This article is part of GEN's 2022 Global Entrepreneurship Week thought leadership series, featuring voices from around the world.
I had the privilege to lead Venezuela’s chamber of e-commerce, Cavecom-e, more than 20-something years ago before my country entered an era of political turmoil and economic decay. We started keeping statistics about the emerging digital economy in Venezuela and Latin America and helped create the regulatory framework that secures online commerce and safeguards virtual identity through certification platforms.
Today, despite many things going wrong in the country, including human rights violations, increasing poverty, and unjust conditions leading to extreme wealth concentration, Venezuela’s IT and telecommunications sector continues to be creative and active.
It has “spilled” over our country’s borders following the path of our diaspora’s growing economy. Large and stealth technological services providing software development, call-center support, digital marketing, and even startup acceleration spaces, are very much alive inside our borders. These services are in close contact with international markets thanks to associates and partners living abroad and, of course, through global Internet connections that are not the best in our region, yet, savvy users make the best of it.
The local promotion to these activities has shown a favorable trend. Twenty-something years ago, there were very few active business angels and only a couple of organized venture capital firms willing to invest in early-stage/early-growth startups. Our Venezuelan company, Negociosdigitales, coordinated the first angel group that provided seed capital and business development support to startups.
Startup investment as a culture and business practice has developed much since those days, following a similar pattern of inside-borders activities in tandem with our diaspora’s economy abroad. We now have many angel investors supporting startups individually; family offices and financial institutions, especially Venezuelan investment banking groups with headquarters offshore, provide more prominent tickets in a very professional way. Thus, several startups, like Yummy and Asistensi, began operations in Venezuela during the last five to ten years and have raised considerable funding to support international expansion.
Startup investment opportunities are popping up increasingly often in Venezuela with a social impact. Quite a few are led by world-class teams that use state-of-the-art technology and impressive adaptation skills to market conditions. I’m familiar with a few that will take this know-how and learning capabilities abroad as soon as their presence in the local market is consolidated, and their business models are proven sturdy and profitable.
Among the current promising startup opportunities in Venezuela, I am particularly impressed by the resilience and creativity of Suplymos, a lean logistics platform that coordinates the delivery of consumer products to the very much underserved small stores that cater to the needs of the poorest sectors of Venezuela’s economy. Suplymos also provides education, community development skills, and trade financing to its rapidly increasing large customer base. It’s an example of a market-driven solution to social and economic needs, very much in line with environmental, social and corporate governance criteria.
So far, Suplymos has been funded by Venezuelan angel and institutional investors. It is ripe for business angels that would provide financial support and local market knowledge for expanding its business to other countries. I expect impact investors will certainly be interested in meeting Suplymos' excellent team and analyzing its successful business model.