Two years in Latin America – corporate investments in seven interactive graphs

“Just a few years ago, a typical entrepreneur wouldn’t even consider the existence of corporate VCs. Now it’s an investor class you can tap,” says Richard Zeiger, general partner at MSW Capital.

Indeed, two years is a long time in a rapidly-growing market. Latin America, a region whose corporate VC ecosystem really began to hit its stride post-pandemic, has been attracting more capital from more places, than ever before.

We took a look at corporate-backed deal flow across the region between 2023 and September 2025 and put together a picture of the past two years in the form of interactive graphs that tell the story of the region.

We can see who is investing where, how each country’s activity has grown over time, what sectors are seeing the most deal flow, what the exit landscape looks like, and more.

Scroll over any graph to explore it further.

Interested in Brazil’s innovation ecosystem?

Join our São Paulo event to meet hundreds of leading companies and investors.

Brazil and Mexico lead the pack

According to available data, Brazil is where startup funding rounds that include at least one corporate investor have passed the $1bn mark in the past two years.

Mexico, however, is not far behind in terms of the cumulative dollar value of corporate-backed rounds. It is approaching the billion-dollar mark despite having a quarter of Brazil’s number of corporate-backed rounds in the past two years, some 30 deals in Mexico vs 121 in Brazil. This suggests much higher round sizes on average in Mexico.

According to the Latin American Venture Capital Association (LAVCA), in H1 2025 Mexico overtook Brazil for the first time in terms of VC dollars invested. GCV’s data shows the same when just looking at corporate backed rounds –  from the disclosed rounds collected for H1 2025, Brazilian startups hauled in nearly $197.7m, while Mexican startups, in fewer rounds, raised $474.1m, over twice as much. Mexico’s explosive year has been buoyed by a couple of nine-figure rounds – a $127m SoftBank-coled round for used vehicle marketplace Kavak and the $170m series C for app-based fintech platform provider Klar – and an $80m round for business expense tracking platform provider Clara.

A similar dynamic can be seen between Argentina and Chile, with Argentina having over half-a-billion dollars invested across 22 rounds, and Chile a more modest $318m across 35 rounds.

Other countries in the region are slowly but surely growing their ecosystems – Colombia and Peru, in particular, are looking promising.

Except in Brazil and Chile, most corporate investment is from overseas

The vast majority of corporate investors in Latin America have only invested in one round since 2023, but there are some companies taking multiple bets in the region.

Sociedad Química y Minera, through its CVC SQM Lithium Ventures, has been the most prolific Chilean investor since 2023, though many of them have been smaller, sub-million-sized tickets.

SoftBank, while putting up numbers nowhere near what it was doing back when its Latin America Fund was firing on all cylinders during the pandemic, has remained one of the biggest corporates putting money into the region’s startups. SoftBank’s investments are spread across sectors like IT, consumer, financial and transport.

Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica has, both through its CVC Wayra and telco subsidiary Vivo, also been one of the biggest corporate investors in the region.

As countries in the region continue to develop their venture ecosystems, the key corporate investments have come from abroad. The largest source of foreign corporate investment for startups in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico over the past two years has been from the US, which also provided the only corporate investment in Honduras.

Ecuador, Peru and Panama saw few, if any, investment from domestic corporates.

The two big exceptions to this trend are Brazil and Chile. In Chile, domestic companies account for around half of startup funding rounds that include a corporate backer, while in Brazil well over half of corporate investments are from inside Brazil.

“The ecosystem is maturing,” says Zeiger, noting the strong appetite of domestic corporates for investment inside Brazil.  

CVC leaders, help us keep compiling this data. Take part in our annual survey and receive the resulting benchmarking report for free.

Financial startups dominate investment but energy sector is growing

Unsurprisingly, and keeping with what has been true for the past several years, the biggest sector seeing CVC investment by quite some margin is the financial sector. Within that, the sub-sectors of payments and cryptocurrency, alternative lenders and personal finance and wealth management are each larger than almost any other across all sectors. This reflects a region that is still heavily underbanked, where providing alternatives to the big banking institutions – that may either not be available everywhere or overlook certain parts of the economy – is good business.

“Financial is always going to be the strongest – this won’t change. But the one sector that may be able to get close is the energy transition. We will see a lot of new money inflows from that,” says Zieger.  

While in more mature markets like North America and Europe, artificial intelligence tends to dominate investments in the IT sector, Latin America over the past two years has still more action in enterprise software. There were 14 corporate-backed funding rounds, reflecting the fact that the region is still in a period of rapid digital transformation. However, AI is fast becoming a focus for corporate investors, with eight deals in the past two years.

None of these investment rounds involved pure-play AI startups – they tended to be in specific applications including customer service, image recognition and others.

“Adoption of AI in LatAm is slower because I think many large companies are still missing the data governance layer that makes AI initiatives work well. A number of big companies are working on it but they’re not fully developed yet. That’s what’s currently missing, especially at the startup level,” says Jose Pascual, former head of Cencosud Ventures, the CVC arm of Chilean retail conglomerate Cencosud.

“There are many startups — and a large part of what I’ve seen is AI-native — but if corporates don’t have that governance layer, it’s very hard to operate at scale and integrate that startup technology.”

Given that Latin America is a region ripe for agricultural innovation, it is surprising that only two countries – Brazil and Argentina —  have seen corporate investment in the space.

Who are the outstanding corporate investors in the ecosystem?

We’re looking for outstanding early and mid-career CVC investors to celebrate in our list of Rising Stars and Emerging Leaders.

Nominate them through this form.

Pressure growing to achieve exits

As Latin America is a much younger venture ecosystem than the US or Europe, it has far fewer exits — most startups are not yet big or mature enough for a stock market listing or M&A deal.

As with investments, Brazil has dominated the corporate-backed exit landscape since 2023, boasting 12 exits — more than all other countries combined —  according to GCV data.

IPOs have been nowhere to be seen, with nearly all exits coming by way of acquisitions. There was also at least one secondary market transaction, when private equity firm Partners Group bought a holding in cloud enterprise resource planning startup Omie, providing exits for SoftBank and Tencent.

Although financial services startups have received the most corporate investment, this sector doesn’t dominate in exits. Both the fintech sector and the services sector saw five exits each in the past two years. In both cases, those exits were distributed across multiple subsectors and countries, but both mostly in Brazil.

Energy, media and telecoms saw one exit each, while the consumer, transport and IT sectors all had two exits, all of which spanned multiple countries. The consumer sector is the only one that hasn’t had an exit in Brazil in the past two years.

With financial exits not yet materialising, a lot of CVCs are feeling pressure to show some kind of strategic returns in the meantime. Having lower exit numbers than North America or Europe is to be expected, but that cannot stay the same for much longer.

“Within the next two years [Latin America] needs to start showing exits. We must have exits for corporations to remain in the game,” says Zeiger.

“Otherwise it will be very difficult to operate, raise new money, or even maintain what they’re doing now. Even if the aim is strategic, if at the end you don’t start returning some cash or prove that it can at least be self-sustaining, appetite goes down.”