LATAM’s Deep Tech Landscape

The database used for this analysis comprises 2,566 LATAM startups. This count differs from our initial estimate of over 5,000 after filtering; a fuller explanation is in the Methodology section.

For context, the IDB mapped 340 Deep Tech startups in LATAM in 2023,¹⁹ and EMERGE reported over 1,300 in 2025.²⁰ Our higher count reflects an expanded sector scope that includes AI and cryptography, two verticals that have grown sharply in the last five years. This underscores the limits of closed, proprietary databases maintained in parallel by different actors, divergent definitions, methods, and limited auditability drive many of the discrepancies across reports. The robust path is a regional, open, versioned, auditable dataset with a shared taxonomy, transparent inclusion criteria, and a public correction/contribution workflow.

The main discrepancy comes because we expanded the scope of the database to AI and cryptography, two verticals that have grown significantly in the last two years. This is work in progress and will expand as we validate additional rounds.

# Geographical analysis

LATAM’s Deep Tech landscape is sharply concentrated: Brazil hosts about 41% of all startups, driven by São Paulo’s 29% share, while Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Colombia, together with their leading capitals, gather most of the rest, leaving a long tail of smaller countries and cities that underscores both the ecosystem’s strength and its geographic imbalance.

• Brazil dominates with 1,048 Deep Tech startups, about 40.8% of the entire regional database. Its share is larger than the next four countries combined.
• Mexico (358, 14%), Argentina (256, 10%), Chile (251, 9.8%) and Colombia (219, 8.5%) form a solid second tier. Together with Brazil, these five countries host 83% of all mapped companies.
• Beyond the "Big 5," a long tail of emerging hubs, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Ecuador, offers earlier-stage, less-crowded markets.

Cultivating a distributed tech ecosystem depends on a dual approach: reinforcing major existing hubs, like São Paulo and Mexico City, while nurturing new ecosystems across the region, such as Uruguay and Costa Rica. Two strategies documented in Chile and Colombia are relevant: mixed cohorts that place international and local founders in the same programs to maximize peer-learning, and ecosystem-as-a-service (EaaS) operators that provide shared services so startups can progress faster.

• São Paulo is Latin America’s largest Deep Tech hub with 329 startups, roughly 29% of all ventures in the top-10 cities, more than the next three hubs combined.
• Buenos Aires, Santiago and Mexico City form a strong second tier; together with São Paulo they account for 63% of the mapped activity.
• Bogotá anchors the Andean corridor, but its scale remains half that of the tier-two group, signalling room for growth of seed and Series A funding.
• Brazil fields five of the top-ten hubs, São Paulo plus Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre, highlighting powerful domestic network effects.

# Funding stage and tickets

Our analysis indicates a significant funding gap. While capital flow has rebounded since the 2021 pandemic and big-tech crisis, few startups progress beyond Seed rounds as of 2025. This is consistent with IDB findings: up until 2022, 65% of Deep Tech startups in LATAM were still in pre-seed and seed phases, having raised less than $1 million, while a scant 8% had progressed to Series B (those exceeding $10 million).

The ecosystem is heavily front-loaded: 72% of ventures are still at Seed stage, and only 19% have secured a Series A. Dramatically, only 22 startups (10%) have secured a Series B round or beyond, confirming a steep funnel from validation to scale-up. According to Dealroom, even as overall Deep Tech funding remained robust at $138 million in 2024, not a single Series B or later round closed in LATAM.²⁵ Our data reveals the median round size scales from US$0.6M (Seed) to US$8.3M (Series A), then leaps to US$17M (Series B) and US$100M (Series C).

Over the past five years the number of funding rounds has increased, yet the average cheque size has fallen dramatically from its 2021 high. In 2021, only 27 rounds were recorded, coinciding with unusually large tickets. In 2022, deal activity more than doubled as capital dispersed into a wider set of companies. In 2023 the round count fell 30% from 2022 and, more dramatically, the average check dropped 70%. In 2024 activity rebounded to its highest level by round count, yet still skewed toward early-stage financing, confidence in Deep Tech fundamentals returned faster than appetite for large growth cheques, leaving the Series B–C "scale-up gap" even wider.

# Sector coverage

Given the absence of sector-level disaggregation in our data, we use the IDB’s Deep Tech: The New Wave as the reference framework. By 2023, Biotechnology (61%) dominated LATAM’s Deep Tech, followed by Artificial Intelligence (11%). Together they represented 72% of regional startups, reflecting the critical role these technologies play in sustainable agriculture, food security, and healthcare.

According to the IDB, the prevalence of biotech aligns with the region’s abundant specialized talent in biological sciences, the international competitiveness of the agricultural sector, and remarkable biodiversity. Costa Rica and Argentina illustrate this concentration, with 97% and 80% of their respective Deep Tech ecosystem value coming from biotech. Establishment Labs, a Costa Rica–based biotech company, stands as the region’s most valuable player. SOSV/IndieBio reported a 72% gross average return on LATAM Deep Tech startups between 2015 and 2023.

Beyond these two leading areas, the landscape includes Nanotechnology (6%), Clean Tech (5%), Spacetech (4%), Advanced Mobility (4%), Robotics (2%), Advanced Manufacturing (2%), Health Tech (2%), Advanced Materials (1%), and Medical Devices & Others (<1%). While these sectors carve out promising niches, the region’s Deep Tech ecosystem remains starved for capital, venture funding for R&D in LATAM is roughly 13 times lower than in China and 70 times lower than in the U.S., a shortfall that chokes off early-stage growth.²⁶

# Who is investing

By 2023, there were 65 VC funds with at least one Deep Tech investment in LATAM, according to the IDB, both regional and international. By 2025, Hello Tomorrow’s Deep Tech Investor Mapping had identified nearly 40 VC funds active in the region.²⁷ Beyond updating coverage, the analysis should move from presence to intensity: quantify how often each investor backs Deep Tech startups, at which stages and ticket sizes, their follow-on behavior, and the graduation rate of portfolio companies. It should also isolate corporate venture capital activity and add family offices and sovereign wealth funds, which emerged in our interviews as increasingly relevant co-investors.