Marcos Galperin

Sharing 6 insights on how AI is reshaping the tech ecosystem in LatAm, from a panel discussion at the AWS Summit São Paulo. 1) The rise of the technical CEO in the world of AI: We’re seeing more CTOs step into the CEO role. In our own portfolio, we have great examples: David Grandes, Pedro M.. 2) Early movers win in AI. It is true that many founders today can scale without VC funding. But in AI, first movers often capture the market: products can be 10× better than non-AI versions, and once a customer adopts, switching is rare because the different is negligible. Capital can help you get there first. 3) PMs are becoming builders. Product Managers can now launch products and test ideas much faster, with less reliance on engineering. This boosts their strategic value inside organizations. 4) LatAm founders are closing the gap. With AI’s “core” technology accessible to everyone, top Latin American founders are launching directly into the U.S. market. 5) Shorter build times and copy times. It’s cheaper and faster to build an MVP… but it’s also faster for competitors to copy it. 6) Defensibility is the main challenge. Strong moats in AI can come from: - Proprietary data, in particular for vertical solutions (though people have different views on this); - Embedding AI deeply into vertical workflows; - Integrations that increase customer lock-in; Thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Arthur Gazzinelli Rabelo, and Samuel Veloso for the great conversation.

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PicPay raised $434M on the Nasdaq. Everyone's reading it as proof that LatAm IPOs are back. I read it differently. The most important signal isn't the IPO. It's the fund cycle. Funds that deployed between 2020–2022 need to show returns now. To raise their next fund. To maintain their narrative with LPs. To survive as managers. That creates exit pressure, through M&A or IPO, regardless of whether the market is "ready." LAVCA reports PE/VC exits in LatAm rebounded to $13.2B in 2025 after two years of lows. Strategic sales remain the dominant path: $4.5B. Secondary markets hit a record: $4B. The liquidity is coming back, but through the back door, not the Nasdaq. For founders building today: the most likely exit in the next years is still M&A, not IPO. That should shape how you build, who you sell to, and what structures you raise with. Thanks to Bloomberg Línea and Daniel Mauricio Salazar Castellanos for bringing these conversations to the surface. Full article here: https://lnkd.in/e4cqnQdH

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ONDA raises USD 5.4 million in a Series B bridge to advance AI hospitality SaaS, reinforcing leadership with global partner recognition and imminent AI Agent launch. https://lnkd.in/gmB6ue2c

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We’re thrilled to be a meaningful partner in Kavak.com's $300M Series F alongside Andreessen Horowitz and WCM Investment Management. It’s hard as an investor to find an N-of-1 company; it’s meaningfully harder for a founder to build one. Today, Kavak.com is Latin America’s leading platform for buying, selling, financing, and servicing used cars. It closed 2025 with ~120k transactions (+40% YoY), reached its first month of consolidated global profitability in December, and has financed $1B+ for customers since inception. Most remarkably, more than 40% of their customers were first time car buyers — and in Latin America, car ownership can completely transform a person’s livelihood.   When Carlos Garcia Ottati and his team started, the basic plumbing for a functioning used-car market simply didn't exist. In Kavak’s markets, the process was informal, high-friction, and uncertain, with customers facing fraud risk in up to 40% of transactions. Everything we're familiar with in the U.S. — reliable inspections, professional refurbishment, standardized pricing, consumer financing, and structured resale channels — were capabilities Kavak had to build from scratch over a decade. They created trust in a category where it was scarce, and in doing so, a valuable consumer brand.    Kavak isn't just a marketplace. It’s something rarer — part retailer, part logistics network, part lender, and emerging AI powerhouse — and it somehow runs as one. That integration creates an information advantage: proprietary, longitudinal data on how cars are bought, priced, financed, and used, which helps them apply AI to improve decisions at scale.   Many AI beneficiaries won’t look like AI companies at first glance. And while the physical economy has historically made tech investors uncomfortable, it's where Lingotto has leaned in most — where we see some of the largest markets and most durable moats forming over the next decade.    Huge respect to Carlos Garcia Ottati and the team for building the hard thing first — now they get to scale it. In his words, “we have less than 1% of the market, and the best companies create more than 95% of their value after year 15.”   📰: https://lnkd.in/eYvc67j9   Carlos Garcia Ottati Jaime Macaya Moises Flores Botello Isabella S.   #Lingotto #LingottoInnovation #LingottoInvestment cc Clemente Dadoo Lomeli

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Pablo Bérgolo, Daniel Moretti, and I are thrilled to share that Mappa has oversubscribed a $3.4M seed round, led by Draper Associates with participation from Serac Ventures, Riverwalk Capital Partners, Sher Ventures, Seagrass, Angel Squad (Hustle Fund), Grão, SoGal Ventures, The Pitch Show, and Angel Hub Ventures. When we started Mappa less than two years ago, we didn’t set out to raise capital. We bootstrapped our way to multimillion ARR by helping companies hire better and retaining based on compatibility. But as we evaluated the U.S. market, the problem was clear and urgent: organizations were struggling to identify the right talent quickly, losing top performers before they ever got past the first interview. Mappa changes that. In under 60 seconds, our platform decodes 30+ vocal signals — drawn from over 100,000 data points — to reveal how candidates communicate, take ownership, show empathy, and handle pressure. Over 100 employers across the U.S. and LATAM already rely on Mappa to make faster, smarter, and more inclusive hiring decisions. The results speak for themselves: ✅ $30,000+ saved per hire through better alignment and reduced turnover ✅ 300+ hours saved per role by accelerating decision-making ✅ Less than one minute to full behavioral decoding and compatibility scoring I’m incredibly proud of our team and deeply grateful to our early customers, advisors, and partners for believing in this vision. Big thank you to our biggest supporters:  ✔️ Tim Draper, Michelle Kwok, James Walker and Lucas Rosillo at Draper Associates ✔️ Kevin Moore at Serac Ventures ✔️ Kari Danek  at Riverwalk Capital ✔️ Dan Ellis and Justin Sher at Sher Ventures ✔️ Gabriela Ruggeri and Vivian Baring at Seagrass ✔️ Brian Nichols at Angel Squad (Hustle Fund) ✔️ Sung Lim at Grão ✔️ Pocket Sun at SoGal Ventures ✔️ Josh Muccio, Lisa Muccio and Peter L. at The Pitch Show ✔️ José Luis Cimental at Angel Hub Ventures ✔️ And to all our previous partners and angels who’ve rolled up their sleeves with us. With this funding, we’re scaling our go-to-market team, doubling down on R&D, and embedding behavioral intelligence into how enterprises make critical people decisions. This is about building a future where behavior becomes one of the most valuable data assets in hiring and we’re just getting started! Thank you Ashley at South Florida Business Journal for covering our story!

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Loved our TJC rapid fire with Tiago Dalvi, founder of Olist 👇 What’s the most underrated tech company in LATAM? What popular advice do you strongly disagree with? What founder trait is underrated but critical? What’s the smartest pivot you’ve ever seen? What’s the one question you wish people asked you more often? What routine has had the biggest impact on your productivity? Here are Tiago Dalvi’s picks. My personal favorite: “Investment is a catalyst, not a success metric. It can accelerate you—or speed you into the wall.” What’s yours? Comment Olist and I’ll personally send you the link to the full conversation 🔗

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Episode 35 of the Coworking Chronicles has us traveling to visit The Engine, Part 1.. The Engine is an incubator & accelerator supporting Tough Tech, the transformational science and engineering that solves the world’s most important challenges. We caught up with Stwart Peña Feliz, Co-Founder & CEO at MacroCycle Technologies, Evan Haas, Co-Founder & CEO at Helix Carbon, and Chris Taylor, Ph.D. , Co-Founder at VioNano Innovations, Inc on this segment.. ♻️ MacroCycle Technologies is creating the future of circular textiles, taking textile waste of any quality and upcycling it into yarn that's identical to virgin material ⚡ Helix Carbon is tackling the steel industry's carbon problem by building an electrochemical reformer that converts CO2-rich flue gases back into usable fuel gas, cutting emissions while reducing operating costs for steelmakers 🔬 VioNano Innovations, Inc is developing a new class of polymer materials for semiconductor manufacturing, reducing the variability that plagues leading-edge chip production ♻️ Stwart Peña Feliz, Co-Founder & CEO of MacroCycle Technologies shares.. Stwart's team can take textile waste of any quality and upcycle it back into a drop-in solution for true circularity. Over 99% of all textile waste produced today ends up in landfills, oceans, or gets incinerated. Recently, MacroCycle has produced recycled yarn that is identical to virgin material. The team is raising additional capital to scale production and start addressing this crisis at a larger volume. Stwart is watching Mantel, another MIT startup one year ahead of them, and leans on their CEO Cameron as a mentor and friend. ⚡ Evan Haas, Co-Founder of Helix Carbon shares.. Helix Carbon is an electrochemistry startup focused on decarbonizing the steel industry. Evan's team built an electrochemical reformer that takes CO2-rich flue gases off steelmaking furnaces and uses electricity to convert that CO2 back into carbon monoxide, the primary fuel gas used in those furnaces today. Helix Carbon raised a Pre-Seed round last year and has already gone through two 10x scale-ups of their system. The next year is all about execution: one more 10x scale-up and first field deployments with customers. Evan is watching Sora Fuel, Solvanic, and MacroCycle Technologies, their neighbors and friends at The Engine. 🔬 Chris Taylor, Ph.D., Co-Founder & CEO of VioNano Innovations, Inc shares.. There is immense variability in leading-edge semiconductor processes. Companies are struggling to control these processes, and VioNano wants to make materials that fix that. If you have spare or scrap silicon wafers with test structures, they will take your trash and make magic out of it! Chris is watching ChEmpower Corporation, also innovating in semi manufacturing with a slurriless CMP pad, that could mean huge cost reductions and better process control. The winter tour continues with MGMT Boston. More from The Engine coming in the weeks ahead!

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PROPTECH-X : Waltz – Latin American Expansion: Market-Driven and Ready to Scale: $25 million facility to further scale AI innovations  Press Release -MIAMI, June 2025. Waltz, the all-in-one platform streamlining U.S. residential real estate financing for foreign national investors, announced it has secured $50 million to date in total equity and debt funding, including a new $25 million line of credit. The new capital will support Waltz’s […] #Proptech #startups #digitaltransformation #realestate #Property

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New episode of Tacos & Tech is live! I sat down with Alexander Adler, co-founder of Puesto, to talk about scaling a family-run taco empire, building systems for consistency, and innovating without losing soul. Listen now: https://lnkd.in/duf-DxJt

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Thanks Mauricio Gil and Alex Burrowes. We are super excited about what the two of you are building at Motai. The overall impact that you can have in #Latam and especially the informal market (some thing motivates us everyday). This really could elevate the quality of life of a lot of families in Latam. This our mission at Driven VC. Finding founders like you that can amplify the impact and improve the quality of lives in Latam. Macarena Liu Rivas

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Great insights on the LatAm SaaS ecosystem — increasing number of companies reaching scale and tech founders are optimistic about the growth opportunity in the region and globally

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Impressive insights shared by Hi Ventures regarding the current state of AI in Latam. The revelation that Latam is progressing, though with some ground to cover, comes as a pleasant surprise. Here are the key takeaways from their review. Kudos to Federico Antoni and Jimena Pardo. Link to the full report: https://lnkd.in/gHjqac9W

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Scaling beyond the tech In this preview from the next Stable Talks, we sit down with Juan Oliva, co-Founder and CEO at Capa, to discuss a topic that’s rarely talked about: Why CS becomes a real competitive moat as volumes grow, and the role founders play in shaping it. This episode dives into what actually differentiates stablecoin companies once pricing tightens and regulation kicks in. Full episode coming soon!

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FinTechs are shaking things up in Latin America, turning small businesses into titans of potential. Are we really ready for a funding revolution, or is it just another shiny distraction? #SmallBizGrowth #FinTechInnovation https://lnkd.in/gTS8_SJ8

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking with J. Skyler Fernandes, Founder and General Partner at VU Venture Partners — early investors in transformative companies like OpenAI, Neuralink, Uber, SpaceX, and Dropbox. Our conversation centered on the tremendous opportunity that LATAM service providers have in shaping the future of the U.S. AI ecosystem. As AI adoption accelerates, the demand for top-tier technical talent continues to outpace supply — and LATAM is increasingly seen as a high-value, strategic partner. Some context: According to McKinsey & Company, 40% of companies using AI in 2024 reported cost reductions and revenue increases, yet talent scarcity remains a top challenge. Gartner forecasts global IT services spending to reach $1.5 trillion by 2025, driven largely by AI initiatives. Meanwhile, countries like Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico are producing thousands of qualified engineers annually — many of whom are fluent in English, operate in U.S. time zones, and understand Western business culture. We also explored some thought-provoking questions: What’s the next phase in human evolution? Will we merge AI, hardware, and the human mind? What will it mean to live alongside sovereign AGI systems? These questions may sound philosophical today — but in a few years, they’ll be boardroom topics. Grateful for the insight and vision, J. Skyler Fernandes — and for the work VU Venture Partners is doing to shape the next generation of innovation.

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🚀 Kamino is redefining financial operations for mid-sized companies in Brazil a segment long overlooked by traditional solutions. 🇧🇷 With a $10M Series A round co-led by Flourish Ventures and Quona Capital, alongside Endeavor Capital and other institutional investors, the fintech founded by Gonzalo Parejo Navajas, Benjamin Gleason, Guto Fragoso, Rodrigo Perenha, and Juliana Strohl is accelerating its mission to become the financial operating system for Latin America’s mid-market. 👉 Read the full story and discover how Kamino is shaping the future of finance in the region. https://lnkd.in/eBMSW4Kf #Fintech #Innovation

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Today we officially kick off our $2M pre seed round for Salubrum (Backed by Forum Ventures), supported by Forum Ventures, Coeus Collective Ventures, and Draper House Americas. Healthcare companies spend over $30B a year trying to acquire patients. The problem is not media. The problem is timing. Every time a patient approaches a healthcare decision a moment opens. Which doctor to see. Which procedure to pursue. Which treatment to start. For the companies involved in that decision, knowing that moment exists is incredibly valuable. Salubrum (Backed by Forum Ventures) is building the intelligence layer that maps those decision moments across the U.S. patient population. Our system aggregates large healthcare datasets covering 300M+ patient identities and uses them to predict when individuals are approaching important healthcare decisions. That signal can then be used by providers, pharma companies, payers, and other healthcare organizations trying to reach patients at the right time. Our first wedge is patient acquisition for healthcare providers and brands, but the underlying intelligence layer has much broader applications wherever patient behavior influences economic decisions. Over the past months we have quietly built the foundation. • Early pilots validating our patient intent scoring system • Distribution partnerships forming across healthcare platforms • Backed by Forum Ventures, Coeus Collective Ventures, Draper House Americas, NEXT Canada and Metta World Peace Starting tomorrow we will be meeting investors as part of the Forum Ventures showcase. If you are an investor interested in building with us get in touch. Calendly: https://lnkd.in/e5j-VvGC Investor Memo: https://lnkd.in/e5HyemAp

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Proof of concepts are dead, and AI killed them. Because the question is not if we *can* build something, it's *should* we build it? Will it actually deliver value? That's why Osvaldo Ramirez Hurtado from the Panamerican Business School told me that "Proof of Value" is more important than a proof of concept when you're considering an AI software development project. More coming soon about this on the Scaling Tech Podcast, and on the blog at AgilityFeat. But you can already see my full discussion with Osvaldo on Youtube! https://lnkd.in/eSpk_Cse

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Building a technology company in Latin America is not for the faint of heart. Volatility is constant. Infrastructure is uneven. Rules change. Context shifts. And yet — that’s exactly what makes it such a powerful place to build. After more than two decades in this journey, one thing has become clear to me: to succeed here, you need to hold two opposing ideas at the same time: • Think long term — while operating in short-term chaos • Build for scale — while adapting to local complexity • Stay optimistic — but grounded in reality That tension is not a bug. It’s the system. I recently joined The J Curve, hosted by Olga Maslikhova, where we explored some of these themes in more depth. Some highlights from our conversation: • Conviction matters most when the path is least obvious • Ecosystems win — not isolated products • Logistics and fintech are not “adjacent” in LatAm — they are core • Culture is the only true long-term advantage • Execution compounds more than strategy Huge thanks to Olga for such a thoughtful interview and for capturing Mercado Libre’s journey so well. If you’re building or investing in emerging markets, I’d be curious: which of these resonates most with your experience? Links below: • Post: https://lnkd.in/gVcrNqAg • Article: https://lnkd.in/gJ2CPrNG • Podcast: https://lnkd.in/gjb9hkQw #TheJCurve #MercadoLibre #LatinAmerica #Startups #Technology #Leadership

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