#002: Female founders, open banking, and crypto-cannabis

Fintech and female founders make noise, even though venture funding is quieting down -- and the SoftBank saga continues

Apr 25, 2022

Hey technopolists,

Welcome back! This week, Crunchbase brought us some disappointing venture funding statistics, but we’re finding a silver lining in the positive news being made by female founders. Fintech is so hot that I’m running the risk of turning this newsletter into a one-note samba.

What’s hot

🙋🏽‍♀️ Female founders go big. Two notable fundraises by female-founded businesses in LATAM are making waves. NovoPayment, the banking-as-a-service platform founded by Anabel Perez in 2007, raised a $19m Series A after a 15-year bootstrapped slog. Then there’s 2-month-old Morado, founded by Angela Maria Acosta, who raised a $5m pre-seed to digitise beauty salon supply chains across the continent. Morado boasts over 60 employees, 72% of which are female. It’s a small dent in the gender-raise gap, as only 2% of LATAM venture funding in 2021 went to female-founded startups. (NovoPayment, 683 words; Morado, 433 words)

🏦 Open banking gains speed. Uruguayan fintech Datanomik has raised a $6m seed round from a16z, Nazca, Canary, and angels to facilitate inter-bank data sharing. Open banking solutions have been well tested in other geographies (e.g., TrueLayer, Plaid), which makes this a game of execution and speed to market. Luckily for Datanomik, their fintech pedigree is strong: co-founder Sergio Fogel turned dLocal into Uruguay’s first unicorn before founding Astropay, which was last valued at $100m. (TechCrunch, 775 words)

🌿 Cannabis goes crypto. Global Cannabis Capital, the VC fund that’s invested in 28 LATAM canna-businesses, will issue its own cryptocurrency to raise funds for its existing portfolio as a funding alternative to IPO. Finance is notoriously scarce for the sector, which operates in a legal grey area that traditional financial institutions avoid like a bad (skunky?) smell. Yet newer investors are queuing up, with over 100 private investors on the waitlist for GCC’s token issuance. (Bloomberg, 806 words)

What’s not

🔻 LATAM venture funding drops. The first quarter of 2022 has been slow for LATAM tech, with VC funding dropping -30% and deal counts declining -58% from the previous quarter. This is the fourth consecutive quarter that funding has dropped, but there’s still cause for optimism — funding is up 28% year-on year, and seed and early stage funding held stable, a good sign for future late stage funding. (Crunchbase, 799 words)

🚪 SoftBank bleeds LATAM talent. Following the announcement of their LATAM early stage fund spinout (Upload Ventures), two of three managing partners for SoftBank’s LATAM’s parent fund have announced their exit. The two partners, Shu Nyatta and Paolo Passoni, will launch their own fund to support late-stage LATAM startups. The exit is Act 3 of SoftBank’s LATAM’s saga: first ex-COO and LATAM fund manager Marcelo Claure left over compensation and control disputes; then the Upload spinout; now, Nyatta and Passoni. (Bloomberg, 734 words)

Stat of the week

As crypto continues to dominate headlines, here’s a look at the breakdown of adoption across LATAM’s biggest tech geographies:

Source: Sherlock Communications

For the culture

Rosalia broke her website when she announced tour dates for her newest album, Motomami, the dazzling maelstrom that reached 22 charts in 19 countries since dropping in March. The album drips in flamenco-urbano soulful swagger as it ventures into the Catalan sensation’s personal history and myriad musical influences. (Spotify, 42 minutes; Pitchfork album review - 8.4 of 10)
TikTok takes center stage in Colombia’s presidential election, as candidates have taken to sharing pithy sound-bites, memes, and dances on the platform as a central battleground for campaign comms. Observers worry that TikTok’s UX reduces messages to overly simplistic slogans, yet strong user engagement seems to signal the emergence of a new realpoli-TikTok. (BBC video, 2:33 min)
You might want to check out Lolita Taub, one of LATAM’s biggest early stage investors, who has a particular focus on “underestimated” founders. With 15k+ subscribers, her newsletter and LaaS (”Lolita-as-a-Service”) resources are highly popular amongst founders, VCs, and LPs alike. (Twitter; LaaS; Newsletter)

That’s all for this edition. If you like what you’re reading, then please consider reaching out, forwarding to a friend, or posting on socials!