Deep Tech Investment in LATAM
A promising but still nascent ecosystem
Showing the figures as the report published them, September 2025.
By 2023, investment in LATAM increased by nearly 600% between 2019 and 2023, rising from under USD 300 million to USD 2 billion in just four years, according to the IDB’s Deep Tech: The New Wave. As of September 2024, cumulative investment had grown by an additional USD 536 million, bringing the regional total to roughly USD 2.54 billion.
Even at this higher level, LATAM still trails other regions: roughly USD 13 billion in Asia, USD 14 billion in Europe, and USD 52 billion in the United States. In macroeconomic context, those volumes correspond to about 0.04% of Latin America’s GDP, versus approximately 0.08% in Europe, 0.20% in Asia, and 0.22% in the U.S. Per capita, Latin America’s $15.25 per-person investment is higher than Asia’s modest $2.7, but still half of Europe’s $31 and a fraction of the United States’ $153.
LATAM invests about half of Europe’s (≈EU) level and a tenth of the United States’, per person. Asia is the whole continent, so that bar is not a like-for-like density.
The figure as the report published it, September 2025.
SourcesLatin American Dynamism Project (LADP), Accelerating Deep Tech in Latin America; Inter-American Development Bank (IDB Lab), Deep Tech: The New Wave; Sling Hub & Itaú, LATAM Startup Market 2024 in Review; Atomico, State of European Tech Report 2024
Methodology: Cumulative deep tech investment per person, in US dollars, as of September 2024. LADP divides each region's cumulative investment by its population; none of the cited sources publishes this per-person figure directly. The population bases are not the same kind of geography: "Asia" is the whole continent (about 4.8 billion people) while "Europe" is counted roughly as the EU (about 450 million). Read the ranking as directional; do not treat the exact multiples between regions as precise.
| Category | Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| United States | $153 |
| Europe (≈EU) | $31 |
| Latin America | $15 |
| Asia (continent) | $3 |
In absolute terms the gap is starker still: roughly USD 2.5bn for all of LATAM.
The figure as the report published it, September 2025.
SourceInter-American Development Bank (IDB Lab), Deep Tech: The New Wave
Methodology: Cumulative deep tech investment by region, in billions of US dollars, counted to September 2024 as reported by Science|Business and the IDB. The series is deliberately not extended to 2025 or 2026: current public trackers use incompatible definitions of deep tech (Tracxn puts the United States near $179bn against Dealroom's $20.3bn for Europe), and mixing them would produce a comparison none of them supports. For scale, Europe alone recorded $20.3bn of annual deep tech venture capital in 2025, so these four bars are one cumulative 2024 snapshot and should not be read as a live comparison.
| Category | Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| United States | $52.0B |
| Europe (≈EU) | $14.0B |
| Asia (continent) | $13.0B |
| Latin America | $2.5B |
This illustrates that while other regions have more mature Deep Tech ecosystems, Latin America has an immense and largely untapped opportunity for both capital and innovation. Looking ahead, the IDB projected in 2023 a twentyfold increase in VC investment into LATAM Deep Tech startups over the next decade, underpinned by a growing pool of researchers and engineers, cost advantages, lower early-stage valuations with attractive return profiles, and the region’s exceptional biodiversity.
The model rests on three points: Europe’s deep-tech VC 18× growth from 2012 to 2022, LATAM’s general 20× VC growth between 2012–2022, and LATAM’s 1.8× Deep Tech growth from 2020 to 2022. We present this as a high-end scenario, credible but contingent on progress in talent retention, later-stage capital depth, regulatory coherence, and exit pathways.
Investment grew ~600% between 2019 and 2023, reaching USD 2.5bn by late 2024. The BID projects a 20× expansion of the ecosystem by 2032.
The figure as the report published it, September 2025.
SourcesInter-American Development Bank (IDB Lab), Deep Tech: The New Wave; Sling Hub & Itaú, LATAM Startup Market 2024 in Review; Latin American Dynamism Project (LADP), Accelerating Deep Tech in Latin America
Methodology: Cumulative deep tech investment in Latin America, in billions of US dollars. Only the three points the report states are plotted: under $300m in 2019, $2bn in 2023, and about $2.54bn to September 2024. Nothing between them is interpolated. The $2.54bn endpoint comes from a source that reports an annual flow, so it is an approximate cumulative level, not an exact stock. The series has not been extended past September 2024.
| Year | Value |
|---|---|
| 2019 | $0.30B |
| 2023 | $2.00B |
| 2024 | $2.54B |
In 2024, after three years of decline, primarily due to the pandemic and the "big tech crisis", the funding landscape for LATAM tech startups showed positive signs again. According to the LATAM Startup Market 2024 in Review report by SlingHub & Itaú, 2024 marked the first year since 2021 that LATAM’s tech industries experienced year-over-year growth, reaching 37%. Market funding across all tech sectors increased from USD 6.4 billion to USD 8.8 billion.
LATAM’s tech investment rebounded 37% YoY in 2024, marking the first year of recovery since 2021 and signaling renewed investor confidence across sectors.
A closer look reveals that Deep Tech is the most steadily growing area. Deep Tech emerged as the third-largest category within all tech industries, securing USD 536 million of funding, 6% of the overall total, placing it just behind energy (13%) and fintech, which dominated with 55% of market funding. Although a small percentage overall, Deep Tech grew the most year over year, accounting for a 219% overall growth increase. On equity funding the trend is similar: Deep Tech lags Fintech (41%) in volume and equals Energy at 11%, yet was the highest year-over-year grower in equity funding volume in 2024, with 189% growth.
Deep tech took 6% of Latin America’s tech funding in 2024, USD 536M of USD 8.8bn. Fintech still dominates the total, but deep tech’s share is climbing.
The figure as the report published it, September 2025.
SourceSling Hub & Itaú, LATAM Startup Market 2024 in Review
Methodology: Share of total Latin American technology funding by market in calendar 2024, from Sling Hub. The report names fintech at 55%, energy at 13% and deep tech at 6%; the 26% "other" slice is the remainder to 100 and is not itemised. Fintech's dominance has held since, with Dealroom putting it near 58% of Latin American venture capital in the twelve months to Q2 2026. The deep tech share is a reported figure that has not been independently verified.
| Category | Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| Fintech | 55% |
| Energy | 13% |
| Deep tech | 6% |
| Other verticals | 26% |
By equity funding, deep tech reaches 11%, level with energy and second only to fintech. Investors are already putting real ownership behind the sector.
The figure as the report published it, September 2025.
SourceSling Hub & Itaú, LATAM Startup Market 2024 in Review
Methodology: Share of Latin American equity funding by market in calendar 2024, from Sling Hub. The report names fintech at 41%, deep tech at 11% and energy at 11%; the 37% "other" slice is the remainder to 100 and is not itemised. Equity only, so it excludes the debt and structured instruments that make up a growing share of regional funding.
| Category | Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| Fintech | 41% |
| Deep tech | 11% |
| Energy | 11% |
| Other verticals | 37% |
In 2024 deep tech outgrew every other tech vertical in LATAM, by funding and by equity.
The figure as the report published it, September 2025.
SourcesSling Hub & Itaú, LATAM Startup Market 2024 in Review; Dealroom.co, Deep Tech Overview: Latin America
Methodology: Year-over-year growth in 2024 against 2023, from Sling Hub's 2024 review, plus a corporate venture capital multiple of 4× reported by Dealroom. Three of the four figures are percentages and the CVC one is a multiple, which is why the unit is recorded as mixed. Both sources cover calendar 2024 and neither has been extended to 2025.
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| Deep tech funding growth | +219% |
| Equity funding growth | +189% |
| Overall tech rebound | +37% |
| Corporate VC growth (2020–24) | 4× |
# Gaps to become international unicorns
While Deep Tech in LATAM boasts exciting pockets, the region remains dramatically undercapitalized. R&D funding is roughly 13× lower than in China and 70× lower than in the U.S. This shortfall is structural. In advanced economies like the US and EU, companies fund over 60% of R&D (nearly 80% in China); in LATAM, businesses cover only about 35%, while governments provide roughly 60%.
Business covers about 35% of R&D in Latin America, against 60% or more across the United States and Europe and nearly 80% in China. Thin private research funding is a structural brake on deep tech.
The figure as the report published it, September 2025.
Methodology: Who pays for research and development, as a share of national R&D spending, from ECLAC using 2019 data. The 25% government figure for the United States and Europe is the midpoint of the 20–30 range the report gives; the report publishes no point value. This measures the composition of R&D funding, not its size: on level, UNESCO's 2026 data puts Latin America and the Caribbean at 0.57% of GDP spent on R&D against a world average of 1.92%.
| Category | Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| Latin America | 35% |
| United States & Europe | 60% |
| China | 80% |