Our investment thesis
Salkantay Exponential Fund is the first VC in Perú
The main purpose of Salkantay Exponential Fund is to make investments with high potential for return and impact in Peru and other Latin American countries. We are interested in Peruvian companies expanding abroad, and global companies expanding to or targeting Peru and the Pacific Alliance (PA). We look for early and/or expansion stage companies (startups and scaleups), dynamic and innovative, with high real or potential growth, strong teams and in sectors of high impact potential.
We hope to invest early, help entrepreneurs grow and expand regionally, and make successful follow-on rounds until the exit. The average ticket size will vary between $500K and $3M, seeking to make between 2 to 4 investments per year, with a total target portfolio of 14 to 20 investments. Our investment model is based on having access to great opportunities through our own capacity and the extended capacity of our network, and in being focused on the entrepreneur by supporting our portfolio companies to execute and create value.
The Fund will have a generalist approach, investing in companies with high potential impact that solve common challenges to the region with the use of technology, on a large scale and efficiently, independent of the sector. However, both the experience of our team and our vision have led us to focus on areas where there are major problems to be solved and where technology and innovation can play a crucial role, such as:
· Lack of financial access
· Urban disorder
· The lack of accessible options for quality services
· Informality
· The bottlenecks that plague medium-sized companies
Therefore, we see great regional opportunities in fintech, e-commerce, smart cities and logistics, Saas / B2B, edtech and healthtech, among others. It is in these spaces that we believe cases like Uber, Rappi, and Nubank will be repeated, where the potential market is huge due to the infrastructure gap and the failures of the traditional market, where technology can be the key for middle classes accessing to new products and services.
Our investment policy includes guidelines for adequate and standard diversification, including limits per investment, economic group, country and sector, as well as space for disruptive ideas and opinions, in such a way that investment decisions minimize the potential risk of the herd effect. For this, we hope that our Advisory Committee, which brings diversity and more than 75 years of collective investment experience, as well as our contact with other emerging market fund managers of the Capria Network, will allow us to listen to other voices and add new perspectives.
Salkantay is an investment manager with a positive impact approach, who seeks to deliver market or superior returns to its investors (Finance-first Impact Investing). This approach is born of the conviction that investments that improve people’s lives and that close access gaps, both for people and for productive sectors, are more resilient, less risky, and more profitable as a whole than investments that do not solve fundamental problems. We have incorporated this perspective of positive impact and resilience throughout our investment process, from our marketing strategy to the evaluation and closing of investments, the onboarding process of the companies, as well as the support we provide to entrepreneurs. Our impact mission has two main goals: i) systemic and catalytic positive impact, mainly in Peru, and ii) direct positive impact on the companies in which we invest.
Although we evaluate the merits of the impact of each investment case by case, the areas of more focus for Salkantay are the following, which in turn align with the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the UN (UN SDGs):
