VENTURE CAPITAL

A scaling sector

Chile’s venture capital industry has trebled in the past decade. reaching over We are an excellent testing ground, allowing companies to test their market models in the country and then expand into the region.

In 2022 and 2023, the country experienced high levels of Venture Capital investment, while maintaining the volume of deals made (TTR Data).

Chile’s attributes

Platform. Chile is an excellent gateway to Latin America, standing out for its model of openness to global markets and its broad network of double taxation treaties. This is borne out by the over 1,000 exporters of global services that have chosen Chile as a business platform.

Chile is the safest country to invest in Latin America (Bloomberg 2023).

Outlook. Chile’s investment fund industry has a dynamic outlook. Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia have the best startup ecosystems in the region (Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2024).

Chile also leads Latin America in terms of ecosystem development, particularly in human capital and the availability of digital infrastructure (CMD InnovationLab 2021). Other key strengths include its legal and regulatory framework, intellectual property protection, and transparency.

The industry’s growth has been boosted by the Funds Law (LUF 2014) and the 2016 Productivity Law, under which alterative assets can account for up to 15% of the assets under management of pension funds, which total some US$200,000 million.

Digitalization and Financial Inclusion. The country also stands out as a model of digitalization and financial inclusion: over 95% of the adult population has access to some financial product (CMF). The OECD ranked Chile 9th globally for mobile data consumption per user in 2023 (21.4 GB), just behind Sweden (21.5 GB) and ahead of Ireland (20.5 GB) (Data Penetration and Usage 2023 – OECD).

The sector has been strengthened by the Single Fund Law (LUF 2014) and the Productivity Boost Law (2016), which allows pension funds to invest up to 15% of their portfolios in alternative assets, totaling around US$190 billion in assets under management (2024).

Entrepreneurship ecosystem and talent.  Chile’s entrepreneurship environment sets trends. Public support began in 2001 with nine start-ups; today, there are over three thousand companies from 85 countries with a portfolio valued at over US$5.8 billion in assets (StartUp Chile 2024).

The state’s long-term work in entrepreneurship and the promotion of venture capital has transformed Chile into “one of the countries with the best conditions for entrepreneurial activity” (GEM 2022-2023), and also one of the regional leaders (WIPO 2023).

The country has a workforce imbued with a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation, representing a pool of talent not only for the development of innovative companies but also for the installation of overseas companies, the recruitment of country managers, proffessionals for company builders or regional scouting.