How large is Latin America’s deep tech opportunity, and how should an allocator size it? On the figures we have assembled for our forthcoming report, cumulative investment into the region’s deep tech companies reaches roughly US$2.54 billion as of September 2024, against roughly US$13 billion in Asia, US$14 billion in Europe and US$52 billion in the United States. Per person that is US$15.25 in Latin America, US$2.7 in Asia, US$31 in Europe and US$153 in the United States. As a share of output it works out at about 0.04% of Latin America’s GDP, versus approximately 0.08% in Europe, 0.20% in Asia and 0.22% in the United States. That gap is the opportunity: the region produces deep tech companies faster than its capital base has caught up with them.

Four Regions in One Snapshot

Start with the trajectory. The Inter-American Development Bank’s Deep Tech: The New Wave (2023) tracks investment in Latin America rising from under US$300 million in 2019 to US$2 billion by 2023, growth of nearly 600% in four years. Sling Hub then records US$536 million of deep tech funding in 2024, and our regional total of roughly US$2.54 billion as of September 2024 is those two figures put together.

One thing to carry with you whenever you quote that total: it joins the IDB’s multi-year cumulative series to a single year of funding recorded by Sling Hub, so it is a cumulative stock with a year of flow inside it. The practical rule for anyone sizing a region, us included, is that an investment total is usable only when its basis travels on the same line as the number: cumulative or annual, which years, whose taxonomy, and what normalises it.

The three comparator figures reach us through David Matthews, writing for Science|Business in 2024, and we hold them as reported rather than as numbers we have verified against a primary series ourselves. Read all four values as a 2024 cumulative snapshot with its compiler named, not as a live scoreboard.

Per Person and Per Point of GDP, Where the Room Is

The per-capita and share-of-GDP values are our own calculations from those totals, not source data. They come with a caveat we would rather state than bury: neither we nor the compilers put the population and GDP base on the same line as the number, so use them for order of magnitude and not for precision.

At that order of magnitude they say something an allocator can act on. Latin America’s US$15.25 per person is roughly half of Europe’s US$31 and a tenth of the United States’ US$153, and it sits above Asia’s US$2.7. On a regional GDP of roughly US$6 trillion, that cumulative total amounts to about 0.04% of output, the share that has reached companies working on biology, satellites, materials and energy systems. None of the regions ahead of us is discovering a new advantage; they are funding the one they already have.

What Is Already Standing On That Base

The base is larger than the funding figure suggests. Our database for the forthcoming report comprises 2,566 Latin American deep tech startups, drawn from Tracxn with a data cutoff of March 2025. That count is deliberately wider than the IDB’s 340 companies mapped in 2023, because we break AI and cryptography out as their own verticals. Every count in this field carries its taxonomy and its cutoff, and none of them is the number.

The map is concentrated. Brazil holds 1,048 of those companies, about 40.8% of the database. Mexico follows with 358 (14%), Argentina 256 (10%), Chile 251 (9.8%) and Colombia 219 (8.5%), and together those five host 83% of everything mapped. Sao Paulo alone accounts for 329 startups, roughly 29% of all ventures in the top ten cities, with Buenos Aires, Santiago and Mexico City forming a second tier that brings the four to 63% of mapped activity.

The companies are real and several are already global. Establishment Labs, founded in Costa Rica and listed on NASDAQ, stands as the region’s most valuable deep tech player at US$1.8 billion on the IDB’s 2023 mapping. Satellogic runs an Earth-observation constellation of 34 spacecraft out of Buenos Aires. Argentina’s Puna Bio has raised US$24.3 million for agricultural inputs derived from high-altitude extremophile microbes, with SOSV/IndieBio and the Gates Foundation behind it, and Mexico’s Sistema.bio raised US$22.8 million across three Series B rounds in 2024 and 2025 for biodigesters sold to farmers. Start-Up Chile counts NotCo and Autofact among its alumni. These company figures come from our own extraction of the sources named, not from a fresh independent check.

On composition, the IDB’s 2023 mapping puts biotechnology at 61% of the region’s deep tech companies and artificial intelligence at 11%, together 72% of the ecosystem. On flow, Sling Hub records deep tech as the third largest category of 2024 funding at US$536 million, or 6% of the US$8.8 billion it counts across all tech sectors on a basis that includes debt, behind energy at 13% and fintech at 55%. On returns, McKinsey’s July 2024 study of deep tech funds in Europe and North America found an average net IRR of 17% against 10% for traditional tech funds. That is the closest thing to a benchmark this asset class has.

The One Pool Large Enough to Move the Total

If the regional total is the number to move, the question becomes which pool of capital can move it without waiting a decade for foreign allocation. The OECD gives the order of magnitude: pension assets under management in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay total roughly US$1 trillion. Redirecting 1% of that would mobilise US$10 billion for domestic deep tech, about four times the US$2.5 billion deployed into the sector since 2018, and our own arithmetic against the current regional total puts it at 3.9 times. One percentage point of the region’s own retirement savings is several times everything the sector has attracted to date.

The precedents are running. Atomico’s 2024 State of European Tech report finds pension funds accounting for under 5% of the top 50 deep tech investors by deal count across Europe and the United States by 2024, a small but established foothold. Under the first phase of France’s Tibi initiative, from 2020 to 2022, institutional investors committed EUR 6.4 billion to approved funds, and for its second phase the French financial marketplace projects EUR 40 to 50 billion in technology funds under management by 2026, with the potential to support around 15 late-stage funds each managing over EUR 1 billion, per DG Tresor in 2024. The UK’s Mansion House Accord of May 2025 pledges 10% of pension provided portfolios to private markets by 2030, at least 5% of it ring-fenced for UK assets.

Latin America has a working small-scale template of its own. Uruguay allocated US$10 million to a 1:1 matching-funds programme managed by its Innovation Hub from May 2024, with vetted venture firms and angels co-investing through convertible notes, disbursements tied to technical and commercial milestones. Scale that logic with development banks and multilaterals as anchors, commit through independent managers on competitive mandates, and you have the instrument our forthcoming report recommends: a public-anchored fund-of-funds rather than another subsidy line.

What Would Sharpen This Estimate

The constraint sits on the numerator, and it is definitional. Latin America’s 2024 deep tech funding is US$536 million on Sling Hub’s broader count and US$138 million on Dealroom’s narrower one. Both are credible, and the roughly fourfold gap is what happens when two compilers draw the boundary of deep tech in different places, so we present both with their taxonomies rather than choose. It is the same reason we will not rebuild the four-region comparison from newer numbers: the available series disagree by construction.

What closes it is a transaction-level base built on one taxonomy, per-capita and share-of-GDP figures published with their denominators stated, and an open data commons that funds, agencies and mappers contribute to instead of each keeping a private count. That work is on our roadmap, which is why our recommendations include a standardised regional data effort alongside the capital ones.

What This Means for Allocators, Ministries and Founders

The IDB projected in 2023 that venture investment into Latin American deep tech could grow twentyfold over the next decade, resting on Europe’s 18 times deep tech venture growth from 2012 to 2022, the region’s own 20 times general venture growth over the same period, and 1.8 times deep tech growth from 2020 to 2022. The IDB labels that a high-end scenario and so do we. The useful point is that the ask does not depend on which multiple you accept:

For allocators, a region at about 0.04% of GDP and US$15.25 per person is an entry point rather than a verdict, and the small size of the deployed base means a single fund can still shape a vertical.

For ministries and pension supervisors, the lever is one percentage point of domestic retirement assets, routed through a fund-of-funds with fiduciary safeguards and milestone-gated disbursement, on models France, the UK and Uruguay have written down.

For founders, the concentration in Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Santiago is where the capital and the corporate partners sit, and the long tail from Panama to Ecuador is where the crowding is not.

Our report, Accelerating Deep Tech in Latin America, publishes later this year with the full investment chapter, the twenty recommendations and the sourcing behind every figure. If you invest, allocate or regulate in this market, we want your view on the pension route before it lands. Write to us, and take our survey to shape the next round of research.