Nuvemshop, the e-commerce unicorn in Latin America, announced on Friday the creation of a $10 million investment fund focused on technology companies for e-commerce in Latin America.
The Nuvemshop Capital fund, which will start its first contributions in 2022, aims to “invest in a few dozen companies” in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, according to Nuvemshop CCO and co-founder Alejandro Vazquez. Eligible for the fund’s selection are all technology companies and partners that develop apps to solve the needs of retailers of different sizes and segments.
“We want to accelerate the commerce ecosystem in Latin America and Brazil through technology partners. Today we already work with about 300 partners, but we are thinking of thousands of partners over the next four, five years,” said Vazquez, in an interview with LABS.
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According to the CCO, these partners suffer specific needs of retailers, and these specific needs have to do with segments. “It’s not the same thing fashion retailers and electronics retailers for example, and it also has to do with geographies. Retail is very local, it differs between Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, and also to do with the size of the business. It’s not the same for a small entrepreneur and a big brand working with us. The range of solutions needs to be quite broad,” he says.
Focusing on the concept of an open platform, i.e. hosting several shopkeepers, Vázquez says that Nuvemshop has already been doing this for five years and the fund is another step to speed up the development of partners. So that Nuvemshop customers can invest more in technology, improve interactions with the Nuvemshop platform and also develop new applications within the Nuvemshop ecosystem.
“To solve more specific needs we believe very much in this model [of investment] because precisely we keep the spirit of open platform, that means we will have different options and the shopkeeper is the one who chooses,” he said.
For the executive, the M&A movement in this scenario ends up closing the doors, which is why Nuvemshop opted for the venture capital fund. Recently, Nuvemshop bought Ecommerce na Prática, which is not a technology partner, but an e-commerce school, and Mandaê, a logistics platform, “which connects with our long-term vision of logistics”, he said.
“Even so, we need other technology partners in the ecosystem.”
