After nearly being eradicated when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the Brazilian startup community has been slow to come back. However, over the last two years, growth has been accelerating and Brazil’s startups seem poised to make a comeback. As Roi pointed out recently, the support ecosystem for young businesses in Brazil is still thin and plenty of friction remains (like high labor costs and… → Read More
Startupi, a site covering the Brazilian startup scene, has raised a $300,000 seed round of its own.
The team was pitched to me as the “TechCrunch of Brazil,” and in fact it has attracted the backing of Roi Carthy, who covers Israeli startups for TechCrunch. (Carthy invested through his firm Initial Capital, which backs early-stage Israeli and Brazilian companies.) Other investors in the round… → Read More
Apple is set to lose its iPhone trademark in Brazil, according to a report from Reuters which cites a source familiar with a forthcoming decision from that country’s copyright regulator. The trademark was challenged by Brazilian electronics firm IGB Electronics SA, which launched a new line of Android phones bearing the name late last year. → Read More
Telefonica Digital, the tech arm of carrier giant Telefonica, has been making a lot of consumer-focused acquisitions and investments in the last year — and now it’s showing that it has an equal interest in enterprise verticals, specifically in e-health: today it announced the acquisition of a controlling stake in Axismed, a chronic care management provider based in Brazil. Financial terms of the… → Read More
Descomplica today added its name to a growing list of startups finding support as they look to harness South America’s growing interest in online education. The Brazilian startup, which helps high school students prepare for their university entrance exams, announced this week that it has closed a round of series A financing from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Brazil-focused investment firm, Valor… → Read More
Another new chapter is opening up for Rocket Internet, the incubator started and run by the Samwer Brothers in Germany. The company is today announcing that PPR, luxury and sport & lifestyle group, is taking a €10 million investment in Bigfoot I, the Rocket holding company that controls Russian fashion commerce site Lamoda, South American fashion site Dafiti and also has a stake in Namshi… → Read More
American investors and VC firms (like Sequoia and Accel) have begun to turn their attention to Latin America, particularly to one of the region’s fastest growing economies: Brazil. Thanks to skyrocketing Internet penetration, the growing number of B2C eCommerce companies that have popped up over the last year and a population of just under 200 million, Brazil has become an appealing market for… → Read More
With today’s launch of Dinda.com.br, the founding team behind Brazil-based Baby.com.br, is expanding into a new vertical following the success of its original, but more traditional, e-commerce offering targeting new parents. While Baby.com.br is like a Diapers.com for Brazil (and local competitor with Bebestore), with Dinda.com.br, the company is introducing Brazil’s first flash sales site for… → Read More
Our hair-brained idea to pilot a Brazilian Pavilion at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt has taken a life of its own!
We expected 10 startups to show interest. Boy did we underestimate… There are now — wait for it — 76 Brazilian startups that have signed-up to take part in the Pavilion! This is on top of the 23 Israeli startups that have lined-up for their own Pavilion.
But the… → Read More
It was at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in 2011 where a fine tradition began, namely, the Israeli Pavilion.
No less than 20 early-stage Israeli startups flew-in from Israel to demo and network themselves to the bone for three non-stop days.
The inaugural Pavilion was such a success, we decided to have another one at the past Disrupt in NYC. It too was a huge success with yet another 20… → Read More
Last October, Kimball Thomas and Davis Smith launched Baby.com.br with $4.4 million in backing from an impressive group of Silicon Valley and international investors, including Tiger Global Management, Monashees Capital, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Chamath Palihapitiya and Thrive Capital. For SV Angel and Felicis Ventures, this marked the first time that either firm had invested in a startup based… → Read More
This post is co-written with Daniel Cunha, my partner at Initial Capital.
In Part I, we outlined some of the challenges facing the Brazilian startup community as it sets-out to reap the massive opportunity the local market has to offer. In Part II below, we’re going to suggest a course of action, and how it could benefit through the experience of the Israeli startup industry.
Step One… → Read More
Initial Capital was launched in 2011 as an investment firm targeting early stage startups in Israel and Brazil. The unlikely investment focus is the result of three friends — two Israeli and one Brazilian — turned professional investors.
Our Israeli investment network was rather mature when we launched, so we were able to hit the ground running and in the nine months since our launch… → Read More
Mozilla and Spain-based Telefonica officially announced their intentions to work together on an open web device at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but I’m not sure anyone expected the launch market Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs just announced.
According to the Brazilian blog ZTop (Google Translated here), Kovacs just recently revealed the the world’s first consumer-ready Boot to Gecko devices are… → Read More
Just two weeks ago it was reported that the relationship between Foxconn and Brazil regarding the proposed $12 billion production center there was on the rocks. Foxconn was making demands the government felt were overreaching, and negotiations were stalled.
Government officials and Foxconn representatives announced today that the plan was still underway, and the plant is ready to pump out… → Read More
Earlier this year it was reported that Foxconn had decided it was going to try to diversity its global holdings by establishing an iPad factory in Brazil. Their reasoning seemed fine: the economy is expanding, there’s a tech-savvy populace, and the government, they figured, would be game for few little sweetheart deals to get the ball rolling. As it turns out, not so much.
“The project for a… → Read More
No doubt, the International category at the Crunchies usually gets the most head-scratching here in the TechCrunch offices and in the auditorium. And truth be told, if we’re picking the best candidates it probably should. The most transformational International companies aren’t building things for the US market that we might have heard of; they’re building things that are transforming their own… → Read More
Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures thinks that 2011 will be the year of the cleantech IPO…finally. So does that mean that America hasn’t totally lost the cleantech race after all?
The most optimistic case is that we’re in a clump of countries leading the pack. The glass-half-empty version: Politics, boneheaded legislation and our lousy capital markets will saddle America’s culture of… → Read More
Ah, the power of those emerging world eyeballs. According to commenters and tipsters, a big thing that could be crashing Facebook today is a new feature that allows people to link their Orkut profiles to Facebook via Facebook connect. (Screenshot on this post.) Jaimin Rajani of Tech.nolicio.us tells us it has only been live about an hour.
This is important for two reasons: Brazil and India. Orkut… → Read More
The third quarter IPO market is like looking at a Rorshach test: You can find data to support that liquidity is getting better or data to support that it’s getting worse.
Here’s the reality check: There is an increase in deals– a big increase if you look at the first nine months of the year and compare it to the first nine months of 2009. And the pipeline is building: 67 new companies entered… → Read More
Fighting international cyber-terrorism isn’t easy, but it’s a mission on which we can all agree, right? Not so fast.
Russia has been pushing a proposal in The United Nations agency for information technology, which describes the greatest cyber-threat not as hacking or stealing but as using the Internet to spread ideas that might undermine a country. Russia wants any such use of the Internet… → Read More
Kobe Bryant, fresh from bringing another championship to Los Angeles, is in South Africa enjoying the sights and sounds of the World Cup. Even if Team USA is out, there’s still plenty of reasons to celebrate, chief among them that my fantasy team’s captain, Holland’s Wesley Sneijder, scored another goal. Beyond that, though, Kobe, a longtime soccer fan (remember when he visited FC Barcelona?), has… → Read More
On the eve of my last trip to Brazil, I was watching an episode of CSI: Miami where David Caruso was tracking a violent drug kingpin in Rio. Every time they mentioned the favelas—the infamous slums that crowd Rio’s hills—his partner said breathlessly, “The most dangerous part of the city.”
Sadly—unlike nearly everything else on the over-the-top CSI franchise—the depiction of the… → Read More
I just got back from a few weeks in Brazil. It was one of my last research trips for my upcoming book on entrepreneurship in emerging markets. During my last trip to the country, I wrote about the preponderance of finance multinationals and innovation percolating in Sao Paulo and suggested it could be a hub for future financial innovation. Another big category that jumped out at me on this trip… → Read More
Bom-dia, amigos! É Nicholas com uma conta do Brasil! Vocês sabem que A Copa do Mundo inicia em junho, mas sabiam que muitos brasileiros estam a comprar televisões especficamente para o torneio? Uma firma, DisplaySearch, diz que carragamentos dos LCD TVs vai subir 68% neste ano no país. É claro que todo o Brasil quer ver A Seleção conquistar a copa! → Read More
Oh, look, video of Modern Warfare 2 has leaked. (I’m still not sure if it’s called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or simply Modern Warfare 2. Go figure.) It was taken at a retailer convention in Las Vegas. → Read More
Brazil will be joining its cousin Portugal in deploying Intel’s Classmate PC in the classroom. Cnet has an adorable story of a Brazilian foundation, Fundação Bradesco, that has introduced the tiny laptops at a school in Campinas. What’s different about this particular program and other is that the students don’t get to keep the Classmates, as the surrounding neighborhood is… → Read More
The cheapest place to buy a 4GB iPod nano is Hong Kong ($148.12), while the most expensive place is Brazil ($369.61). Crazy stuff. Yup, Reuters went out of its way to compile a list of worldwide nano prices, using it as a sort of price index. Why? I don’t know. Something about tariffs, currency undervaluation, lolcatz. Here’s the top 10 most expensive 1. Brazil $369.61 2. Bulgaria… → Read More
The dodecahedra speaker is being developed at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. The speaker has 12 sides, each covering 360 degrees of sound space in the room. The listener can move around the room and hear sound coming from any direction and any angle. One speaker might be able to replace a set of speakers for front, back and rear setups, effectively saving on total costs, according to the… → Read More
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