Category: Latin America Startups and Investing

Ep 40 Jie Hao: How China Sees Latin America Startups

Category : Crossing Borders Podcast, Latin America Startups and Investing
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Jie Hao is a partner at Magma Partners who previously built and sold two companies before heading to Chile to look at investment opportunities in 2012. To make this podcast, I repurposed a segment of a conversation we had while I was in Shanghai for the launch of the partnership between Kr Space and Magma Partners to create the Sino-Latin American Accelerator. This conversation was a part of our doing business in Latin America course through 36Kr, China’s version of TechCrunch, where we taught Chinese entrepreneurs and investors about the growing opportunities for investing in Latin America.

In this short form episode of Crossing Borders, we talk about how Magma Partners got involved in China, why Chinese investment is important for Latin America, and how China and the US are looking at Latin America differently.

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LatAm List: Latin American Startup News in English

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing
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Latin America’s entrepreneurs are solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges, yet there is only minimal English language coverage of their work. As a result, these stories remain confined to the region, hidden away in their native Spanish or Portuguese.

With major English-language tech publications covering only the biggest stories, generally $20M+ fundraising and big ticket acquisitions from the region’s most prominent startups who have been funded by US venture capitalists, English speakers only have limited access to insights on Latin America’s booming startup ecosystem.

After we started the Crossing Borders Podcast ~1 year ago to highlight entrepreneurs with amazing stories with some connection to Latin America, the feedback was overwhelming. Building on what we’d started, we realized that there was a pressing need to bring the US and Latin American startup ecosystems closer together and to keep the English-speaking public informed of current events in Latin American entrepreneurship.

To solve this issue, we launched a new Latin American tech news site, called LatAm List to cover the stories that the English tech media isn’t covering. These stories are already being shared by mostly Spanish-language sources like PulsoSocial, El Mercurio, La República, and many more and many are aggregated into the great LAVCA bi-weekly English newsletter. Unfortunately, the language barrier prevents these narratives from reaching a wider, more global audience. (more…)

Latin America’s Growing Mobile Market

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing
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Latin America is the world’s second fastest-growing market for mobile subscribers, after Sub-Saharan Africa. In a region of approximately 640 million people, there are already 415 million mobile phone users, over half of which (more than 200 million) are smartphone users. By 2020, predictions say that 63% of Latin America’s population will have access to the mobile Internet.  

This news is crucial for both large global mobile providers and local tech companies. Latin America has proven to be extremely adaptable, adopting new technologies quickly and leapfrogging over older systems, such as landlines, entirely.

Brazil and Mexico already rank 3rd and 5th in the world for the most Facebook subscribers. In the Dominican Republic and Bolivia, mobile app usage is growing at 116% and 155%, respectively. As a whole, Latin America’s immense mobile growth presents a huge opportunity for businesses targeting the mobile market.

Why is Latin America experiencing so much mobile growth?

In 2015, Wharton published an article pegging Latin America as “the next big mobile battleground,” back when only 32% of Latin Americans had a smartphone. That article predicted that up to 50% of the region would be accessing the Internet via mobile devices by 2020. However, it is only 2018, and already more than 50% of Latin America’s mobile users are using smartphones to access the Internet. (more…)

China-Latin America Innovation Year: Vibrant Mexico

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing
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One of the most exciting parts of the Kr-Magma Partners platform is showcasing the growing business opportunities in Latin America for Chinese entrepreneurs and investors. As part of our partnership with Kr Space, we created the China-Latin America Innovation Year and will be putting on an event each month to highlight the unique opportunities in different Latin American countries.

Dong Bo, Kr Space’s Vice President, debuted our joint 2018 China-Latin America Innovation Year plan: Kr-Magma Space will host 10 monthly Latin American country themed workshops and will rotate between Beijing and Shanghai. Over the next year, we’ll showcase Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Panama, and Puerto Rico to helping more Chinese entrepreneurs to understand Latin-American market and how to do business in each country. At the same time, the events will help more Latin American entrepreneurs to understand and leverage China, whether in their home countries or in China, with the ultimate goal of building a cross-border innovation, entrepreneurship and financing ecosystem. (more…)