Tag: magma partners

How To Work In Tech in Latin America

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing
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I wrote a guest post on VentureBeat called How to find a job in a Latin American Tech Hub aimed at highlighting the growing trend of US and European tech workers coming to Latin America to both start companies, but also to work for high potential startups like GroupRaise, PropertySimple, The Intern Group and more. I covered four main paths to working for tech companies in Latin America:

  1. Working remotely from a coworking space
  2. Working for an established Latin American company
  3. Working with a Latin American startup targeting Latin America
  4. Working with a Latin American startup targeting the US market

Each of these have their pros and cons, but all are great ways to get involved in the local tech scenes, travel the world and experience a new culture.

From the article:

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Portal Finance

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing, Magma Partners
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I’m excited to announce that Portal Finance is the winner of our FinTech competition and is now part of the Magma Partners portfolio. Portal Finance stood out from of the multitude of companies that applied from all over Latin America because of founders Diego Caicedo, Felipe Puntarelli and Nicholas Bohorquez’s deep experience in the market and the ability to translate it into a top notch product with clients in multiple countries that can expand worldwide. (more…)

Raising US VC Money from Latin America

Category : Latin America Startups and Investing
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Note: A version of this article originally appeared in Inc with the title How to Raise Venture Capital if You’re Outside the United States.

Over the past three years, I’ve been working with 30+ companies that have their bases across Latin America build their businesses. Many of these companies are really US companies that just happen to have a tech and sales team in Latin America and want to raise capital in the US. Others are Latin America B2B companies that would love to raise money in the US, but have found hard sledding.

When I first got started, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find investors to follow in on our companies and our strategies were all wrong. In 2015, I got on a plane to California with Adrian Fisher, the founder of PropertySimple, to take his company to the US market. He’d build an amazing product, similar to Zillow, but in Chile, and 1000+ real estate agents using his product and millions of people using PropiedadFacil to find properties. (more…)

Three Years of Magma Partners

Category : Magma Partners
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Francisco, Diego and I first started working on Magma Partners in December 2013, which means we’re just passing our 3rd birthday. We originally planned to invest in 4-6 Chile based companies per year, but quickly found that demand for private capital, high quality mentorship and a bridge to the US market outstripped our modest goal.

We like to be the first check into a startup and invest an average of $50k initially, with the capacity to follow on with $250k more in two niches:

  • B2B companies that serve the Latin American market
  • Startups whose tech team is based in Latin America but whose primary market is the US.

In 2016, we invested in 7 new companies, moved to new offices in Santiago and expanded our presence in Colombia and in the US. We’ve honed our expertise in helping Latin American startups derisk the jump to the US market and have had our first successes helping B2B companies in Latin America negotiate significant deals with legacy companies.

We also focused on building out our networks in Colombia, Mexico and the US. As more of our companies started to expand outside of Chile, it was the logical next step to live up to our promise of helping entrepreneurs with more than just money.

As we turn 3, here’s some of our 2016 stats: (more…)