Tag: jie hao

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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Ep 40 Jie Hao: How China Sees Latin America Startups

Jie Hao is a partner at Magma Partners who previously built and sold two companies before heading to Chile to look at investment opportunities in 2012. To make this podcast, I repurposed a segment of a conversation we had while I was in Shanghai for the launch of the partnership between Kr Space and Magma Partners to create the Sino-Latin American Accelerator. This conversation was a part of our doing business in Latin America course through 36Kr, China’s version of TechCrunch, where we taught Chinese entrepreneurs and investors about the growing opportunities for investing in Latin America.

In this short form episode of Crossing Borders, we talk about how Magma Partners got involved in China, why Chinese investment is important for Latin America, and how China and the US are looking at Latin America differently.

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China-Latin America Innovation Year: Vibrant Mexico

One of the most exciting parts of the Kr-Magma Partners platform is showcasing the growing business opportunities in Latin America for Chinese entrepreneurs and investors. As part of our partnership with Kr Space, we created the China-Latin America Innovation Year and will be putting on an event each month to highlight the unique opportunities in different Latin American countries.

Dong Bo, Kr Space’s Vice President, debuted our joint 2018 China-Latin America Innovation Year plan: Kr-Magma Space will host 10 monthly Latin American country themed workshops and will rotate between Beijing and Shanghai. Over the next year, we’ll showcase Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Panama, and Puerto Rico to helping more Chinese entrepreneurs to understand Latin-American market and how to do business in each country. At the same time, the events will help more Latin American entrepreneurs to understand and leverage China, whether in their home countries or in China, with the ultimate goal of building a cross-border innovation, entrepreneurship and financing ecosystem. (more…)

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: