Regulatory Portability: The 34th Regime

Latin America’s Deep-Tech policy landscape is a patchwork: several countries have strategies and tech-transfer programs, yet startups still face duplicative approvals, uneven incentives, and slow, case-by-case rulemaking across borders. Investors and founders stressed that one missing layer is coordination, portable rules and institutional capacity that let a company scale regionally under one predictable framework.

Building on the prior chapter’s case for regional interoperability, this section outlines how mutual recognition, regional sandboxes, and a voluntary LATAM "single-startup status" could translate policy intent into cross-border scale, inspired by Europe’s emerging "28th Regime" model. A region-wide framework can sound politically unrealistic given sovereignty concerns and market fragmentation, yet a voluntary, modular design may reduce sovereignty costs, allow phased adoption, and create incentives for convergence.

There is international precedent to devise LATAM’s "34th Regime": a Pan-LATAM initiative to unite its 33 countries under a single regulatory framework for Deep Tech advancement. In December 2024 the grassroots coalition EU-Inc submitted more than 13,000 signatures urging the next European Commission to create a "28th Regime", an optional, pan-European company form that would let a startup incorporated in one member state operate everywhere else through one fully digital registry.⁵⁵ The idea has won backing from founders of Stripe, Wise and Bolt, VCs like Index and Sequoia, and even Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

France Digitale’s accompanying non-paper fleshes out the concept: a regulation (not a directive) establishing an online-first, mobile-first, API-first corporate status with minimal share-capital requirements, a single employee-stock-option regime, and due-diligence processes completed 100% online. By stripping away the "27 different hurdles" that slow cross-border expansion, the 28th Regime aims to give European scale-ups a clear path to become global champions.⁵⁶ Particularly for Deep Tech, it proposes an explicit exemption from state-aid restrictions, recognizing that university spin-outs and science-heavy scale-ups may need five, ten or even fifteen years to break even.

While a region-wide "single startup status" is still some way off, a promising basic recognition stack is already taking shape. At the base, cross-border digital identity and electronic signatures are moving from pilots to practice, most visibly with Mercosur’s Digital Citizen.⁵⁷ In trade, the new mutual recognition between Mercosur and Pacific Alliance "Authorized Economic Operator" programs, signed in 2025, streamlines supply chains without creating a supranational authority.⁵⁸ In health, the Pan American drug-regulatory network and the single-audit program for medical devices offer workable reliance models. Taken together, this is recognition without harmonization, the scaffolding for a voluntary pilot of a regional Deep Tech startup label and shared sandboxes.

Down the line, the 34th Regime should also propose policies that tackle the lack of incentives for Deep Tech ventures, from programs to create Deep Tech companies to public-purchase mechanisms and tailored regulations, as identified by ECLAC in 2020.⁵⁹ Rather than an exhaustive list, the following highlights a diverse set of innovative regulatory strategies that governments in the region are already implementing, which could serve as primers for the 34th Regime.