Welcome to the rounds of the week. Over the last seven days, venture capital investments have diversified in terms of sectors, and have included investments in agritech (agriculture and technology), gastrotech and dark stores, as well as fintech, and which continue to be the favorites to raise venture capital.
This year could see the record 2021 venture capital investment figure of $15 billion in Latin America surpassed, according to data from the Latin American Private Equity Investment Association (LAVCA).
Following are the week’s rounds distributed across the region.
Grupo Central
La startup chilena pionera en su país en el desarrollo del modelo de dark kitchens y dark stores, cerró una ronda semilla por US$3 millones. Ésta estuvo liderada por el banco de inversión Moonvalley Capital, junto al fondo de inversión alemán Global Founders Capital (GFC) y Opera Ventures.
The Chilean startup, pioneer in its country in the development of the dark kitchens and dark stores model, closed a $3 million seed round, led by investment bank Moonvalley Capital, together with German investment fund Global Founders Capital (GFC) and Opera Ventures.
Grupo Central places its kitchens and hidden stores near urban logistics, storage and distribution centers for e-commerce, with the promise of delivery in 30 minutes. Its growth plans include international expansion to Peru and Brazil.
Leaf Agriculture
Los Angeles-based startup Leaf Agriculture, which provides agricultural data infrastructure to agritech companies, has raised $5 million in seed funding. This round was led by S2G Ventures. The startup plans to grow its sales, operations, customer success and development teams globally, add support for new data types and launch new services.
Leaf Agriculture offers a unified farm data API that allows anyone to send and receive user-authorized data across all platforms in a standardized way, eliminating the need to create and maintain multiple data integrations.
Parra Payments
The first Argentine gastrotech, created in 2019. This week it closed a seed investment round, led by Grupo Bonanza, Langley Terrapin Partners LLC and Eastern Point Trust as investors and advisors, for a total of $500,000, which will allow the startup to continue its development and internationalize to Paraguay this year.
Parra Payments works to improve the customer experience in the gastronomic sector through a solution that allows establishments to digitize menus easily so that their customers can view them through a QR code, in addition to placing orders in the dining room, take-away or delivery in the same place.
Finkargo
Finkargo, a fintech dedicated to providing financing to importing SMEs, announced the completion of a $7.5 million seed investment round. The startup founded and led by Santiago Molina, Tomás Shuk and Andrés Ferrer was founded in Colombia.
Finkargo seeks to tackle the lack of access to financing for small and medium-sized companies and thus become a catalyst for economic development in Latin America through linkages to global markets. This financing round will enable the company to grow its team and begin operations in Mexico in April.
