Where is the least crowded place to deploy deep tech capital in Latin America today? On our own data, it is the round immediately after Series A. Twenty-two companies in the region have secured a Series B or beyond, and the median round at that stage is US$17 million. Twenty-two is not an abstraction, it is a list. An investment team can work through a list that short company by company, meet every founder, and still have time to price the round. That is not a condition you find in a crowded market.

These figures come from LADP’s analysis of Tracxn data with a March 2025 cutoff and will appear in our forthcoming report on accelerating deep tech in Latin America. The stage shares and median tickets are extracted from our own database work and not yet re-verified against a comparable database, the honest limit on any original figure drawn from a proprietary source. The count of 22 is the figure we defend, and its error runs one way: a March 2025 cutoff under-captures late rounds, often disclosed months after they close, so read 22 as a floor.

A Front-Loaded Ecosystem, Read as an Entry Point

The shape of the funnel is unambiguous. In our mapping, 72% of ventures are still at Seed stage funding and 19% have secured a Series A. The Inter-American Development Bank found the same front-loading on its own 2023 mapping, Deep Tech: The New Wave: up until 2022, 65% of LATAM deep tech startups were still in pre-seed and seed phases having raised less than US$1 million, while 8% had progressed to Series B investments, those exceeding US$10 million roughly.

Now set the ladder of median round sizes beside it. Median round size scales from US$0.6 million at Seed to US$8.3 million at Series A, then leaps to US$17 million at Series B and US$100 million at Series C. The seed to Series A step is one the region demonstrably clears for close to a fifth of its ventures. The step after it is where the population thins to a number you can count, because that is where a company needs a round at the US$17 million median from a funder base smaller than the one that wrote its Series A. It is also, for that reason, where a new entrant meets the least competition for the best assets.

What Clears the Step

In LADP’s investors roundtable, one participant named the region’s central problem:

One key element missing is a concrete track record that shows Latin American companies have global reach and impact. Track records are super important for investors. While there are isolated examples, the overall image and history of successful exits in the region remain limited.

The isolated examples are nameable, and naming them is how a track record starts. Sistema.bio, the Mexico-based biodigester company, raised US$22.8 million across three Series B rounds between 2024 and 2025, with KawiSafi, AXA Investment Managers, EcoEnterprises Fund and Novastar Ventures among its investors, while running major hubs in Mexico and Colombia. Look at that syndicate: climate and impact capital rather than classic regional growth funds, and a round assembled in three parts rather than one. That is what clearing this step often looks like.

Above it sit proofs that the ladder goes all the way up. Tractian, with Brazilian roots, closed a US$120 million Series C led by Sapphire Ventures, with Y Combinator among earlier backers, for AI applied to industrial predictive maintenance. Establishment Labs, the Costa Rican company behind Motiva Implants, took a US$55 million Series D as its largest single round and listed on NASDAQ at a US$1.8 billion valuation. Satellogic operates 34 high-resolution Low Earth Orbit satellites at TRL 9, with the IDB among its backers. Auth0, out of Argentina, raised a US$120 million Series E led by Salesforce Ventures at a US$1.92 billion valuation before Okta acquired it in March 2021.

Below it, the pipeline into that US$17 million round is visible and it is being built deliberately. Puna Bio in Buenos Aires, a TRL 9 agricultural biotech working with high-altitude extremophile microbes, has raised US$24.3 million in total at Series A, backed by The Gates Foundation and SOSV/IndieBio. Splight, in Chile, raised US$12 million in seed funding for grid-operations AI, led by noa with EDP Ventures and Elewit participating. Strong by Form, also Chilean, secured a €4.8 million seed round led by CMPC Ventures in 2023 for structural wood components that replace steel and concrete. These are the companies asking for the growth round next.

Who Is Already Writing These Cheques

The funder base at this stage is thin, and identifiable, which matters if you want to enter it. The IDB counted 65 VC funds with at least one deep tech investment in LATAM by 2023, regional and international. By 2025, Hello Tomorrow’s Deep Tech Investor Mapping has identified nearly 40 VC funds active in the region. The two exercises use different inclusion rules, so read the pair as two views of a base measured in dozens, not as a trend line.

Part of that base is being manufactured on purpose. GRIDX, the venture builder anchored in Argentina, has raised US$41.5 million across two funds according to Scenius LATAM’s 2024 profile, with IDB Lab joining Fund II as a limited partner. Its portfolio runs to 81 companies, 75% co-founded by women, employing 1,000 people including 700 scientists, and those companies have raised over US$100 million from international investors. Vesper Ventures, in Brazil, co-founds instead of investing: on its own account it evaluated approximately 4,500 scientific projects and chose to co-found 8 companies, which hold 16 patents and have raised over US$30 million.

Corporates are the other candidate pool, and that series is worth printing in full. Dealroom puts corporate venture capital into LATAM deep tech at US$9 million in 2020, US$119 million in 2022, US$73.9 million in 2023 and US$36.5 million in 2024. Against 2020 that is roughly four times the baseline; against 2022 it is about 70% below the peak. Both readings are our own arithmetic on one series, so we print the series and let an allocator choose the baseline.

An Instrument Sized for This Stage

If the target is a population in the low tens at a US$17 million median, the instrument is not a large blind pool. It is a concentrated growth vehicle with the patience to write that cheque into science-based companies, and there are designs to copy. Under Tibi’s first phase in France, 2020 to 2022, institutional investors committed €6.4 billion to approved funds, per DG Trésor. The UK’s Mansion House Accord, proposed in May 2025, pledges 10% of pension provided portfolios to private markets by 2030, with at least 5% ring-fenced for UK assets.

Latin America has the balance sheet for its own version. The OECD puts pension AUM in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Uruguay at roughly US$1 trillion, and redirecting even 1% of that would mobilise US$10 billion for domestic deep tech. By our own calculation that 1% is about four times the US$2.5 billion deployed into LATAM deep tech since 2018. Our report recommends a public-anchored fund-of-funds that pools public-sector balance sheets, including development banks and multilaterals, then commits to independent managers through competitive mandates. The near-term obstacle is expertise rather than capital, so the first move is to educate privately and convene publicly.

What We Are Building to Measure Next

Two measurements would sharpen this reading. The first is the region’s annual number, which depends on whose definition you use. Dealroom reports LATAM deep tech funding of US$138 million in 2024, with no Series B or later round closing in the region that year. Sling Hub puts 2024 deep tech funding at US$536 million, 6% of a US$8.8 billion total across all tech sectors that grew 37% year over year. The two providers apply different deep tech taxonomies, and both answer a different question from the count of 22, a standing population to March 2025 rather than rounds closed inside one year.

The second is the metric this stage most needs and nobody publishes in comparable form: the graduation rate from one round to the next. Our report recommends building it, alongside deal counts per investor over trailing 24 to 36 months, follow-on behaviour, and the depth of corporate venture participation. LADP is working toward an open, versioned map of the region’s ventures carrying sector, TRL, location, funding stage, investors and public links, so the community can audit entries and submit updates.

The Road Ahead

The IDB projected in 2023 a twentyfold increase in VC investment into LATAM deep tech startups over the next decade. Our report treats that as a high-end scenario rather than a forecast, and the mechanism it would require is not mysterious. It runs straight through the stage described here.

For founders: raise the Series A on the assumption that the next round must be earned rather than scheduled, and choose investors who can convene the syndicate that writes it.

For allocators: the growth stage in Latin American deep tech is a set you can know exhaustively, and the funder base you would be joining is measured in dozens.

For ministries and development banks: the pension lever is one percentage point of roughly US$1 trillion, and the fund-of-funds design is already written down in France and the United Kingdom.

Our full report, Accelerating Deep Tech in Latin America, publishes this September with the funnel, the median ladder, the company profiles and twenty recommendations in full. If you are building at this stage, investing at it, or writing policy for it, we want to hear from you. Come and find us at LADP.