Peru Venture Capital Conference Highlights Country’s Progress

The Peru Venture Capital Conference, held October 16-17, 2019 in Lima, gave centerstage to the best Peru has to offer, showing that the local startup ecosystem has matured and integrated with neighboring ecosystems. 

The 2019 edition, organized by Jose Deustua, Managing Director of UTEC Ventures, had a decidedly regional feel. Founders and investors discussed real experiences and concrete learnings from scaling startups across Latin America. 

According to Mr. Deustua, the objective of this year’s event was “to both promote venture capital investment and encourage a global, or at least regional, mindset when building a startup.” This year’s conference was the first in which that multiple events were held in parallel. As Mr. Deustua mentions this is “due to the ecosystem spirit of contributing actors such as PECAP, Endeavor, Shift and Xertica.” 

Top-notch Founders

Entrepreneurs are the pulse of the startup ecosystems and the conference showed that Peru-based founders are reaching new heights. Recent Y Combinator grads Manuel Olguin of Keynua and Patrick Wakeham of Apurata spoke of their growth trajectories. Diego Olcese of Crehana, which raised a Series A round this year, shared how he is building a regional education company. These entrepreneurs and others, including Pedro Neira and Amparo Nalvarte, represented the established breed of serial founders who make Lima their home.

Ecosystem Is Filling Out

The conference featured a complete set of breakout workshops for angel investing, venture capital, and corporate venture capital. Miguel Algarín, Senior Research Analyst at LAVCA spoke of venture capital tendencies in the region and gave a run down of recent investments in Peru startups. José Miguel Porto, Senior Partner at Porto Legal discussed issues investors should consider when investing in Peru. The local venture capital association, PECAP, teamed led a matchmaking session for investors to meet with entrepreneurs. Having session multiple actors represent each different stage of the startup lifecycle is a good sign for future ecosystem.

Regional Investors Are Taking Notice

International investors from across the region now have Peru on their dealflow radar. Julio Gaitán of Softbank spoke of the funds rapid investment pace in the region. He joined investors from Angel Ventures, and Salkantay on a venture capital panel. Other regional funds came and joined local funds Winnipeg Capital, INCA Ventures, KB Inversiones y Consultoría, The Board Perú, and Wayra Perú to meet local startup founders throughout the two day event.

Opportunity To Achieve Impact 

An entire day of the event centered around social entrepreneurship and impact investing. Peru has an opportunity to close socio-economic gaps and entrepreneurship is one attractive avenue achieve progress. During the conference Patrick Flynn, investment manager at Kiva, spoke about how crowdfunding is changing the lives of many around the world and what are the key success factors to succeed with crowdfunding. Two impact investors, Maria Laura Tinelly from Acrux Partners and Ana Lopez from CI Ventures, identified investment opportunities for social entrepreneurs across Latin America.

Long-Term Foundational Commitment

This was the third year that the UTEC Ventures team has organized the conference with support from BID Lab, COFIDE, Peru’s development bank, and Innovate, a program of the Ministry of Production. This time of long term commitment has been key to establishing a strong foundation to the startup ecosystem. 

In fact, Peru is at the cusp of a establishing a venture capital asset class. Many funds are currently active and more are on the way. COFIDE has recently announced the launch of a fund of funds that will invest in 3 to 5 venture funds which will, in turn, invest in approximately 120 startups. The fund of funds will go along way to addressing the existing venture capital opportunity in Peru. 

As the conference displayed, Peru has now taken its place in Latin America’s startup scene.

Here are some numbers of the Peru Venture Capital Conference 2019:

• 1,200 tickets sold
• +100 investors
• +400 corporate innovators
• +150 investors & startups meetings.
• +US$ 100 MM in investment opportunities

Thanks to Jose Deustua of UTEC Ventures for his contribution to this article.