Connecting companies with consumers and suppliers that are at each end of the world is the goal of Latin Leap, a venture capital studio firm that was established to create an impact investing platform for technology companies with specific objectives in Latin America.
“We bring to the venture capital world a differentiating proposal, which is what we call ‘E to E’, the Emerging Market connection with Emerging Market, we are positioned as a link between Asia and Latin America”, comments Stefan Krautwald, managing director by Latin Leap. The firm will develop at least $ 100 million in this initiative in the next 24 months.
According to the manager, both markets – Asian and Latin American – have many similarities and there are interesting solutions that have been developed especially in Southeast Asia that have the potential to contribute to the Latin American region. However, one of the great problems for these solutions to reach the continent is distance and cultural differences.
“They are on the other side of the world and they need partners who do know the local environment, know how to move and land these companies in the region, and that is what we do,” says Krautwald.
This practice is called soft-landing , and consists of helping a company with all support in the regulatory field and administrative services to establish itself in a new market.
The objective of Latin Leap is the scaleups, which are technology-based companies that are in the growth phase and that already have a proven model, Asians that have potential in some sectors with potential in the region.
Among the main axes of the firm, Krautwald explains, are health ( healthtech ), a sector that the pandemic has shown to be deficient in the region; agriculture ( agtech ), because although Latin America has 40% of the fertile land in the world, its level of technification in the field is still very low; urban mobility, due to the congestion of cities such as Mexico City, Bogotá or Lima, and fintech , which is experiencing a boom in the region.
