Corporate Venture Capital
A neutral bridge to corporate capital, and a way to measure it
By 2021 only about 40% of LATAM corporates were engaged in CVC, against roughly 90% in the US, and access runs on personal introductions. Stand up a neutral CVC Bridge with an observatory to measure it.
The rationale
Corporate capital is the layer LATAM deep tech is thinnest on, and the gap is structural. By 2021 about 90% of US corporates operated venture arms and 57% of firms in East and Southeast Asia had launched CVC programs, against roughly 40% of Latin American companies engaged in CVC at all. Where programs do exist, access to them runs through personal introductions, an over-reliance LADP stakeholders reported repeatedly. Dealroom’s series shows what that produces: corporate money into regional deep tech rose from US$9m in 2020 to US$119m in 2022, then fell to US$73.9m in 2023 and US$36.5m in 2024, roughly 70% below the peak.
The Bridge is plumbing. Co-run by the LADP, leading accelerators and a multilateral so that no single party owns the pipeline, it would operate recurring virtual pitch days and cross-border roadshows, publish one standardized CVC-ready data-room template, run transparent intake with common NDAs, and maintain the corporate-investor layer of the funders registry with each fund’s thematic priorities. It also tells corporates how to pilot: target SME clusters, keep pilots small in scope and short at 8 to 12 weeks, focus on one clear KPI, and draw public co-funding from national or IDB and CAF programs to lower the cost of trying.
The case for engineering access rests on European evidence. Hello Tomorrow and the EIC found CVC-backed startups going bankrupt at 1.24% against 2.58% for those without corporate backing, roughly half; whether that effect survives in LATAM is unmeasured, and testing it is the job of the separate CVC survival recommendation, which this observatory should carry rather than duplicate. Corporate capital also has costs a founder should price: information leakage to a strategic investor, and acquirers who become blockers at exit. Standardized terms and disclosure norms bound that, they do not remove it.
The evidence
What it unlocks
Corporate capital reached through a published intake process instead of an introduction, and a public record of how long each deal actually took.
It has been done before
Telefónica, the Wayra Hispam open call
Wayra Hispam, Telefónica’s innovation arm, takes startups across Spanish-speaking Latin America through a published application route rather than an introduction, co-invests alongside TheVentureCity and writes up to US$250,000 per company, as reported in 2019. It settles one question the region keeps asking: corporates here will accept applications from founders outside their own networks, at scale, across borders. What a single corporate’s funnel cannot supply is neutrality, since the intake serves Telefónica’s strategic agenda, and that is precisely what a shared bridge with published criteria adds.
First moves
- 0–6 months
Publish the CVC-ready data-room template
Release one standard data-room and intake template covering IP position, TRL, regulatory path, pilot history, unit economics and prior corporate contacts, and make a completed template the entry condition for the first pitch day.
LADP coalition secretariat + leading regional accelerators - 6–18 months
Run four pitch days against stated corporate demand
Hold one pitch day per quarter matched to the themes LATAM corporate funds say they prioritize, currently AI, electric mobility and the energy transition, each closing with named pilot commitments of 8 to 12 weeks against one KPI.
The Bridge (LADP, accelerators, IDB Lab or CAF) - 18–36 months
Publish the observatory’s first annual panel
Release open, anonymized dashboards covering CVC participation, time from first contact to term sheet, pilot-to-procurement conversion and survival, built on the corporate-investor layer of the funders registry rather than a parallel database.
Observatory secretariat + LAVCA
How we would know it worked
- Median time from first corporate contact to signed term sheet, tracked quarterly by the observatory, falling below six months.
- Share of Bridge pilots converting into a paid procurement contract within 12 months of completion, reported by participating corporates.
- LATAM corporates running an active deep tech venture arm or venture-client program, counted annually against the roughly 40% engagement baseline.
- Corporate venture capital into LATAM deep tech per year, from Dealroom, measured against the US$36.5m 2024 trough.
What could go wrong
The Bridge becomes a lead-generation channel for its own operators
If the accelerators co-running it also hold equity in the ventures they present, corporates will read the pipeline as a sales funnel and stop attending. Containment: disclose the co-runners’ financial interest in every company presented, publish intake criteria that a third party can check, and rotate the selection panel each cycle.
An observatory with no data
Corporates do not disclose deal terms, pilots or failures, and a dashboard nobody feeds is worse than none because it makes a thin market look measured. Containment: make anonymized reporting a condition of pitch-day participation, publish response rates next to every metric, and start with the few fields corporates already track internally.
Who acts
Rests on
16 Extended Funders Mapping A versioned registry the community can audit
18 CVC Survival Effect Whether corporate backing lowers failure, measured rather than assumed
02 Metrics & Success Stories A deep tech KPI framework
14 Research & Visibility An open data commons and a funding catalogue
The data behind it
Corporate venture capital into the region’s deep tech peaked at USD 119M in 2022, then cooled with the wider funding market. The base is set for the CVC Bridge the report proposes.
As published in the report, September 2025.
SourceDealroom.co, Deep Tech Overview: Latin America
Methodology: Dealroom LATAM deep tech CVC (ledger #127). 2021 is "n/a" in the report (null). Fell 70% from the 2022 peak but still 4× the 2020 base, present the full series, not just the 4×. Needs 2025/H1-2026 extension.
| Year | Value |
|---|---|
| 2020 | $9.0M |
| 2022 | $119.0M |
| 2023 | $73.9M |
| 2024 | $36.5M |
Global corporate venturing grew 2.8× and corporate–deep tech collaborations 4.2×; 71% of firms expect deep tech to weigh more in their portfolios.
As published in the report, September 2025.
Methodology: IESE 2021 (ledger #122). Multipliers over 2017–2021, not a time series. New context: LATAM CVC activity doubled 2020–2023 and AI is now the leading LATAM CVC theme (41% of funds), not in the report.
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| Overall corporate venturing growth | 2.8× |
| Corporate–deep tech collaborations | 4.2× |
| Of firms expect deep tech to grow in their portfolio | 71% |