Extended Funders Mapping

Two mappings of LATAM deep tech investors disagree by inclusion rule and neither tracks family offices or sovereign funds; build one versioned, auditable registry.

The rationale

Capital stalls here for a locatable reason: a founder cannot see the market. The IDB counted 65 VC funds with at least one LATAM deep tech investment by 2023; Hello Tomorrow’s 2025 mapping identified close to 40 funds active in the region. The two are built on different inclusion rules and cannot be differenced, so the region has no agreed denominator. Neither records how often an investor returns, at which stage, or with what follow-on behaviour, and our interviews name family offices and sovereign wealth funds as co-investors that no mapping tracks at all.

The registry moves from presence to intensity. Every entry carries a fixed schema, sector, sub-sector, TRL, location, funding stage, investors and public links, and every change is versioned so an entry can be audited and contested rather than trusted. Classification follows the IDB’s twelve-vertical taxonomy, which keeps the registry comparable to the IDB and EMERGE mappings instead of becoming a fourth incompatible list. A public submission form plus quarterly partner validation keeps the record alive, and a roadshow calendar turns it from a lookup into an introduction path.

The obvious objection is that registries decay. The region already has the evidence for it: the IDB mapping was published once in 2023 and never updated, and Hello Tomorrow’s was a separate 2025 exercise rather than a second reading of the same instrument. This one survives only if it is load bearing for someone: the coalition’s pitch days, the CVC Bridge’s matchmaking and the KPI framework all read from it, and funds that want a place in the roadshow calendar have to keep their own record current. A registry nobody depends on will not be maintained, and should not be built.

The evidence

First moves

1. 0–6 months

   Publish the schema before the data

   Release the field schema (sector, sub-sector, TRL, location, stage, ticket, investors, public links) and the IDB twelve-vertical taxonomy as a versioned open repository, seeded with the 65 IDB funds and the ~40 Hello Tomorrow funds as two separately labeled layers rather than one merged list.

   LADP coalition secretariat + IDB Lab
2. 6–18 months

   Open submissions and validate quarterly

   Run a public submission form with named reviewers and a quarterly validation round in which partner funds confirm or correct their own record. Publish a changelog with every release so corrections are visible.

   LAVCA + regional accelerator network
3. 18–36 months

   Add intensity fields and the roadshow calendar

   Extend each investor record with deal count, stage mix, median ticket and follow-on rate, add family offices and sovereign funds as tracked classes, and attach a twelve-month roadshow calendar founders can book against.

   Coalition secretariat + national development banks

How we would know it worked

• Share of registry entries validated by the investor themselves within the last two quarters, published in each release changelog, above 60%.
• Number of tracked investors carrying a deal count and stage mix rather than a name only, rising from zero toward the full 65-fund IDB baseline.
• Family offices and sovereign funds carried as tracked entities, counted per release, rising from zero.
• Submissions and correction requests received per quarter through the public form, reported in the release notes.

What could go wrong

Who acts

Rests on

The data behind it