Tag: argentina startup

Migue Morkin, Sirena: The SaaS that Connects Businesses and Clients via WhatsApp, Ep 92

In the US, most people would be surprised to find that WhatsApp is the main platform for Latin Americans to communicate between friends and family, and even more surprised that its one of the main channels for businesses and their clients to communicate. Migue Morkin, an Argentine entrepreneur and founder of Sirena, explains that in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil 70% of the population actively uses WhatsApp on a daily basis.

However, Migue noticed that companies that used WhatsApp didn’t have a proper tool to interact quickly and easily with their customers. Sirena seeks to solve that problem by helping businesses centralize, distribute, and communicate better and faster with every client.

In this episode, I sit down with Migue to talk about his journey from working for a machine learning startup that was acquired by a global business, to starting a market place in Brazil, and the decision to pivot that led to successfully building Sirena to what it is today. We also cover how Migue thinks about raising money, advice on being a Spanish-speaking entrepreneur in Brazil, and how Latin Americans can start their own global businesses within the region. 

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Ep 9 Diego Saez-Gil: Smart Luggage To Make Travel Easy and Enjoyable

Have you heard of smart luggage? It may not sound like something you need but wait until you hear what it can do to make your travel more enjoyable and effortless. Connecting luggage to an app and building out the hardware to integrate the two has enabled Diego Saez-Gil’s company, Bluesmart to jump into a very competitive marketplace and gain a foothold with amazing speed.

On this episode of Crossing Borders, Diego shares the story of his entrepreneurial journey, how he’s founded and funded his new smart luggage startup, and how he manages an international team with offices all over the world. It’s a fascinating example of the kind of innovation and forward thinking that’s coming out of Latin America these days. (more…)

Ep 2: Crossing Borders Adrian Fisher, PropertySimple

Welcome to Crossing Borders with Nathan Lustig, where I interview entrepreneurs doing startups across borders and the investors who support them, with a focus on companies that have some relationship to Latin American.

My guest for episode 2 is my friend Adrian Fisher, CEO and Founder of PropertySimple, a real estate technology company with offices in Santiago, Chile and the United States. I’ve known Adrian for about five years now and PropertySimple was our first investment at Magma Partners back in 2014.

Adrian and I cover his journey from Scottsdale, Arizona to Argentina, Chile and then back to the United States, during which he learned to program, built technology for some of the biggest companies in the world with a 30 person outsourcing team based in Mendoza, Argentina and transitioned from a services company into a product company.

In 2011, Adrian was part of Startup Chile‘s first round, where he and his team built multiple real estate technology businesses including a rental payments system, a mortgage originator and more.

We’ll also talk about Adrian’s experience launching a product in Latin America and then transitioning to the US market and the strategies he has used for building a successful technology business from Latin America that targets the US market.

PropertySimple just closed a financing round of $3M from US investors and is growing it’s team in Chile and the US while scaling sales in the United States. I really enjoyed this conversation, so let’s jump right in!

If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher and check out the first five episodes with other top entrepreneurs doing business in Latin America.