1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jose Deustua of UTEC Ventures (Part 3)

Jose Deustua: We also have a platform called Anvi. They teach English. Currently, we know that most people in Latin America are not good in speaking English. They need to speak English to progress in their work. Even though there are a lot of solutions about how to learn English, this platform is new in the sense that it incorporates both the coaching, coach, and the student.

They also focus on specific segments that are not well-addressed by these huge brands of English courses. There’s another option that’s made for cooking lessons.

There’s a startup that is not tackling a big issue on education, but is using one of the things that Latin America is recognized by. It’s their culinary experience. They are trying to expose all that culture to other countries in the world. It’s one of the startups that we invest in to balance our portfolio. We are thinking more of return in that sense.

The other three that’s in our batch is Candoit. It’s looking to connect students in Latin America with American companies so they can access internships or remote projects. It’s a way to help students in Latin America reach bigger corporations, have more job training, and help them progress in their career development.

Then, one is called Coder School. It’s a school for teaching coding at a very low cost. They run bootcamps. The model is to run high-quality, low-cost, high number of bootcamps in Latin America to teach new skills to Latin American students. The last one is called YouDOX. This is a script but in Spanish. It’s for Latin American students to access Spanish documents for free. They can access books for a very low cost.

One of the challenges we have in Latin America is that there is not much content translated to Spanish. What they are doing is uploading content online to help students access more documents so they can use more sources of information to progress in their career path.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like everything is B2C. Is that a correct observation?

Jose Deustua: Most of them are B2C. We have had B2B also. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the strategy for follow-on funding for these people? $25,000 will not get them that far. What do you have lined up for them?

Jose Deustua: That’s one of the biggest challenges of any accelerator in the world. We have an angel network that funds most of our startups after the program. We’re also part of a network of other funds from Peru called PECAP. We connect with them to give them our deal flow.

We are connecting them with the members of GAN. They have their own venture firms. That’s one way. They apply to these funds. Then we use our network in Latin America to connect them with angel investors and VC firms.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jose Deustua of UTEC Ventures
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