Don’t be afraid to contact us early! We love to partner with founders as early as possible and are very happy to be the first check into your business, even before angel investors, or right alongside angel investors.
We’re very happy to write a small check to get to know you, or a larger check if it makes sense for you and your team.
We generally follow on from our first checks at Seed, or we can invest directly into a Seed stage company that we didn’t get to meet, or missed at first check stage.
We generally lead Series As for portfolio companies we’ve invested in at Pre-Seed or Seed, or underestimated founders with significant traction that we didn’t invest in early. We can lead with $1M-$5M checks.
We like to follow at Series A for non-Magma portfolio companies that we missed previously. When we follow, it's generally $1M-$3M, but we can be flexible on amounts both up and down if it makes sense for the company.
At our core, Magma is a generalist fund. While we’re best known for investing in fintech, insurtech, prop tech in companies like Kushki, Albo, Billpocket, Guros, R5 and Houm, we invest in startups across industries.
Our main core industries are:
We save a portion of the fund to invest in amazing founders that don’t fit these core industries, where we think we can add value, or things we’d like to learn about. Don’t be afraid to reach out if your startup isn’t in our core industries.
We generally shy away from physical products and things like biotech which we just don’t understand well.
We look for: amazing teams, solving big problems, with a solid foundation (cap table) to scale.
We look for founders who share our values and have founder market fit: they are the best people to solve the problem they’re trying to solve. We like to see founders who have experience, either as founders, employees or life experience that shows us that you can build something and get over adversity. We love grit. We’re in this for 7-10 years, and hopefully a lifelong relationship even if we don’t get the outcome we all want, so optimizing for amazing people is really important to us.
Big problems generally = big markets. We’re motivated by founders trying to make life better for Latin Americans. As Latin Americans, former founders and immigrants to the region, we generally have the same problems that founders are trying to solve for their users. We believe that if founders focus on a big problem they’ll likely be well compensated for it.
A skyscraper (or a house) built without a strong, solid foundation will collapse, or only be able to be 1 or 2 stories. A startup needs to be able to scale, and a strong foundation is a key part of it. Things like inactive founders who have left the company and still retain significant equity, advisors who didn’t invest money with large stakes, and family offices/investors who own high % of the company are all yellow and red flags.
If we love you and your company, but your cap table is a mess, we’re willing to get into the weeds to help you fix it. But a messed up cap table will make us pass if we’re not 100% convinced that if you didn’t have the messed up cap table, we’d be able to expand.
We invest from $25,000 to $5M. We like to lead rounds if we can, but we are also comfortable writing small checks to get to know companies and then follow on with larger checks in the future. We can be flexible with founders around allocations and check sizes, both up and down.
Yes. We invest most of our capital in Spanish-speaking Latin America, and devote a smaller percentage of our capital to early stage Brazil-based companies.
We invest in companies that are either based in Latin America, do business in Latin America, or will be expanding to Latin America imminently. We also invest in Latin American immigrants or US Latins who may do business in Latin America in the future, or would like to have some of their team in Latin America.
Magma is a generalist firm, investing in all things technology. We’re best known for fintech, insurtech and prop tech, but we invest in anything that can solve a big problem and scale quickly. We generally avoid biotech and physical products, but we do make exceptions for amazing founders.
The best way to start talking with us is by creating a Magma Memo. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to complete. This allows us to save you time and find out if you might be a fit for our investment thesis. You can read a detailed article about our process here.
We invest across all of Latin America and are comfortable investing via digital channels. We generally only meet founders before we invest at Series A, or if we happen to be in the same place at the right time when we’re evaluating startups.
We don’t take cold calls without knowing about your business because we don’t want to waste your time and our investment team sees 1500+ startups each year. It's impossible for us to meet with everyone without having more information ahead of time.
Yes. We expect to follow on either doing our pro-rata or increasing our position if you’re growing and are successful. We follow on through Series A via our fund, and continue to follow on from Series B and later via syndicates with our LPs.
SAFE, Convertible Debt, Equity. We generally use SAFEs at early stage and equity at Series A. We may ask for equity from day 1 if we’re writing your first check and are restructuring your company at the same time as raising money.
We usually won’t invest in Latin American local entities and prefer to invest in the usual structures most regional VCs understand and are comfortable with. At Pre-Seed or Seed, we can sometimes invest in local entities especially in Chile, Colombia or Mexico, but 99% of the time, we invest in Delaware, Cayman or UK.
We wrote a deep dive into the most common legal structures of Latin American startups. Check it out to learn more about what might work for your startup.
Create a Magma Memo and/or have a Magma portfolio company, LP, entrepreneur or later stage fund make a warm intro.
The best way to help your startup is to tell them to contact us directly via the Magma Memo. We did a deep dive into why it's best for startups to reach out to us directly, rather than rely on bankers or consultants.
Our entire investment team has check writing ability. Don’t disrespect Alexa, Laura, Francisco and Pedro. They have all led or co-led Magma investments. We work together to help do investments. Don’t disrespect the rest of our team.
In addition to investing money, we generally have a standing meeting with portfolio companies at the frequency that they choose. In addition, we have a services team of 15+ people who help startups grow. We also help through our LP network.
Yes! Especially if we tell you to keep in touch. Around 10% of our investments are in companies we initially say no to, either for a lack of traction, a messed up cap table, or just because we were wrong!
We’d like to get updates every 1-3 months. Make sure to include what your startup does and the key metrics right at the top so we can dig back in.
Founder Resources
Founders always hear that hiring great people is one of the most important jobs. Do you want to hire a great team but don't know how to create a process that helps you find, hire, and retain great people? Take a look at this article.
Founder Resources
After precruiting and interviewing you’ll have a finalist candidate who you think will be a good fit. Each step of the Talent Acquisition process leads into the next, with candidate references being the final step of the hiring process.
