The entrepreneurial ecosystem has become more competitive. While the pandemic put many companies in trouble, tech startups have found ground to grow in the face of the need to make our lives more digital. Those focused on e-commerce, for example, recorded the growth scheduled for the next 24 or 36 months in six months. And venture capital funds know that, in this context, they also have to accelerate their bet. This is what Angel Ventures seeks to do, led by Hernán Fernández and Camilo Kejner, who have just acquired Coonector, a Mexican firm specialized in linking startups with corporations to promote open innovation.
The acquisition, of which the fund does not disclose the purchase amount, arises from a clear reality: more and more companies seek to improve their innovation processes through their association with entrepreneurs. “Before there were many corporations that saw a startup that was revolutionizing their business and could not overcome the temptation to say: ‘give us a budget and we will solve it internally.’ Today the most advanced corporations, who are really looking at open innovation issues, realized that it is easier to bring an external vision to solve the problem, than to try to develop it in-house ”, says Kejner.
This link between both worlds is what Coonector, founded by Carolina and Michelle Martínez, does. The firm, created four years ago, has among its clients the ABInBev brewery, the hygiene and health products firm Essity, Claro Colombia or the information technology firm CompuSoluciones. He has linked more than 80 ventures with corporations, helping them solve internal problems or new business models.
“The corporations, to accelerate their innovation processes, take advantage of the collaboration with startups. And something that is the near future is that not only do they want to stay in a collaborative relationship, there is also a very great appetite to start diversifying as a corporate entity through investment ”, explains Michelle Martínez.
The collaboration strategy will focus on providing business development and generating connections between the Angel Ventures portfolio and the corporations, growing the ecosystem to meet the needs of companies that seek to diversify with investments and being the search eyes of the same fund to guide investment decisions.
“We are seeing how capital becomes a commodity in what we do. There is more competition from foreign firms and more concentration of funds, entrepreneurs have a number of sources of capital that they did not have before. And this is where you have to distinguish yourself from others with smart capital, ”explains Fernández.
Angel Ventures, founded in 2008, plans to launch its Fund III at the end of the year. This partnership with Coonector will also be your cover letter to raise capital and attract entrepreneurs. “We are experiencing something that has not been seen in the region, we have a lot of demand from foreign, national and institutional investors to participate and that makes us face the uprising optimistically. This is leveraged from the results of Fund I and II ”, adds the founder of Angel Venture.
