1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about stage. You started off by saying that you like early stage. Define early stage for me. Are we talking seed? Are we talking pre-seed or concept stage?

Francisco Jardim: Now that the AgTech ecosystem in the region is already on its way to maturity, we are given the luxury of becoming much more stage-specific. We do late seed and Series A.

To give you an example on the $75 million fund, we will be investing in 20 to 25 companies throughout Latin America in the AgTech space writing checks of $700,000 to $1.5 million to get the party started. We reserve up to $2 million per investment to defend our positions.

In the past, when we were the first guys to get into the AgTech venture game, we did a lot of early bets. We had a lot of companies that were just starting to sell their products. We did pre-seed and early seed transactions. This was out of necessity because we had to build the ecosystem and the platform.

One more thing that we did as well in the beginning is, we co-founded with
PulseHub, the largest sugarcane and ethanol AgTech accelerator in the world. It was the first AgTech accelerator in Latin America that has become a very well-known place if you want to develop and launch a technology for sugarcane.

We’ve done a lot of things in the past to get the ecosystem up and running. Now as a VC, we want to stick to late seed and Series A.

Sramana Mitra: You put in about $3 million per company in about 20 to 25 companies. You have this accelerator to get things off the ground. What about in between the accelerator and the late seed? Are there funds that have come up?

Francisco Jardim: Latin America is in a very exciting moment. We’ve been seeing a lot of the hype saying that Latin America is the new China. Softbank has been doing a lot of business in the region over the past 12 to 18 months.

Brazil had never had a unicorn until late 2017. We only had three unicorns in Latin America until 2017. From late 2017 till last week, we have approximately 10 unicorns just in Brazil. The ecosystem has come of age.

This means that all the stage financing locations have started to grow. There’re a lot of angel investors. There’re a lot of accelerators that do earlier investment. A lot of seed and pre-seed funds are coming up.

I won’t say that it’s an extraordinarily liquid ecosystem, especially compared to Silicon Valley or Israel, but it’s much less difficult to raise capital today than it was two years ago. The dynamics are great.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Francisco Jardim of SP Ventures
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