From LatAm to the World
By Patricio Aznar
This article is part of Nazca Voices, a collection of stories and reflections from the people shaping our ecosystem - founders, operators, and the Nazca team
When people think about innovation in Latin America, they usually think of VC-backed companies creating opportunities in the region through technology. But for years, many of these opportunities were adaptations of ideas from other parts of the world, adjusted for LatAm or traditional companies focused on solving local problems without aiming to become globally competitive. Over time, the region quietly accepted certain limits and a few subtle forces shaped how founders thought about scale.
One of them is a long-standing bias we’ve had in Mexico and other parts of LatAm—something close to malinchismo: the belief that foreign companies are better positioned to win globally. This often creates the assumption that global competition is too distant or too difficult, and that staying regional is the safer and more realistic path.
The second force is the size of LatAm itself.
LatAm is a large, relatively homogeneous region where expanding from Mexico to Colombia, Chile, or Peru feels natural. For many years, succeeding within Latin America felt sufficient, and expanding beyond it felt unnecessarily complex.
Now, if we go back in time, before the term “tech company” became mainstream, Latin American companies were growing globally. We had companies leading entire categories around the world:
Bimbo – world’s largest bakery
Embraer – leader in regional jets
JBS – largest meat producer
Codelco – largest copper producer
Gruma – largest corn flour & tortillas producer
Tenaris – global leader in steel tubes
SQM – leader in lithium, iodine, and nitrates
Ambev / AB InBev – world’s largest brewer (LatAm origin)
Vale – major iron ore and nickel producer
Cemex – among the top three cement companies globally
These weren’t LatAm companies with some international presence. They were global companies that happened to be from LatAm.
But as tech companies became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s, innovation in Latin America—aside from exceptions like Mercado Libre and Globant, shifted toward a regional model. Building a global company from LatAm became rare.
Moving into 2025, the case for a global vision has returned to the region. More founders are building with the assumption that their market is the world, not just LatAm. Today, the region is entering a second wave of global companies powered by software.
Cross-border operations are simpler, distribution is faster, and many products no longer depend on having a physical footprint in every country. The barriers that once kept companies regional have weakened, and founders are acting accordingly.
We’re seeing it across categories.
Kavak is exporting a tech-enabled operating model for the used-car market that works in multiple countries.
Yuno is turning a payments orchestration layer into infrastructure used in markets far beyond the region.
dLocal connects global companies to emerging-market payments from a single platform.
Auth0 built identity infrastructure adopted worldwide long before its acquisition.
Companies like NotCo, VTEX, Mural, CI&T, Belvo, have taken products born here and scaled them wherever demand is strongest, not just where they started.
The common thread is clear:
built with global use cases from day one
distribution models that scale across borders
products solving universal problems
For years, the default path in LatAm was to build locally and expand inside the region. Today, that ceiling is breaking. What we’re seeing in founder conversations reflects this perfectly.
More often, we hear the idea of “not just LatAm”. We used to see most companies calculate their TAM based on LatAm. Today, only a few still do.
At this point, it’s no longer a question of whether LatAm can build global companies—but how fast.
Patricio Aznar General Partner at Nazca
