1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cristobal Perdomo of Jaguar Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Cristobal Perdomo was recorded in May 2019.

Cristobal Perdomo is Co-Founder and General Partner at Jaguar Ventures, a venture fund that invests in Latin America.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get to know you. Tell us about yourself as well as Jaguar Ventures. What do you like to invest in? What sized funds are you working with?

Cristobal Perdomo: We have a fund that has two offices. One in Argentina and one in Mexico. I’m originally Mexican but I’ve been in Argentina for the last 11 years.

We focus across Latin America except Brazil. The reason why we don’t do Brazil is because we think Brazil is a well-covered market. We focus on Brazil for companies that want to go out to Brazil. Our first fund was $10 million.

We are now investing out of our second fund, which is a $60 million fund. We invest in early stage. Our typical ticket is between half a million and $1.5 million across all sectors. We mostly have experience in FinTech, marketplaces, SaaS, and e-commerce.

Sramana Mitra: The $60 million fund is to invest uniformly across all of Latin America except Brazil or is there a bias towards Argentina and Mexico? 

Cristobal Perdomo: We don’t have a pre-arranged distribution of where we’re going to invest. The first fund, for example, was half Mexico and half Argentina. This new fund, we’ve made two investments. It’s probably going to be 30% Mexico and Argentina and the rest opportunistically.

Sramana Mitra: Can you define early stage? You write $0.5 million to $1.5 million. What do you want to see in the companies that come to you by way of validation? We see all kinds of definitions. We see all kinds of stages. What is your particular preference?

Cristobal Perdomo: That’s a great question. We look for companies that have found product-market fit, that have found a client base. We look at a couple of things. One is, recurring revenue for the same product or service for six months. We want them to be fully devoted to the venture.

We need at least two founders. We need two founders because we think you need both a technical founder and a business founder. We also think that the company has to be in two geographies. Otherwise, we think that investing in someone trying to do a new geography might be too risky.

We also look for KPIs of at least one year. We really like entrepreneurs who are really focused on using data to make decisions. For us, knowing that these entrepreneurs are looking at KPIs from day one and making decisions based on that is super important.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Cristobal Perdomo of Jaguar Ventures
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