be signed by investors from a deal club formed by Apoema Hub, an accelerator that offers intelligent connections and access to highly experienced intellectual capital in the investment format and for business empowerment at the next level of maturity.
Strike
Founded in 2021 and led by Santiago Rosenblatt, Strike is a platform that seeks to transform and expand access to cybersecurity and continuous penetration testing, raised a seed round for $5.4 million, led by Greyhound Capital, and followed by FJ Labs, Canary, NXTP, VentureFriends, Magma Partners, Latitud and OrokVentures. This round will be used to expand its network of strikers around the world and reinforce its leadership position in Latin America during 2022. Subsequently, Strike will seek to expand into the U.S. and European markets.
The round also saw the participation of angel investors such as Pieter-Jan Vandepitte, Chief Operating Officer of DeliveryHero; Sergej Epp, Chief Information Security Officer of Palo Alto Networks; Sergio Fogel, Co-Founder of dLocal; Matias Woloski, Co-Founder of Auth0; Patricio Jutard, co-founder of Mural; Miguel Ángel Peña, director of Banco Galicia and NaranjaX; Miguel Burger-Calderon, co-founder of Ethyca; and Nicolás Acosta, former Director of Product at Twilio, among others.
Morado
The ‘everything’ store for the beauty industry, founded and led by Colombian entrepreneur Angela Acosta in 2022, announced the raising of its pre-seed investment round for $5 million. The round features participation from A16z, Tiger Global, H20 Capital, QED Fontes, Latitude, Village Global (backed by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg), plus a long list of angel investors.
The capital will be used to grow its inventory management and last-mile logistics technology that allows hairdressers and beauty professionals to have a marketplace dedicated to the supplies they require in their business, in addition to starting their international expansion towards Mexico, where is in negotiations with different suppliers and will have a complete operation for the last quarter of 2022.
InstaCasa
InstaCasa, a proptech that created a solution that makes architectural projects available to real estate agents in Brazil to present houses to their potential clients, announces a round of 15 million reais ($3.2 million). The company has developed a platform that is capable of interpreting the physical characteristics of each lot of a development, such as dimensions and slopes, and cross them with legal occupation restrictions such as zoning and construction regulations, with the aim of helping the sales force development to present the buyer with the full potential of what can be built on each lot. The experience is also complemented with augmented and virtual reality technologies applied to projects compatible with each lot individually. The investment is led by G5 Partners and accompanied by Terracotta Ventures and Gerdau Next Ventures.
