Investments in Colombian startups soar and add US$10 million more

The end of the year has brought a lot of activity for Colombian startups in terms of investment with injections such as those received by Foodology (US$50 million), Elenas (US$20 million), and Vozy (US$5 million), with the addition of the digital dollar platform Zulu and the job opportunities platform HoyTrabajas.

The latter, which YCombinator backs, raised US$5 million in a seed round to boost access to formal jobs for Latin Americans without professional education in countries such as Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.

“By 2022, we hope to help close to 42,000 people, that is, the equivalent of the entire Atanasio Girardot Stadium (in Medellín), to be placed in jobs,” said HoyTrabajas co-founder Rubén Córdoba.

Newtype Ventures, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Rebel Fund, Starling Ventures, SCM Advisors, AngelHub, New Ventures & Fundación Botnar, Flucas Ventures, Kube Ventures, Magic Fund, Share Capital, Dragon Capital, Centauri Capital, K20 Fund, Solid Ventures participated in this round.

It also received the support of some angel investors such as Alan Rutledge, James Park, founder and CEO of Fitbit; Roger Dickey, founder and CEO of Made Renovation; Alex Galvez, founder and CEO of 99 startups; Abhishek Kankaniy, co-founder and CEO of Dyte; and Daniel Bilbao, co-founder and CEO of Truora.

This investment round closed after the startup raised a US$500,000 pre-seed investment round from angel investors and participated in the second batch of the RockStart accelerator.

On Thursday, October 13, the digital dollars platform Zulu also reported that it had closed a new round for US$5 million from investors such as Cadenza Ventures, Nexo, CMT Digital, Simplex, Coin DCX, and Gaingels, as well as other angel investors and startup founders.

The company, founded by entrepreneurs Esteban Villegas, Jaime Varela, and Julian Delgado, had previously raised US$1.4 million.

The company projected that it would reach more than 300,000 users by the end of 2022 and now projects that there will be 500,000 after this investment round.

It has already reached 100,000 users, with plans to extend its operations to Mexico and Peru.

“With this milestone, at Zulu, we plan to close 2022 by launching operations in Mexico and Peru, two new markets that will join Colombia, where we have already been adding users who see in Zulu the way to send remittances at low cost between these countries and Venezuela,” said Esteban Villegas, CEO of Zulu.

Colombian startups are attracting capital at the end of the year as they adjust their plans and goals to become more profitable as the market demands.

According to figures from Transactional Track Record and Datasite (TTR), so far this year through August, there have been 699 transactions related to venture capital in Latin America, a negative variation of 0.4% in the number of transactions.

Meanwhile, these operations stood at US$6.7 billion, which meant a 49% drop in these operations in year-on-year terms.

Earlier this month, it became known that Colombia adjusted the equity tax so that the taxable base is taken as the fiscal cost and not the intrinsic value of the shares, which was one of the main concerns of startups given the tax reform that Congress has already approved in the first debate.

Colombian entrepreneurs were concerned that the tax reform bill would change the definition of how the value of equity is calculated.

According to the startups, this definition would mean that every time a company receives investment, it would become part of its equity.

It would mean that the entrepreneur would have to pay a higher tax, even though the resources go to the project’s development.

As Bloomberg Línea advanced, the Government and the fintech industry held punctual meetings to address this issue and get the entire startup ecosystem to achieve exclusion.

“An important change for the fintech sector: the taxable base of the wealth tax will be the fiscal cost, not the intrinsic value. From the Dian (National Tax and Customs Directorate of Colombia), we will seek that the intrinsic value is reported for informational purposes, but strengthening this sector is the priority,” reported the director of that entity, Luis Carlos Reyes.

Colombian startups raised about US$808.9 million in 2021, according to the ColombiaTech Report 2021 released Thursday by KPMG.

With information from Bloomberg

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