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 co-founder Rafael spent months designing the first product. That included val...

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 million dollar Series A round, led by Kaszek and Andreessen Horowitz. At Latitud Ventures...

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 were trying, but failing, to cover their safety vulnerabilities. That’s how Santi created St...

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 to the pod to give us a masterclass on how to successfully incorporate artificial intelligence in...

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 Libre. And while he didn’t win that fight, it was the best way to learn about how to build and grow ...

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 might be simple, but the execution isn’t. In this episode, we had a chat with co-founder and CEO...

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: – What real estate insight led to the creation of Pulppo; – How to define company values based ...

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 finding product-market fit inside an industry. That’s the case with Cometa’s private schools, F...

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 challenges across fintech, SaaS, e-commerce, logistics, and artificial intelligence. If you’re looking for one ...

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 when setting up an employee stock option plan for your startup. What you’ll hear: — When to ...

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 has also raised more than 60 million dollars with investors – and I was fortunate enough to h...

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 later, Nomad is expanding its offers and combining financial and travel services. This epis...

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 recently embarked on a new startup journey to disrupt healthcare once again. With the help of artificial intelligenc...

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 region. Mercado Libre, iFood, and Nubank are just the beginning for Latin America. What you’l...

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 decisions that'll boost their sales. Darwin AI has raised 2.5 million dollars with investors, Lat...

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 scientist who saw metrics that were better than he ever forecasted when he co-founded and became th...

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 world now ruled by AI, Scott talks instead about IA, or intellectual amplification. On a similar...

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 building something, just the two of them, that really lit a fire under their feet. Oh yeah, and they should ...

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 Americans manage investments in commercial properties. In this episode, Matias and I talk about: — Wheth...

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 weeks ago, with a USD 6M round to boot. We're over the moon about being early investors in Hyperplane an...