Timeline: LatAm's Top 10 Funding Rounds in H1 2022
Fintech dominates LatAm's H1 2022 funding, with banks leading 2 of the top 3 rounds.
The world of venture capital has been slowing down this year. We’re in a bear market due to rising inflation and interest rates. These factors limit the availability of companies to borrow money, and thus investment in private and public markets is reduced.
This environment makes the companies’ achievement of getting massive funding rounds even more impressive. Thanks to data from Sling Hub, a platform that tracks Latin American venture capital deals, we put together a list of the largest 10 funding rounds so far this year.
Neon, the Brazilian digital bank, tops the list with a $300M investment led by traditional BBVA bank. The investment helped secure Neon’s growth and gained BBVA “exposure to retail banking in Brazil, a market with one of the highest potential in the world.”
Creditas, which offers consumer loans secured by borrowers’ assets like homes, automobiles, and even iPhones, is 2nd on the leaderboard. It reached a $4.8B valuation in its $260M Series F led by Fidelity, a Boston-based multinational bank. Spot the trend yet? — The two biggest rounds so far this year were led by banks trying to modernize in the heavily disrupted world of finance.
The 3rd largest funding went to Colombian Habi, a platform for buying and selling real estate properties. Besides being the only ‘proptech’ on the list, the startup is female-led. CEO and Co-Founder Brynne McNulty claims that in Colombia, about 70% of properties priced in the middle-class segment are not listed online, representing a massive opportunity for Habi.
New Jersey-born Brynne graduated from Harvard and along with her Co-Founder, Sebastian Noguera, recognized and took on the challenge to disrupt an inefficient industry in Latin America. That’s just the kind of opportunity investors worldwide are searching for as they continue to pour money into this new generation of entrepreneurs.