Tag: propertysimple

Magma Partners First Half 2018 Update

Category : Magma Partners
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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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PropertySimple Raises $3M to Expand in the US

Category : Chile, Magma Partners
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I’m excited to finally be able to announce that our portfolio company PropertySimple closed a $3M round in the United States to help them continue to grow. I’ve been working closely with Adrian Fisher, PropertySimple’s founder and CEO, and team over the past year, helping them navigate their US market launch.

PropertySimple gives real estate agents the tools they need to compete in a social media powered world by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. Their software as a service product drives leads and follows up on them for real estate agents and starts at $2500/month.

PropertySimple started out as PropiedadFacil, a Chilean property search portal back in 2012. PropiedadFacil was Magma’s first investment back in early 2014. They’ve gone through many ups and downs and pivots since we first invested. After building great technology in Chile but finding it hard sledding to get clients to pay for it, Adrian and I flew to the US to test out the US market. (more…)

Introducing The Crossing Borders Podcast

Category : Crossing Borders Podcast, Top
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I’m excited to introduce the Crossing Borders podcast (iTunes, Stitcher) where I share the stories of top entrepreneurs doing startups across borders and the investors who support them, with a focus on companies that have some relationship to Latin America.

Why?

Over the past 6+ years in Latin America, I’ve met entrepreneurs hailing from countries around the world doing business across borders. Some do business in Latin America. Others use Latin America as a base to target the US market.

They’re some of the most diverse, risk taking, trailblazing entrepreneurs in the world. But when I come back to the US, Latin American startups just aren’t on people’s radars.

They’re mostly stuck on stereotypes of corruption, narcos and failed states. They see Latin America as a monolith and couldn’t tell you the difference between Mexican, Chilean and Argentine food, much less the difference between each country’s business climate.

As Magma portfolio companies started to do business in the US and meet with US investors, they came across this same ignorance of Latin America and its entrepreneurs. US entrepreneurs and investors have slept on Latin America and are missing out on some of the most interesting entrepreneurs in the world. And some of the best stories. (more…)

Ep 2: Crossing Borders Adrian Fisher, PropertySimple

Category : Chile, Crossing Borders Podcast
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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.