“The market never had so much money for startups”, told Paulo Veras, founder of the Brazilian unicorn 99 to Estadão. Considering the latest reports about the segment, there’s no way to disagree. Brazil has definitely proved itself as a fertile land for unicorns, regarding the already existent team of startups with more than $1 billion in valuation in the country: Nubank, Movile, Stone, 99, PagSeguro, and Gympass.

All these successful cases got the attention of several international groups of investors who are fearless to embrace this market. According to Estadão, in 2018 alone, $1,3 billion were invested in Brazilian startups, an increase of 51% in relation with 2017. This represents 65% of all the investments made in Latin American startups.

The future keeps looking bright since international funds are still announcing even more investment in this segment. Softbank is the last example: the Japanese group has recently announced a 5 billion innovation fund for the region and it’s expected that a significant part of it will be addressed to Brazilian companies. “Even in an economic crisis, the activity of this funds has never been so intense”, says the president of the Brazilian Association of Private Equity & Venture Capital, Piero Paolo Minardi, in an interview for Estadão.    

Read more: “The Potential for Fintechs in Latin America – Takeaways from Visa’s State of Innovation Report“

Even so, according to Paulo Veras, the external market still have no idea how technology became a tight market in Brazil. But one thing we know for sure: this surging growth won’t stop and the time to invest is now!