Luiz Fernando Monteiro de Barros da Silva Néto, head of corporate venture capital at RX Ventures, is one of our top 50 Emerging Leaders in corporate venturing for 2025.
Last year, Luiz Fernando Silva Néto rose up the ranks to become head of corporate venture capital at Lojas Renner, a Brazilian fashion and lifestyle retail brand. The promotion came just two years after joining the company’s CVC as a senior associate in 2022.
The team at the $30m CVC fund, RX Ventures, made a follow-on investment last year in the series B funding round for Connectly, an AI-driven messaging-based marketing startup, targeting online retailers. Chinese ecommerce site Alibaba joined the funding round, which was a validation to Néto of the team’s investment thesis.
“It was a great milestone for a new fund such as ours to reach during the first three years of its life,” says Néto.
Last year, the CVC, which has five portfolio companies, also invested in Topsort, a developer of retail media solutions using AI.
It has also co-developed a product with an investee company that has become a source of revenue for the parent. “We have checked a lot of boxes in what value a CVC can bring,” he says.
After reaching its three-year milestone and the team having grown to five people, including two CVC-as-a-service advisers, Néto says the corporate venturing unit is entering a new chapter of growth.
“This next phase is to deploy the committed capital that we have and to nurture those relationships with the startup we invest in.”
RX Ventures, which is structured independently from its parent, still has approximately two-thirds of its fund to deploy and is looking to make more investments this year in startups whose core markets are in Latin America. “This next phase is to deploy the committed capital that we have and to nurture those relationships with the startup we invest in,” he says.
As a small fund with a 10-year lifespan, the investment team does not feel under pressure to invest quickly. “If we do not find the best opportunities for our portfolio, we do not have any problem to sit down and wait for the best ones,” says Néto.
See the full list of Emerging Leaders 2025 here.
