After many years of working with their team, we are excited to announce that we are joining forces with the Guadalajara-based accelerator Rampa!
We hope that through this acquisition we will establish Guadalajara as a beachhead to both invest in Mexican startups, as well as to help other startups from the region and the US open operations in Mexico, making Latin America’s second-largest market a key part of our investment thesis.
Over the years, Guadalajara has become an important hub for tech companies, churning out some of the most talented engineers in the region. Its proximity to Silicon Valley and high concentration of engineering talent makes it an ideal base for deepening our roots in Mexico, where we’ve invested in 12 Mexican startups including Albo and Moons.
By combining operations, Mak Gutierrez, Rampa’s founder, will join our team as CEO of Magma Infrastructure. He will run our a16z-inspired internal agency designed to support our portfolio of over 75 Latin American startups to generate sales, create partnerships, and scale more quickly.
“I’m excited to double down on both Guadalajara and our Infrastructure team,” said Nathan Lustig, Managing Partner at Magma Partners. He added, “Under Mak’s leadership, I’m confident our Infrastructure team will be able to help make our portfolio companies more successful.”
Rampa’s Alexa Clark Ibarra, will also join our GP team as an analyst, leveraging her experience recruiting startups to Rampa’s accelerator programs.
“I love supporting early-stage startups. It’s been my passion for 15 years. By joining Magma Infrastructure, I get to lead a team that’s supporting startups and building the ecosystem not just in Guadalajara, but across the region,” said Gutierrez.
As a result of the acquisition, our team has grown and its 15 members are now distributed across Guadalajara, Mexico City, Bogota, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and the US.
We look forward to working with our Guadalajara office to help startups from both South America and the US accelerate their expansion into the Mexican market!
Updates
As we have grown, our team has become larger and more distributed. For monthly all-hands meetings, our nine-person team comes online from the US, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, and we depend on Google Cloud for these collaborations.
