Nido’s first-ever report: The State of LatAm Entrepreneurs

Towards the end of last year, we wanted to push our content section—ConteNIDO—to the next level. You might’ve already seen some of the results of this decision, such as our recently launched newsletter and useful guides for founders. Now, we are proud to share the next step of our strategy: the first-ever report by Nido.

This report—The State of Latam Entrepreneurs—was meant as a challenge to us as we hope to make Nido the best fund in the region. Thus far, through our content section, we’ve provided analysis and some form of guiding principles in the world of entrepreneurship. This year, we wanted to go further and become a source of information as well. So we decided to create a new form of report looking not just at economic trends but also at the essential building block to our ecosystem: founders.

So the idea for our first report was born. We set out to speak with as many founders as possible to understand their experiences, discovering broad patterns that led them to create a startup. In the end, we were able to speak with 112 founders from across Latam creating startups in sectors from Fintech to Climate Tech. Our dataset includes companies founded as early as 2014 and as late as 2023. Some companies were far along their journey, with 1.8% having raised a Series C round of capital. Others—far more common—had just begun their stories raising from friends and family members or venturing to a pre-seed round. All were united by the shared desire to change Latam through entrepreneurship.

As you read our report, quite likely, you’ll find some facts that may seem obvious to you. That, in a way, was our goal. As we thought of our questions, we wanted to quantify some key intuitions about founders in Latam. Topics such as past business experience, the prevalence of second-time founders, and even the tendency for founders to study in private or foreign universities were high on our list of interests. We also wanted to challenge some key perceptions of the ecosystem through data, such as the idea of founders being college dropouts or the lack of experience before founding.?

In many ways, this is the first attempt to bring hard facts into the conversation of well-known perceptions of the industry. We think of our report as a mirror. Maybe, we have a brought semblance of the face of entrepreneurship in Latam, but this is not synonymous with precision. Our goal was to hold that mirror to the ecosystem and help it better understand itself.

Most importantly, see this as the first of many reports as we strive to create a new generation of content in the world of VC and entrepreneurship more broadly.?

From the Nido

Maria, Ana Caro, Renata, and José Luis