Pensions: A Fund-of-Funds for Domestic Deep Tech
Recommendation 12 · Regional Coalition
Showing the figures as the report published them, September 2025.
Pension funds should be part of the conversation on Deep Tech financing in Latin America. They are among the region’s largest pools of patient capital, yet much of that capital is deployed abroad rather than into domestic innovation. Beyond isolated remarks in private interviews, we found no coordinated effort to bring pension trustees, supervisors, and Deep Tech managers around a shared investment architecture.
Global benchmarks clarify both feasibility and urgency. Across Europe and the United States, pension funds account for under 5% of the top-50 Deep Tech investors by deal count by 2024, well behind VC funds, government entities, and corporate VCs. Even so, their presence demonstrates an investable foothold. For the authors of the 2024 State of European Tech Report, redirecting even a small share of pension assets currently invested outside the EU could unlock the patient capital needed to seed and scale Deep Tech.
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.
The figure as the report published it, 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% |
The 2025 "CERN for AI" white paper, authored by the European Union, also points to European pensions to unlock patient capital. In the United Kingdom, the idea is entering the mainstream. Most importantly, the UK’s Mansion House policy reforms are already putting this approach into practice, and France’s Tibi initiative goes further by setting clear commitments for institutional investors. Under Tibi’s first phase (2020–2022), institutional investors committed €6.4 billion; its second phase projects €40–50 billion in technology funds under management by 2026.,
While precise figures are hard to aggregate across LATAM, a useful order-of-magnitude comes from the OECD: in Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay, pension AUM total roughly US$1 trillion. Redirecting even 1% would mobilize USD 10 billion for domestic Deep Tech. This 1% would represent about four times the USD 2.5 billion deployed into LATAM Deep Tech since 2018, enough to turn today’s funding bottleneck into an investable pipeline.
# Recommendation: A Fund-of-Funds path for patient capital
A coalition-led strategy can change the frame: instead of treating pensions as distant spectators, invite them, prudently and voluntarily, into vehicles that channel a small share of assets toward local R&D and Deep Tech, without compromising fiduciary duty. Immediate priorities are to specify investable vehicles that fit fiduciary mandates, map the regulatory tweaks that would enable pilot allocations, and define safeguards that protect senior pension tranches.
Governments should take the lead by establishing a public-anchored Fund-of-Funds (FoF). By pooling public-sector balance sheets, including mutual insurance and pension funds, governments can set an example, then commit to independent managers through clear, competitive mandates, drawing inspiration from the 2018 Tibi report in France. The UK’s Mansion House Accord (May 2025) has taken this French policy as a first step, pledging to allocate 10% of pension portfolios to private markets by 2030, with at least 5% ring-fenced for UK assets. Complementing this, the BVCA’s 2025 expert panel proposes a UK "NOVA" program, modeled on Tibi, steps LATAM can mirror with development banks and multilaterals.
# Shared R&D infrastructure
From quantum rigs and petabyte-scale AI clusters to secure blockchain nodes and biotech wet-labs, Latin American innovators converge on one persistent bottleneck: the region’s limited supply of specialised, capital-intensive R&D infrastructure. Governments have begun to chip away at the gap: Brazil now boasts 11 active biotech hubs, Chile at least three, Uruguay at least seven, and Argentina at least one., Yet the region is still scratching the surface of what is needed.
- Parque de Innovación de Buenos Aires (Argentina)
- An urban innovation district spanning 12 city blocks and 340,000 m², uniting universities, research centers, co-working spaces, and startups.
- StartupLab.01 (Chile)
- CORFO and Fundación Chile launched a shared lab and cowork space for Deep Tech startups focused on climate tech, supported by the IDB and partnered with GRIDX.
- Patagonia Biotech Hub (Chile)
- A shared lab and cowork space for biotech startups, launched September 2024 with backing from the Ministry of Science.
- CBT SOFOFA HUB (Chile)
- The Translational Biotechnology Center accelerates adoption of biotechnology across biomedicine, mining, aquaculture, forestry, and agriculture.
- New Lab (Uruguay)
- Newlab’s first LATAM hub, a partnership with ANII, Globant, UPM and others, offers state-of-the-art prototyping labs and pilot testbeds inside Montevideo’s Innovation Campus.