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Now, one Brazilian venture firm is ready to help keep that momentum growing in a unique way.

, an early-stage firm with more than $120 million under management, told Crunchbase News exclusively that it has launched a new program to help first-time founders graduating abroad kick off their business ideas in Brazil.

Dubbed JetPack, the program is designed to help people who live outside of Latin America’s largest country explore innovative ideas with a little help.

In December, Canary closed on a $75 million fund to invest in about 50 early-stage startups operating primarily in Brazil. The São Paulo-based firm generally provides the first institutional capital–seed or Series A financing–to tech companies in the country.

Izabel Gallera, the Canary partner leading JetPack’s efforts, told me there are “a lot of inefficiencies in Brazil that are much wider than in the U.S.”

The real estate, health care and financial services sectors are prime examples. In fact, those industries in Brazil have a reputation for being inefficient and expensive.

“Here we could use a lot of technology to become more efficient,” Gallera said. “Even a little bit of technology could help gain a lot of efficiencies. In Brazil, we have much more explicit opportunities of building something that can solve a real problem.”

As such, the firm is “very bullish” with regard to those market opportunities.

“We believe more capital flowing to great talent will be able to help solve a lot of problems in the country,” Gallera added.

, managing partner of Canary, said the program is being founded on the premise that Brazil is seeing a turning point where more and more talented workers “are moving away from traditional careers.”

He also echoes Gallera’s sentiment regarding opportunity in the country.

“In Brazil, we have tons of opportunities to tackle as we have a huge number of sectors that are either fragmented or low tech,” Toledo told me.

Since it began operating in 2017 through December 2019, Canary has invested in more than 60 companies which, combined, had raised over $400 million in subsequent rounds. Portfolio companies include , (which we covered here), (whose recent $175 million round we covered in this piece), and .

Program details

With JetPack, Canary is looking for an ambitious team of first-time founders who live abroad and want to return to, or go to, Brazil to start a company. A formed team or being Brazlian are not requirements, but living outside of Brazil is.

Canary says its standards are high, and the firm will only choose teams if they see true potential for a long-term relationship. It will evaluate criteria such as ambition, fit with Canary’s investment model, founders market fit and execution capability.

Once a founder is chosen, Canary will invest $50,000 uncapped, which means the financing will be priced only in the next venture round. The firm will cover all LLC costs, but for future rounds a founder will need to open a company in Delaware.

The team will have office space in São Paulo during the extension of the (industry-agnostic) program or until its first funding round. Canary says it will be on hand to help when the team is ready to raise its first round of institutional venture capital. It will also provide full access to its network of tech founders and operators, talent to recruit, possible first clients (for B2B companies in particular), market specialists and enterprise senior executives, among others.

In return, Canary expects the right to lead that first venture round (assuming both parties agree). It also asks a team “to maintain a keen and exclusive focus on validating its business hypothesis.”

“We want you to focus on building a business, but don’t expect micromanagement from our side,” the firm said.

Interested parties can apply .

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Other global hubs, including Seattle, Bangalore and Beijing, have even shorter track records for startup funding. And tech hotspots like Austin and Sao Paolo, have really taken off only in the past few years.

So which places are set to be the next growth centers of startup action? For this latest Crunchbase slideshow, we perused our country-by-country funding data to pinpoint which nations are seeing the biggest jumps in funding activity.

Click through to see which countries saw the biggest year-over-year investment gains. The tabulations also include a look at deal counts, top cities for startups and notable rounds.*

*For this dataset, we did not include seed financings, focusing only on venture rounds of Series A and beyond. 

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But in countries like Brazil, these types of spaces are not common for a number of reasons. (Historically, most people have lived at home with their parents until they marry, for example.) However, as the Latin American country’s society evolves, the real estate scene is attempting to keep up. One proptech startup is hoping to help bring the country up to date in terms of its apartment offerings.

As part of that goal, São Paulo-based has raised a $4.7 million pre-seed round led by Brazil’s . , a cross-border firm with offices in São Paulo and San Francisco, also participated in the round in addition to , Founder , Managing Partner and Partner . (It’s important to note that $4.7 million is an unusually large amount for a pre-seed round anywhere, but especially in Brazil, despite having seen a surge in venture funding in recent years.)

I talked with co-founder and CEO , who told me more about what the startup is doing exactly. He also helped shed some light on how Yuca fits into an evolving narrative of how São Paulo’s core is being impacted by the growth of its startup scene.

Background

Campos was born in the Northeastern Brazil city of Recife, Pernambuco, before moving to the U.S. when he was 14 years old. His first experience with the venture world was when he helped set up a small VC practice with a family office in São Paulo in 2012.

“Today’s unicorns were just getting started then,” he recalls. In fact, Campos’s first deal was investing in fitness discovery platform , which last February. He also invested in fintech startup and QuintoAndar, another Brazilian real estate-related startup (that happened to become a unicorn with a $250 million Series D raise last September).

It was that experience that led Campos to “fall in love with tech as a whole.”

So last year, he started Yuca after realizing how big a problem finding affordable housing was becoming in tech hubs around the world.

“Most of those cities have an affordability problem where people can’t find decent housing at a decent cost,” Campos told me. “So we put those two things together to come up with this business model.”

Knocking down walls

While the funding round was actually raised last summer, Yuca did not disclose it publicly until recently. Last week, the company launched its first “unit.”

What does that mean? Well, it started off by looking at the real estate supply in São Paulo, and noticed that tech companies as a whole were starting to congregate in two specific central neighborhoods that were well-served by public transportation.

But when the Yuca team looked at the real estate supply in those areas, it realized the apartments were not only decades old, but “pretty rundown and super expensive still because of their location.”

“They offered no amenities or parking spaces even,” Campos said.

So Yuca set about buying some of those units, completely tearing them down, and rebuilding them as shared apartments. Its target demographic is tech workers who want to live close to where they work.

Yuca has bundled the apartments with services such as cleaning and concierge, and takes care of all the backend issues like water and electricity. It’s also made sure its terms are “super convenient and flexible, not the standard Brazilian 30-month contract, which we think is absurd,” Campos said.

“We’re not looking to make a quick buck like an rental,” he added. “We want to solve the problem of how people live.”

Rent starts out at about $500 a month, including condo fees, utilities, cleaning services and support.

“Even for Brazil, this is very affordable for a new apartment,” Campos said.

All units, each about 200-220 square feet, are fully renovated with four units fitting in one apartment. There’s about 600 square feet of common area, including a centralized living room and kitchen.

The buildings that were torn down were typically approximately 1,800-square-foot, three-bedroom apartments that included a separate maid’s quarters.

“In Brazil, it’s common for the middle and upper class to have a live-in maid, but these days younger folks are not wanting to have that relationship with help inside the house, so those floor plans don’t work anymore,” Campos told me. “So we turned those maid’s quarters into a fourth bedroom and, for us, tearing down that wall is a figurative thing.”

The renovation process takes anywhere from one to three months, and Yuca currently has 30 units under renovation in the pipeline. It plans to launch one apartment per week over the next two months with the goal of “ramping up and scaling faster in the future.”

Investor POV

For , founder of ONEVC, Yuca represented an attractive investment opportunity for a number of reasons.

For one, he said, the opportunity for full-stack proptech companies “is extremely attractive at the moment, given how low real interest rates are.”

“Investors are looking for yield, and Yuca is a perfect example of top- and bottom-level efficiencies that are brought to this market,” Sorrentino said. “When better utilization per square feet meets a technology-enabled apartment, you have a different, promising IRR (internal rate of return) profile than a regular REIT (real estate investment trust).”

He also points to the global “epidemic” of loneliness with the rising use of smartphones ironically being a big contributor.

“Once you think through the implications of co-living spaces, they are a massive indirect solution for a mental health problem that is increasing in our society, since community building is essential for the co-living model to thrive,” Sorrentino added.

Also, millennials and Gen Z are less worried about a large apartment than they are about being close to work and surrounded by a good community.

“Branding and a human approach to this solution is vital,” he said.

Last August, I wrote about another co-living startup that raised venture money. Specifically, , a Los Angeles-based real estate startup providing co-living space for students and  young professionals, raised a $10 million Series B at a $100 million valuation.

The trend of rising rental costs in hot job markets has brought all sorts of new ideas regarding living to the market. And so long as jobs continue to cluster in large urban environments, the market may keep generating demand for new housing arrangements like what Yuca, Tripalink and others can provide.

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, a São Paulo-based mobile gaming company that claims to have over one billion players, this morning announced a $60 million Series A round of funding led by .

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Notably, the nine-year-old company said in a statement that the investment gives it a valuation of $1.3 billion. According to , the round makes Wildlife Studio “Brazil’s most valuable tech company with the widest global reach.”

In addition to San Francisco-based Benchmark, participants in the round include ; , VP of growth at ; , co-founder and CEO of ; partner at ; , partner at ; and , former VP of VR at .

The round is also notable for a few reasons. One, a $60 million Series A is huge anywhere but particularly in an emerging startup scene such as Brazil’s. Secondly, becoming a unicorn at the A stage is not exactly typical. And while unicorns are not common in Brazil, they are popping up more regularly. (Check out this piece here about real estate startup reaching that status in September). And thirdly, it is yet another example of a Latin American startup raising money from U.S.-based (and global) investors, which is becoming more common.

Growth

Founded by brothers and , Wildlife has grown to 500 employees spread out across offices in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Dublin, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Orange County, California.

In a statement, Wildlife said it will use its new capital to “accelerate talent acquisition, further enhance game quality, as well as support new developers to bring games to market.” Specifically, CEO Victor Lazarte said the maker of popular mobile games Zooba and Tennis Clash (among others) will “significantly grow” its team as it scales its games globally to the tune of more than 800 employees by the end of 2020.

Wildlife Studios has launched more than 60 titles since 2011 and expects to reach 2 billion mobile game downloads by the end of 2019. The company operates on a “freemium” business model, notes Brazil Journal, meaning that (like Fortnite) it does not charge users to play but only to purchase things if they wish to accelerate progress.

Benchmark General Partner , said the company is “well-positioned to take more than its fair share of the mobile gaming market.”

, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said it’s been “exciting” to watch Wildlife evolve “from a small studio with a single hit game to a global gaming studio with 60 successful titles.

Market context

Brazil has been the largest recipient of venture funding in an increasingly hot investment climate in Latin America. Earlier this year, we reported that venture funding in the region’s largest country exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year, according to , the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America. That’s 52 percent more than the $859 million invested Brazil in 2017, and a staggering 369 percent increase from the $279 million raised in 2016, as you can see in the chart below:

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New investor and existing investors , , partner , , Broadhaven Ventures, founder and also participated in the financing, which brings Kovi’s total raised since its inception to $40.6 million.

Founded in 2018 by two former (������������’s ) executives, São Paulo-based Kovi rents vehicles to on-demand drivers who work for ride-hailing companies such as Uber, Didi and Lyft. It operates under the premise that more people in Latin America would work for these companies if they could afford to operate the necessary vehicle. Less than half the population in Brazil . Also, cars are in countries like Brazil than in the U.S. and the difference is even greater when it comes to the average income of the population. Kovi gives drivers who don’t necessarily want, or cannot afford, to own a vehicle “quick access to quality cars” at what it says is “a fair price”

Growth

Using machine learning, Kovi says it’s able to monitor vehicles and drivers in real time, “ensuring safety and performance in the use of cars, as well as driver welfare.”

Also, via its model, drivers don’t have to worry about damage or theft to vehicles since they don’t have “to buy and leave expensive shared cars parked on the street,” the company says. (High car crime rates ).

Kovi currently has about 110 employees (up from about 20 a year ago) and more than 3,000 active cars in its fleet. It currently operates in São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Mexico City, and recently opened an office in Mexico.

, Kovi’s CEO and co-founder, told me that the startup has been seeing about 68 percent growth monthly. The company plans to use its new capital to do some hiring, increase its fleet and expand into other cities and countries. It also plans to invest in developing technology aimed at improving “the driver experience while increasing fleet security,” said , Kovi’s CTO and co-founder.

In a short amount of time, Kovi has established partnerships with a number of automakers and rental companies.

Neto predicts the company will have 5,000 drivers by year’s end.

Investors Weigh In

To Neto, having an investor such as Global Founders Capital (which has previously backed the likes of and ) validates its business model.

I hopped on the phone with , who heads up GFC’s Latin American office in São Paulo, and he noted that this isn’t the first time his firm has put money in Kovi.

Kovi, he said, addresses the problem that there are “basically thousands of gig economy drivers in Latin America and a majority of them have trouble owning and maintaining the asset they need to work.”

“So, Kovi’s offering for them is very compelling,” Pettena told me.

Further, he believes the opportunity is a large one. Between Mexico, Brazil and other Latin American countries, there are more than 1 million people for whom driving ride-hailing vehicles is their primary earning method.

“There’s a huge market on the demand side, with companies needing drivers,” Pettena added. “And on the supply side, there’s literally a waiting line of people wanting cars to drive. Kovi is able to provide that car supply.”

Global Founders Capital established its Latin American presence by opening an office in Brazil in 2016, according to Pettena. It now has 30 companies from the region in its portfolio, most of which are “early stage or under the radar,” he said.

“We try to become lifecycle investors in the companies we really like,” Pettena said. “With Kovi, we see there is a very clear, concrete business to scale.”

, founder of ONEVC (which we profiled in this piece last month), said his firm looks to partner with category-defining companies in large markets.

“Kovi is exactly that,” he said.

Noting the above points about cost being a barrier, Sorrentino pointed out that typically, the community of ride-hailing drivers don’t have access to credit or “essential services like health insurance.”

“The lack of access to essential services at-large creates an enormous opportunity since you have a significant pool of people that want to be economically active, but don’t have the tools (the car) to start the job,” he told me.

Latin America and other emerging markets are prime opportunities for companies like Kovi, he said. In fact, the is Brazil in which 17 million users were using the app in March 2018.

Also, ONEVC is drawn to the fact that “in a post-WeWork world,” Kovi “operates an asset-light business model that scales.”

It leases the cars and doesn’t have to sell them back to the market, “allowing the company to focus on fleet management risk and prime customer experience for the drivers.”

“Kovi is profitable on every single car, continually improving gross margins given the scale of the business,” Sorrentino said. “The team has a solid background in the market and since we first partnered with the Kovi team, the company has grown the size of its fleet by more than 100 times. Early days, but very promising.”

In April, we did a deep dive look at how Latin America has “arrived” among global VCs. Brazil has been the largest recipient of venture funding in an increasingly hot investment climate in Latin America. Earlier this year, we reported that venture funding in the region’s largest country exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year, according to , the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America. That’s 52 percent more than the $859 million invested Brazil in 2017, and a staggering 369 percent increase from the $279 million raised in 2016, as you can see in the chart below:

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The firm, with offices in São Paulo and San Francisco, has closed its first fund, ONEVC FUND I LP, Crunchbase News has learned exclusively.

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The firm has $30 million under management, along with $8 million to invest in “special opportunities” (more about those later). Since it was formed in November 2017, ONEVC has already seen two portfolio companies become unicorns and another (San Francisco-based ) exit.

ONEVC claims to be the only seed firm “to have a presence in Silicon Valley and São Paulo.”

“We invest in both geographies acting as a strategic partner for U.S. companies that want to become global early and Latam founders that want to connect with Silicon Valley, either to set up offices here or raise capital from U.S.-based VCs,” said ONEVC founder . “We believe this is one of the most unique and profitable opportunities available now within VC.”

In general, Brazil has been the largest recipient of venture funding in an increasingly hot investment climate in Latin America. Earlier this year, we reported that venture funding in the region’s largest country exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year, according to , the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America.

“Now is the perfect time to build a cross-border seed firm between the U.S. and Latam,” said Sorrentino.

ONEVC’s first close on the fund was of $10 million in July 2018. It decided to double its target, raising $20 million about a month later. Then it put a $30 million cap on the fund, which it closed in July, according to Sorrentino.

The remaining $8 million is in special-purpose vehicles that were created for later-stage investing in companies like Colombian on-demand delivery unicorn (which we reported on here) and Brazilian shipping logistics platform . In both cases, members of the ONEVC team had previously backed the companies at earlier stages).

“We see it as a systematic way to allow investors to co-invest on almost every opportunity out there,” Sorrentino told CrunchbaseNews. “LPs love it as well. Some want access to direct investments when companies are more mature so we structured some deals around that  because we knew there was market demand.”

Strong Background

Prior to forming ONEVC, the six-person team (all Brazilians) invested in 71 companies (including fitness discovery platform , real estate unicorn(which we reported on here) and , which we covered here) and saw a combined 27 exits in less than five years. With those investments, the team achieved a combined return of nearly eight times, “cash on cash,” (or an 87.8 percent realized IRR), according to Sorrentino.

“We were able to personally anchor our first fund, having almost five times more skin in the game in our deals than your average emerging manager,” he said.

Since its inception in November 2017, ONEVC has backed 15 startups, including three U.S.-based companies. As mentioned above, the team was an early investor in Colombian unicorn Rappi and back-office integrator . Rappi went on to raise over $1.4 billion from the likes of , , , and others.

“We were able to partner with Rappi, by making a commitment to…help them open their operations in Brazil, by hiring the first set of local employees,” Sorrentino said. “We continued to be involved in further financing rounds, investing and making connections for the founders.”

Its story with Pipefy was similar, but in that case, ONEVC was “deeply involved” in the hiring of the company’s first two employees in its San Francisco office.

Sorrentino said ONEVC also introduced Pipefy CEO to other U.S.-based investors. In August, the startup closed a $45 million Series B led by .

Investment Philosophy

ONEVC invests from pre-seed through Series A from its flagship fund, writing checks ranging from $350,000 to $1.5 million. As mentioned above, the firm will consider later-stage deals, and structures special purpose vehicles that are primarily offered to its LP base.

The firm looks for companies that primarily fall into two different categories. One, those that are global from day one, according to Sorrentino. It is also focused on companies that are tackling multibillion dollar markets with “inherent barriers to entry,” whether they are regulatory or cultural.

The six main sectors it is drawn to are urban mobility and logistics, financial services (fintech), e-commerce and marketplaces, enterprise software, healthcare and agricultural technology.

Brazil is particularly full of opportunity, Sorrentino said, considering the interactions that Brazilians have with the internet “are massive.”

“The key here to helping them is to identify people that, irrespective of macroeconomic and political challenges, can build a business that can thrive and grow.”

Despite its focus, Sorrentino said you will never see him “waving the flag of Latinx.”

“We’re just here to help phenomenal founders build massive companies in Latin America,” he said.

Quality Deals Take Priority

ONEVC said it’s all about quality over quantity. It intentionally invests in fewer startups because it is very hands-on and involved with its portfolio companies. Its three main goals are to help them raise more funding, recruit talent and sell, according to Sorrentino.

“We believe if we serve our entrepreneurs with excellence in these three areas, there will always be a place at the table for our firm,” he said.

The firm’s deep commitment is evident to visiting partner , who has invested in a handful of deals alongside ONEVC, including both backing HeyDoctor (which was recently by ).

“The ONEVC guys are kind of like the investor equivalent of the type of founder that the YC community looks for,” Flora told Crunchbase News. “They’re animals, just real hard workers. They have a lot of energy and put it to work for their founders. As an investor, it’s easy to write checks but they go beyond that and really dig in and help companies figure things out operationally.”

As a result, Flora said, ONEVC has a reputation of working closely with its founders and for sticking to their investment thesis.

“When they get excited they do their homework and are really disciplined,” he added. “They say no to a lot of stuff other investors would look at if not on thesis. But they’re consistent. They have a certain way of investing and stick to it.”

co-founder and CEO of ONEVC portfolio company , can attest to Flora’s statements.

The São Paulo startup, which provides rental cars for on-demand drivers in Latin America, was the only Brazilian startup in Y Combinator’s most recent winter batch. It’s been growing its revenue about 30 to 50 percent every month since it was founded in June of 2018, according to Neto.

In March, Kovi raised a $10.6 million seed round led by Y Combinator and Brazilian VC firm that included participation from ONEVC, and others.

Neto first met Sorrentino during the YC program when Kovi was raising its seed round.

“We were looking for a cross-border VC that had experience in Latin America, and also a presence in the U.S. that could better understand our market and needs,” he told Crunchbase News. “As VCs, ONEVC has been very hands on which is great for this stage. And we’ve built a great trusting relationship to share the most critical problems we have with them.”

In announcing the new fund, ONEVC also noted that it has tapped as a new full-time general partner of the firm, alongside Sorrentino and . (The firm also has three venture partners). A recent Stanford Business School graduate, Yoshimura  will be primarily based out of São Paulo.

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This morning, and reported that its latest deal involves leading a $110 million round for , a Brazilian online home goods platform.

The round is nearly triple raised by the Curitiba-based company since it was founded in 2009, according to its Crunchbase profile. MadeiraMadeira raised a $27.3 million in November 2017.

Palo Alto-based also participated in the latest funding round along with existing investor out of Boston, examples of how Latin America as a whole is seeing increasing global investor interest.

According to Reuters, the Brazilian etailer, “which offers around a million home furnishing products,” (think Wayfair here in the U.S.) will use the new capital to “invest in technology, logistics and customer services.”

The company saves money on overhead by not having a lot of inventory. For example, according to Reuters, if a customer orders a piece of furniture off its site, that order goes straight to the manufacturer.

Former professional race car driver , CEO and co-founder of MadeiraMadeira, told Reuters his company is looking to expand outside of Brazil into other regions in Latin America at some point. The company is already “break-even,” according to Reuters.

Last week, we wrote about how Sao Paulo-based real estate startup raised $250 million from SoftBank.

In general, Brazil has been the largest recipient of venture funding in an increasingly hot investment climate in Latin America. Earlier this year, we reported that venture funding in the region’s largest country exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year, according to , the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America. That’s 52 percent more than the $859 million invested Brazil in 2017, and a staggering 369 percent increase from the $279 million raised in 2016, as you can see in the chart below:

At the rate SoftBank is going, 2019 numbers will far exceed those of 2018.

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led the round, which also included participation from another new investor as well as existing backers and . The financing brings the six-year-old company’s to over $335 million, according to its Crunchbase profile, and comes just nine months after its $70 million .

“QuintoAndar makes it easier for people to quickly find homes and for landlords to better manage their properties,” said , CEO of SoftBank Group International, in a prepared statement. “The company is at the center of a global transformation of the real estate industry.”

QuintoAndar describes itself as an “end-to-end solution for long-term rentals” that, among other things, connects potential tenants to landlords and vice versa. It’s seen impressive growth in recent years. I spoke with CEO by telephone and he told me that the company has increased the number of rentals it helped facilitate by five times year-over-year. QuintoAndar also saw its revenue surge by more than three times last year, according to Braga. (It keeps the first month’s rent and a percentage fee of the transactions it helps facilitate.) The company has also more than tripled its number of employees to 1,000 compared to about 300-350 a year ago. On average, it has been closing over 4,500 new contracts per month.

Ultimately, its goal is to provide “a seamless experience for tenants that removes the need for a guarantor, large security deposit, or rental insurance while also providing landlords the best liquidity in the market and fully guaranteed rent.”

History

CEO Braga and , CTO, came up with the idea for QuintoAndar after getting their MBAs at Stanford University. As many startups do, the company was founded out of Braga’s personal “nightmare” of an experience in renting an apartment in Sao Paulo.

The search process was difficult as there was not enough information available online and renters are forced to provide a guarantor, or co-signer, from the same city or pay rent insurance, which Braga described as “very expensive.”

“Overall, I felt it was a very inefficient and fragmented process with no transparency or tech,” Braga told Crunchbase News. “There was all this friction and high cost involved, just real tangible problems to solve.”

The concept for QuintoAndar (which can be translated literally to “Fifth Floor” in Portuguese) was born.

“Little by little, we created a platform that consolidated supply and inventory in a uniform way,” Braga said.

The company took the search phase online for the first time, according to Braga. It also eliminated the need for tenants to provide a guarantor, thereby saving them money. On the other side, QuintoAndar also works to help protect the landlord with the guarantee that they will get their rent “on time every month,” Braga said.

Investors

As we previously reported, Braga acknowledges that some U.S.-based investors initially liked the premise behind the company but were intimidated by the complexities of investing in Brazil, such as the exchange rate risk and a turbulent political, and uncertain economic, environment.

“Although the company was doing well in terms of traction, it was hard at first to convince investors,” Braga said.

New York-based General Atlantic led its Series C and, according to Braga, “was committed to Latin America and not afraid of Brazilian risks. They knew firsthand the importance and relevance of the problems we were solving.”

, co-founder and managing partner of Argentina-based , notes that his firm has invested in QuintoAndar since its in 2016.

“We fell in love with the founding team first and their vision of significantly revolutionizing the way Brazilians rented properties,” Szekasy said. “It could take more than a month for someone that was looking at a property to get a transaction closed. Now it can be done in a day.”

Szekasy said Kaszek, which recently closed on $600 million between two funds, is “super excited” by �ϳܾ��ԳٴǴ��Ի岹��’s trajectory, execution, strategic vision and “how they’ve been attracting talent in the different areas of the company.”

Certainly, the fact that SoftBank led this round is notable. We reported earlier this year SoftBank Group had unveiled plans for , or what it described as “the largest-ever technology fund focused exclusively on the fast-growing Latin American market.” The news was validation that investors are starting to take the region more seriously.

Plans

Last year, QuintoAndar began expanding its offering to more regions in Brazil, and is now in 25 cities and nine metro areas in the country. With its new capital, the company plans to continue growing there and also to start expanding outside of its home country.

“We’re doing our homework to understand the pain points and where we can make the biggest difference,” Braga told me.

QuintoAndar also recently began partnering with Brazil’s leading brick-and-mortar real estate agencies. Currently, 15 brokers work with company “to provide landlords with personal face-to-face support.”

It, of course, plans to continue hiring as well and continue building out its home improvement segment of its business.

“Our rentals are going faster at a better price, and through an even more seamless experience for tenants,” Braga said.

Brazil has been the largest recipient of venture funding in an increasingly hot investment climate in Latin America. Earlier this year, we reported that venture funding in the region’s largest country exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year, according to , the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America. That’s 52 percent more than the $859 million invested Brazil in 2017, and a staggering 369 percent increase from the $279 million raised in 2016, as you can see in the chart below:

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RD Station, which is focused on SMBs in emerging markets, claims the round marks the largest funding round raised by a Latin American company in the SaaS (software-as-a-service) space.

, , , , and also participated in the round. The new financing brings RD Station’s total venture raised to about $90 million, according to CEO and co-founder . It last round was a $19.2 million led by TPG Growth in 2016.

Founded in 2011, RD Station has more than 700 employees (compared to about 500-550 people at this time last year) and 13,000 customers in 20 countries. Its headquarters (and the majority of its staff) are in Florianópolis, located in the southern part of Brazil, but the company also has offices in Sao Paulo, Bogota, Mexico City, and San Francisco.

“Most SaaS companies in the world ignore the SMBs, especially in emerging markets, due to difficulties with economics,” Santos said. RD Station has worked to be able to provide an AI and machine learning-driven solution that is “affordable” for smaller businesses yet can still help them “grow in a predictable and sustainable manner.”

While the company declined to disclose its annual recurring revenue (ARR), Santos said it has “basically grown [its ARR] by triple digits on average year-over-year in the last four years,” with the exception of last year.

“Of course as you grow, it gets harder to produce triple digit increases,” Santos points

In a phone conversation today, Santos told me that the company plans to use the money in part to continue its expansion in Colombia and Mexico. It also plans to invest in R&D to improve its product and naturally, as do most just-funded companies, grow its headcount. Last year, the company acquired another startup, , so that it could incorporate a CRM product into its platform. The startup now has two products: RD Station Marketing and RD Station CRM. It also works with about 100 other SaaS companies which integrate RD Station’s product, Santos said.

“Over the years we have become the leading marketing automation vendor in Brazil by far,” Santos said. “And we believe that we have a very differentiated competitive advantage in a market like Brazil want to replicate that in other emerging markets.”

It seems that investors like what they see.

In a press release, , the Sao Paulo-based managing director of Riverwood Capital, said his firm believes RD Station “has enormous growth potential” both in Brazil and globally.

The deal is the latest in a number of Latin American-focused investments for Riverwood Capital.  In April, we covered the news that the firm was the sole investor in a $20 million Series B raised by another Brazilian SaaS and SMB-focused startup, . It’s also previously backed Brazilian ride-sharing startup and , among others.

Latin America, as a whole, is increasingly attracting global investors. This deal is just the latest example of a growing trend in the global VC market. Just last month, Silicon Valley venture firm confirmed it led a $400 million round for Brazilian fintech startup , marking that firm’s first “significant” investment in Latin America.

Brazil is by far the largest recipient of funding in the region, according to , the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America, which found that venture funding in the country exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year. That was 52 percent more than the $859 million invested in 2017, and a staggering 369 percent increase from the $279 million raised in 2016.

Featured Photo of Eric Santos provided by RD Station

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In a phone interview, Paulo Braga – the company’s head of corporate venture – told me that the fund will allocate up to Brazilian Real(R) $45 million (about US $12 million) “for technology projects with the potential to transform the healthcare sector.”

To give you an idea of its size, Sao Paulo-based Eurofarma recorded R $4.3 billion (about US $1.14 billion ) in “gross income” and had nearly 6,800 employees in 2018. It has 287 products, serves 30 medical specialties and covers 101 therapeutic classes across Brazil. Eurofarma has operations in 20 countries, with an industrial site in Brazil and plants in six other Latin American countries. Last year, it invested more than R$250 million (US $66.5 million) in R&D, according to Braga.

Eurofarma’s first investment out of the new fund, which launched in June, was in a Belo Horizonte-based content marketing startup called . Overall, Braga projects the portfolio will include 8-12 companies with investments ranging from R $500,000 (US $133,000) to R $4 million (US $1.06 million) with Eurofarma joining a company’s board as part of the funding.

The new fund is focused on Brazilian startups but is open to investing in other countries, particularly the United States and Israel. But in those cases, it expects to partner with other VCs on deals, Braga said.

“In general, we are agnostic as to sector,” Braga told Crunchbase News. “We want to look at companies that are changing the healthcare ecosystem through technology over the next 10-15 years.”

In particular, Braga noted that patient management and integration systems are “fragmented.” As part of its corporate venture efforts, Eurofarma also plans to target scientific or academic initiatives “still in the embryonic phase” and help turn them into businesses. It also offers a mentoring program.

I was also curious as to why, after 47 years in existence, Eurofarma was ready to jump into the venture world. Braga’s answer was unsurprising.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve been seeing a lot of healthcare startups start to emerge here in Brazil,” he said. “About five to six years ago, health tech was almost nonexistent. And now we know of at least 300 Brazilian startups focused on the space. We know there’s a lot of mechanics in the healthcare system here as a whole that need to change, and are hopefully going to change. We want to be a part of that.”

Indeed, Brazil’s startup ecosystem seems to be gaining traction as of late. As we reported in May, venture funding in Brazil exploded in 2018 to $1.3 billion, representing nearly two-thirds of all venture money raised in Latin America as a whole last year, according to , the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America. That’s 52 percent more than the $859 million invested in 2017, and a staggering 369 percent increase from the $279 million raised in 2016, as you can see in the chart below.

Illustration: Image Credit: iStock/fotopoly.