A surprising number set the tone for Michroma's Biotech & Agrifood Afternoon in Rosario, Argentina: 61% of all deep tech startups in Latin America are biotech. Not AI, not cleantech. Biotech.
The data was presented by GRIDX, the venture builder that co-hosted the event and has spent years mapping the region's deep tech ecosystem. And it keeps getting interesting: GRIDX shows that the region's composition of science looks almost identical to the rest of the world's. About 41% human health, 35% agri-food; roughly matching global’s 42% and 37%. This shows that, far from being some niche corner of biotech, LatAm is a scale version of the global picture — running on less than 2% of the world's venture capital.
That gap between great science and poor capital is what four investors kept circling back to, each from a different angle, when they shared their insights with FTW that afternoon.
Michroma / Luz Gorostiaga
What the investors are writing checks for
I asked each fund the same three things: what stage, what sector, what size check.
Luis Stein of Chilean fund Andes VC writes the earliest checks: a first ticket around $150,000, with room to follow on up to $500,000. He's placing pre-seed bets on scientific talent that, in his words, costs 10 to 20% of what the same talent would cost in the US.
Alex Kopelyan of SOSV, the fund behind IndieBio, writes $200,000 to $500,000 checks into pre-seed teams of just one to five people. SOSV places a vote of confidence in a local player: they often wait to see where GRIDX has invested before stepping in themselves.
Alex Bondar of Acre Venture Partners plays from seed through Series B, with checks starting at $1-2 million and climbing to $3-6 million as companies mature. Acre only invests in food and agriculture, no exceptions.
Bonnie Brayton of InnoVenture Iowa, is the only one who doesn’t represent a VC fund, but a US state government fund. They invest pre-seed through Series B across agtech, biotech, and more with up to 10% of its capital allowed to leave Iowa entirely.
Put together, a range forms: $150K to get started, $200-500K to keep going, $1M+ once there's traction, and a state fund willing to jump in almost anywhere along the way if the technology fits.
Why they're all looking here in the first place
None of these investors needed convincing about the region. Stein said it: the talent is world-class, at a fraction of the US price. Kopelyan also commented that the science here is simply very good. But Brayton put it best: what struck her was that "for such a small country, there is so much tech that competes with other powerhouses, like Israel."
What impressed her more, though, was what happens after the science is validated. She's watched a lot of ecosystems get startups off the ground and then lose them somewhere between the lab and the market. Here, she said, that path to commercialization seems to actually be working.
Michroma / Luz Gorostiaga
The region’s exit problem
Not everything I heard was encouraging, and the most revealing answer of the day was about what happens after a startup succeeds.
Stein claims it's not about attracting more investment, it's about what happens to the investment once it's in. Exits are rare here, and when they do happen, they take far too long. He mentions the key role of pension funds in the flow of funds back into the ecosystem. Freeing up even a small slice, 3 to 5%, for venture capital would do two things at once: give the ecosystem liquidity, and give pension holders exposure to genuinely high-upside bets. Without something like that, capital keeps flowing in with no fast way back out.
Foodtech is a hard sell right now, not just here
I asked Kopelyan whether LatAm founders are missing something that's keeping foreign capital away. His answer: foodtech is just brutally hard to fund right now, everywhere. What gets a deal done these days is real revenue, corporate partnerships, and a fast, believable path to scale — regardless of geography. It's a fair reminder not to treat this as a "LatAm problem." Right now, it's everyone's problem.
When I asked Bondar what separates a founder ready for outside capital from one who isn't, he didn't mention geography either. It came down to two things: does the team understand its own vision, and is the market they're chasing big enough to justify the bet.
Where this leaves the region
GRIDX's own ten-year projection puts the region on track to absorb somewhere between $2.6 and $5.5 billion over the next decade — the exact number depending largely on whether the pre-seed-to-seed bottleneck gets easier. Their stated goal is close to 15,000 researchers working in startups.
Every investor at Michroma that day, in their own way, was betting on the higher end of that range. The science is already there, that part isn't up for debate. What happens with the capital is the part nobody can answer yet, and it's the part that will decide which of those two numbers this region will land on.