Category: Magma Partners

Introducing Magma Media: Magma Partners In-House Media Agency

Today we announced Magma Media, our next step forward to continue to support Magma portfolio companies and hopefully the ecosystem at large.

We were inspired by the Andreessen Horowitz model of providing top class services to portfolio companies. We’re starting with media because these strategies do work and are low risk/high reward for startups. Even an extremely lean, revenue focused business will benefit from basic content marketing and a social media strategy.  Rightly or wrongly, first impressions make a difference.

We currently offer:

  • Growth strategies: landing pages, analytics, ads
  • Content marketing in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese
  • PR in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese
  • Podcast production
  • Video production
  • Social Media management

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Ep 55 Pedro Pablo del Campo: Building Bridges Between Latin America & the USA

Pedro Pablo del Campo is a Chilean entrepreneur and the newest addition to our Magma Partners team. Born in Punta Arenas, one of the most Southerly cities in the world, Pedro Pablo traveled the world in his youth since his father was in the Air Force and then a commercial pilot. From a young age, Pedro Pablo was eager to be involved in early-stage enterprises and has gone on to founding or joining early teams of several startups and nonprofits bridging the US and Latin America. In 2016, he joined the Techstars team in Austin as the Business Development Director for Latin America, a position they created just for him.

Pedro Pablo has now brought his passion for supporting Latin American entrepreneurship to Magma, where he will be helping manage our portfolio and evaluating future investments for the fund. In this episode, we discuss Pedro’s non-traditional career path, his start in the nonprofit world, how a cold email got him connected to the Techstars network, and what he thinks of the maturing Latin American entrepreneurial ecosystem.

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Magma Partners First Half 2018 Update

Since we closed our second fund in January to invest in fintech/insurancetech companies in Latin America and US companies with Latin American tech and sales teams, the entrepreneurs we support have been busy. And so have we. Here’s a roundup of some of the most interesting things that have happened in the first half of 2018.

New Investments

We’ve invested in 8 companies out of Magma II since January. Here are three that are public. We’ll be announcing more of our investments in the next month.

CryptoMarket – CryptoMarket is a Chilean fintech company that operates cryptocurrency exchanges in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Europe, with plans to open Mexico and Colombia this year. Magma coinvested with Consensys, the fund created by the cofounder of Ethereum in a $600k round.

BrainHi – Puerto Rico based Brainhi helps doctors and dentists book more appointments using chat bots. They’re the first Puerto Rican company to be accepted into YCombinator. I met them during a visit to Parallel18 in Q1.

Workep – Medellin and San Francisco based Workep is a project management tool built onto of G-Suite. I’ve know Carlos Eduardo Alvarez since meeting him at a BBQ in 2015 in Medellin and have been following since then. We reconnected at Parallel18 this year and invested recently.

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Jie Hao at Remix (Chinese TED): Estonia’s e-Residency Will Change the World

Adam Rang wrote an article on the e-Residency Blog about Magma Partners’ Jie Hao’s talk at the Remix Conference, China’s version of TED, about Estonia’s e-residency program. More than 5M people have watched it so far. From the article:

Estonia’s e-resident community has been growing at record speed so far in 2018, thanks in large part to new interest from entrepreneurs in south-east Asia — especially Korea, Japan, and China.

One person who has played a particularly significant role in this growth is Jie Hao, one of the first e-residents from China, who took to the stage at the Remix conference in December to discuss his thoughts about the e-Residency programme.

Hao is a serial entrepreneur, author, angel investor and a Partner at Latin American tech fund Magma Partners. He’s a passionate advocate of blockchain technology and teaches Chinese entrepreneurs to find global opportunities.

During his talk, Hao cited the analysis conducted by Deloitte into the economic impact of e-Residency, which revealed that e-residents make a positive contribution to Estonia and the country is projected to gain €100 for every €1 invested into the programme.

You can read the rest of Adam’s article which goes into more detail on the e-Residency Blog and can watch Jie’s whole talk, complete with English subtitles below: