Founders Stories

Entrepreneurs First, Success Follows

Shining a light on our creative founders, the problems they are solving, and the pathways that led them to where they are now.

These are the challenges, people and stories that motivate us each day.

Why we invested in Welbe - a startup fixing occupational health for LatAm

SVLC is excited to back Welbe alongside Nazca, Volpe, Kortex Ventures, and Green Rock, with previous investors Twenty and various angels such as Diego Libanio (CEO of Mercê do Bairro) and Ricardo Weder (CEO of Justo).

  • Cubbo Founders

    Delivering Fulfillment

    Brian York, Josu Gurtubay and Ignasi Vegas are transforming city space throughout Latin America by providing a tech-driven fulfillment solution for e-commerce direct-to-consumer brands. Cubbo’s e-commerce fulfillment platform facilitates last-mile delivery, who use Cubbo as their urban hub to deliver items on time.

  • Health on Demand

    Latin America’s health care system is profoundly inefficient. These profound inefficiencies serve as a clear leverage point for innovation and change. Prixz is doing just that.


  • Investing in the Environment: A Conversation with Michael Selden

    We asked Michael Selden, Finless Foods Co-founder and CEO, to address some questions about climate issues and the role investors can play in investing.

  • New Hope for Overlooked Diseases

    GEn1E has created a rich pipeline of next generation immunomodulators in a time span of 2 years with $5 million spend – something that would have taken traditional companies about 7 years and over $100 million.

  • Kickstarting a Payment Revolution

    As recently as a decade ago, credit cards were a challenging proposition for Mexican businesses. Many didn’t accept them, and the ones that did had to acquire a separate terminal for every bank (and wade through the mire of bureaucracy that came with it).

  • Bonding on a Cellular Level

    Crystal Nyitray, Ph.D. and Grace Wei, Ph.D. shared an idea about creating living medicines for a patient when the patient needs them. The resulting company, Encellin, leverages cells as molecular factories.

  • Changing the Face of Finance in LatAm

    While fintech is arguably the most popular VC topic in Latin America right now, Vilash Poovala realized the LatAm advantage well before most founders and investors.

Talking Trash

With dumpsites and sanitary landfills being pushed to their limits, Martin Junck and Fabrício Guimarães knew it was time to fundamentally change the industry.

 
  • Fintech Trends in Emerging Markets

    We sat down with Oyster Financial’s Vilash Poovala to discuss trends in fintech, his area of expertise.

  • For Cancer Patients, A Gift of Time

    When it comes to cancer, time is of the essence. The founders of Biomakers, Nicolás Kirchuk and Rubén Salanova, have dedicated their lives to giving as much time as possible back to advanced cancer patients. 


  • Jüsto: A Fair Deal

    Ricardo Weder is at it once again — shifting sector paradigms and transforming lives in Latin America.

  • A Simpler Way to Handle Money

    Deirdre Bobadilla and Silvia Schwartz are bringing trust, security and control to cross-border families with the fintech they co-founded, Fiado


  • Finding Their Second Act

    Before they built Mercê do Bairro together, Diego Libanio and Guilherme Bonifácio had individually achieved immense success.

  • Meet the Vegetarian Changing the World of Meat

    At first glance, Anne-Sophie Mertgen, Ph.D. seems like an outlier among meat producers, including those in the alternative and cultivated meat sector.

 

Coffee That Helps The Planet

Compound Foods leverages precision fermentation to create the same compounds found in a typical cup of coffee, but without the beans. Founder, Maricel Saenz is focusing on perfecting the coffee’s flavor profile through food science and fermentation, while scaling production to reach the mass market.

  • Liberating Retailers, Transforming Lives

    The desire to liberate merchants in Brazil from inequitable and broken systems is what drives Lucas Chita, Vinicíus Fernandes, Marco Korehisa and Gira forward
.

  • Forging a Bias-Free Path to Investment

    The Decision Analysis practice enables us to frame our intuition, minimize bias, focus on what matters and streamline the diligence process.

  • Living in a Materials World

    Typically, it takes up to 10 years and around $400 million to launch a new product in advanced materials. Ares went from product identification to customer acceptance in less than 18 months
.

  • Shower the People

    Nebia initially began as a Kickstarter campaign. Today, the company’s products are in more than 100,000 homes. In 10 years, the founders anticipate that everything in your home that touches on water use will have a Nebia component

  • Our First Exit

    In late 2021, we celebrated our first exit from Fund I when Thermo Fisher Scientific acquired the precision medicine startup Combinati. 


  • Bridging Gaps

    Timely diagnostic testing is often the key to living a longer and healthier life. And yet, across the world, 4 billion people on the planet lack access to reliable testing services.


 

A Trailblazer for VC in LatAm

Consuelo Valverde’s life has been all about breaking barriers and defying expectations. In 2013, she became the first Mexican woman to found an early-stage venture capital firm, in both Mexico and Silicon Valley.

  • Making Pharma Faster

    Compared to the industry standard of more than three hours with significant sample volumes, Correlia’s assays are complete in just under 15 minutes with minuscule samples.

  • How to Serve 166 Million Americans Lacking Financial Security


    Insurtech startup, Onuu, is removing obstacles that keep people from obtaining financial security.

  • Saving our Planet One Fire at a Time

    Torch’s novel IoT system warns users of fires while they are still containable, leveraging a mesh network across large swathes of variable terrain 


  • Life Sciences Advances Spark Record Fundraising

    The gene-editing tool kit is continuing to expand, which will enable the development of therapeutics for previously incurable genetic disorders.

  • Solving Burnout

    Mello is building a new standard for companies to measure, track and act on burnout, inspiring happier, healthier and more motivated teams

  • The Battle Against Obesity Heats Up

    Patients suffering from obesity have had no safe options to turn to when diet and exercise fail. Until now

An Innovator’s DNA

It’s no secret that building a company from scratch is not for everyone, let alone making a company that’s profitable and high-impact. And yet, every entrepreneur in our portfolio is doing just that. We asked our founders what they believed should be at the core of an innovator’s DNA.

  • 2022 SVLC Summit

    A glimpse into SVLC's 2022 Investor & Founder Summit.

  • Día de Los Muertos – Founder Social

    During Día de los Muertos in 2021, we had the opportunity to meet with our founders safely, where we could finally reconnect, celebrate milestones, sip coffee and eat delicious food.