My personal story makes me a firm believer in the power of Startup Nation movements.
In 2012, I incorporated CinePapaya in Peru with Manuel Olguin and Inma Cañadas with an initial seed investment from Telefonica’s Wayra accelerator and angel investors, which included Gonzalo Begazo, former Director of Finance at Google in Silicon Valley, and Carsten Korch, a Danish entrepreneur living in Peru. Our dream was to lead the online and mobile sales of movie tickets in emerging markets by offer a unique bundle solution of payment processing, ticket scanning and business intelligence analytics. Despite our early credentials and passion, all odds were against us.
But the resources that startup movements brought to the region helped us get to our latest scale-up milestone. As TechCrunch recently reported, CinePapaya just raised $2 million in funding from Movile, the Brazilian company known to be constructing an online-to-offline (O2O) platform in Latin America.
CinePapaya is just one of the growing number of new generation companies of Latin American (LatAm) that see no borders both in operations and in support system: after being incubated in 2011 by Holosens in Peru with a grant from Peru’s Innovation Fund of the Science and Technology Program and the Inter-American Development Bank, and winning the Intel Challenge in Peru, we received equity-free seed capital from Startup Chile.
CinePapaya soon became the first company in the Andean Region to receive an investment from the Silicon Valley-based 500 Startups, which funded the startup with $150 thousand in seed capital. CRP, a Peruvian media and entertainment company, also invested in the company. In 2013, CinePapaya was selected as the growth stage winner of the APEC Intel Challenge, competing with startups from 23 countries in the Asia Pacific region.
Valued at more than $7 million, CinePapaya is currently available in Peru, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Mexico, offering a turnkey solution that allows movie theatre chains an easy entry into e-commerce and m-commerce. Through the new round of financing from Brazil’s Movile, the company will expand its footprint in the region.
Startup Peru looks to give other Peruvian entrepreneurs the same chance through its support system.
Photo: CinePapaya’s team
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Gary Urteaga, co-founder of CinePapaya, is the Peruvian delegate for Startup Nations and a Global Entrepreneurship Week ambassador in Peru. One of his mentors is Jeff Hoffman, co-founder and ex-CEO of Priceline.com, and a member of the Global Entrepreneurship Week Board of Directors.