> SocialDiabetes is a Barcelona-based healthtech platform for diabetes patient care, focused on Mexico and Spain, with funding from ALLVP and the European Commission.
READ 📰LAVCA's interview with co-founder and CEO María Salido, where we learn about the opportunity to reduce diabetes prevalence in Mexico, a country with the highest rate of diabetes among the OECD countries:
Los pacientes con diabetes sienten que su vida no es flexible y se sienten inseguros. Con SocialDiabetes adquieren flexibilidad en la forma de comer y pueden calcular la dosis de insulina óptima en cada momento, lo que incrementa radicalmente la seguridad.
Por otro lado, los profesionales visitan a los pacientes cada X meses, y entre visita y visita, no tienen información sobre los mismos. Con el sistema de telemedicina, el paciente puede ahorrarse viajes y visitas presenciales y los profesionales pueden anticipar complicaciones
y priorizar la atención.
En definitiva solventamos el problema que tienen tanto pacientes como profesionales de una gestión ineficiente y poco eficaz, debido a la gestión manual y presencial de la Diabetes.
Fernando Lelo de Larrea at ALLVP adds: “We expect the healthtech sector in Latin America to grow exponentially in the next few years, and believe María and Victor are the ideal leaders to leverage this opportunity."
> Broota is a Chilean equity crowdfunding platform that has crowd-raised over US$6.1m for ~30 projects since 2013 (including a US$200k fundraise for Broota itself). Broota co-founder and CEO Jose Antonio Berrios says Broota is trying to solve one of the biggest problems facing startups in the region, access to capital:
Latin America has twice the population of US, but only 1.3% of the amount of funding to startups. If I back a Kickstarter project, my goal is to obtain my reward. In a lending platform, as an investor my goal is to obtain the funds back plus interest. In equity crowdfunding, there's a long term relationship; the goal of the investor is for the startup to succeed in order to obtain profits of its investment.
Equity crowdfunding is not yet regulated in Chile, according to Berrios.
> Courtney McColgan, Founder of RunaHR, a cloud-based payroll and HR platform for SMBs in Latin America with a recent investment from Salesforce Ventures, explains how YCombinator helped her raise funding quickly and join “the best network I am part of, hands down”:
As a Latin American startup, many investors in Silicon Valley won’t even take your meeting. It doesn’t matter how how amazing the opportunity, the answer is no. As a YC company, we were able to change that conversation. We became a “YC company doing a Latin American play” versus just “a Latin American company.” The difference may sound subtle, but its important. I can say that no investor ever said no to meeting with us.