Which country in Latin America is the best place to back deep tech? The Radar Deep Tech LATAM 2025, presented by EMERGE (Emerge Brasil) and Cubo Itaú on 11 September, gives two defensible answers, and they are different answers. On EMERGE’s mapping of 1,316 deep tech companies in the region, Brazil holds 952, 72.3% of the total. On EMERGE’s table of 2024 private deep tech investment, the order runs Chile US$607.2 million, Argentina US$486 million, Brazil US$216 million. Where the companies are and where the private capital is are two maps of one region, and together they describe complementary national strengths.

One note on reading those series. EMERGE’s investment figures are a single year of flows and its company counts are a stock, so the two cannot be divided into a per-company capital number. Both come from a secondary mapping rather than from deal records we have re-derived ourselves, so we cite them as reported, and as the best independent regional picture available.

Brazil Has Built the Region’s Deepest Pipeline

952 companies is an industrial result. Our report, out later this month, puts Brazil at 1,048 deep tech companies, about 40.8% of our regional mapping; that share differs from EMERGE’s 72.3% because our taxonomy breaks out artificial intelligence and cryptography as verticals of their own, so the two percentages answer different questions about the same country. São Paulo alone accounts for 329 of the ventures in our mapping, roughly 29% of all ventures in our top ten cities, and Brazil fields five of those ten hubs.

The pipeline is specific and it is scientific. brain4care, in non-invasive intracranial-pressure monitoring, was Brazil’s largest deep tech recipient of 2024 on EMERGE’s count. Symbiomics, out of Florianópolis, builds microbiome, genomic and machine-learning platforms for biological agricultural inputs and received about US$2.7 million during 2024 on the same basis, a single-year figure rather than a company total, third-largest in the country. Nintx turns plant and microorganism biology drawn from Brazilian ecosystems into multi-target therapies. FabNS, a UFMG spinoff in Belo Horizonte, sells tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for chemical imaging at nanometric resolution.

What Brazil has not built at the same rate is the private layer above its public programmes. EMERGE’s 2024 edition reported that public funding programmes accounted for 70% of all deep tech financing in Brazil, a share of financing volume. Its 2025 edition frames the same terrain as a count of companies: 47% of Brazilian deep techs have received no investment at all, 36% rely solely on public funds, and 7% have received private capital. Volume in one case and companies in the other, so the two framings belong in separate sentences. For an investor the 7% is the operative figure, because the population of Brazilian deep techs with no incumbent private investor is very large.

Chile and Argentina Have Built the Capital Side

Chile heads EMERGE’s 2024 investment table at US$607.2 million, and EMERGE attributes about 75% of that country total to one company: NotCo, which uses artificial intelligence to formulate plant-based foods and which EMERGE puts at roughly US$466 million cumulative. The US$466 million is cumulative across the company’s life while the US$607.2 million is a single year, so the 75% is EMERGE’s characterisation on its own basis and we do not restate it as a share of the 2024 flow. The more transferable fact is NotCo’s cap table, where Tiger Global, Bezos Expeditions and Kaszek sit: a Latin American deep tech company can be priced by international growth capital.

Chile also runs what is widely recognised as the region’s most successful public innovation programme. Start-Up Chile has issued equity-free grants of US$40K and reports supporting more than 3,000 startups from 85 countries, figures reported by the programme itself and not independently checked by us. Photio, in Huechuraba, makes nanoparticle additives that turn urban surfaces into air-purification agents. Strong by Form, in Santiago, digitally manufactures structural wood components meant to replace steel, concrete and aluminium. Splight builds grid-operations AI aimed at curtailment and congestion. EMERGE counts 72 to 73 Chilean companies, a small base producing large rounds.

Argentina sits second on that table at US$486 million, with 145 companies on EMERGE’s count, and it is the country that most deliberately engineered its investor layer. The 2017 Entrepreneurs Law established FONDCE, a fund of funds underwriting science-based accelerators and early-stage venture capital, and simplified company formation to under 24 hours. Within the law’s first two years, five FONDCE-backed accelerators had invested in 79% of Argentina’s investor-funded deep tech ventures, on an account published in 2021 that describes the law’s opening period, not the position today. FONDCE alumni include NotCo and Autofact.

The Argentine pipeline is visible at every stage. Satellogic, founded in Buenos Aires in 2010 and now listed, operates a constellation of 34 high-resolution satellites, with Liberty Strategic Capital, Tencent and the IDB among its backers. Puna Bio, also from Buenos Aires, derives agricultural biologicals from high-altitude extremophile microbes, backed by the Gates Foundation and SOSV/IndieBio. M4Life, a CONICET spinoff in Tucumán, sits at pre-seed and TRL 6 to 7, applying biologically trained microbes to seeds for soil restoration and CO2 capture.

Company formation and capital formation are happening in different countries. An investor who can work in only one of them is looking at half the region.

The Instrument That Closes the Distance

Lay the two maps over each other and the instrument suggests itself. The largest pool of unpriced technical companies in the region is Brazilian. The clearest evidence that a Latin American deep tech company can absorb international growth capital is Chilean, and the clearest evidence that a state can make private participation routine sits in FONDCE and in Start-Up Chile’s grant. A vehicle that can originate in São Paulo and Florianópolis, price with the discipline that funded NotCo, and sit alongside public co-investment where it exists, holds both halves of the region at once.

Templates exist. GRIDX has raised US$41.5 million across two funds and built a portfolio of 81 companies, with IDB Lab joining as a limited partner in the second fund, on figures reported by Scenius LATAM that we have not independently confirmed. The investor base it sits inside is thin: the IDB counted 65 venture funds with at least one deep tech investment in LATAM by 2023, and Hello Tomorrow’s Deep Tech Investor Mapping has identified nearly 40 venture funds active in the region by 2025. Those counts use different inclusion rules, so the pair is two snapshots rather than one trend. Both describe a set small enough that one new regional fund is a material addition.

The friction a cross-border fund meets is legal, and the region has started to reduce it. Mercosur’s Digital Citizen lets people and investors use their national digital IDs to access services across borders. The mutual recognition between Mercosur and Pacific Alliance Authorized Economic Operator programmes, signed in 2025, streamlines supply chains without creating a supranational authority. Our report proposes going further with the 34th Regime, a voluntary single startup status uniting the region’s 33 countries, modelled on Europe’s proposed 28th Regime, the pan-European company form the EU-Inc coalition backed with more than 13,000 signatures in December 2024 to strip away 27 different national hurdles.

What We Are Still Measuring

The figure we would most like to publish is private capital available per deep tech company by country, and it will not come from these two series: a single year of flows over a stock of companies is not that figure. It needs deal-level records for each country on one taxonomy and one window, which is a build rather than a calculation.

Two further pieces of work sit behind this post. The first is the taxonomy comparison between our mapping and EMERGE’s, which is what the 40.8% and the 72.3% differ over. The second is the funders mapping and shared regional data commons our report carries as recommendations, because part of the reason a regional vehicle is hard to raise is that no allocator can see the pipeline and the capital on one page.

What to Do With Two Maps

For founders in Brazil, these statistics are leverage. If you are one of the 47% that has received no investment at all, or one of the 36% living solely on public funds, an investor entering now has no incumbent to negotiate around. Grant timetables are also setting the pace of your company, and the first priced round will test a capital structure no private investor has yet examined.

For allocators, the case here is a cross-border mandate rather than a country bet. Chile and Argentina show what a priced deep tech round looks like in this region, and Brazil holds most of the companies that have never had one. A fund constrained to one jurisdiction has to pick which of those facts to build on, and picking is the expensive part.

For ministries, the two maps are a reminder that company formation and capital formation answer to different instruments. Brazil’s public programmes did what they were designed to do, and 1,048 companies on our count is a real industrial result. Chile’s equity-free grant and Argentina’s fund of funds were built to make private participation ordinary. Most countries in the region need both, and none has to invent either from scratch.

Our report on accelerating deep tech in Latin America is out later this month, with the full mapping, twenty recommendations, and the country and city detail behind these counts. If you are raising a regional vehicle, running a national programme, or inside a Brazilian company that has never taken private money, we would like to compare notes before the next Radar lands. Write to us, and take our survey so the next edition of this mapping carries your data.