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The rich gastronomy of the Creta restaurant in Medellín accompanies us in the dialogue of several journalists with Fabricio Zabala, Head of Scouts & Wayra Portfolio, Movistar’s open innovation center and corporate fund, which since 2011 has been thriving with technological ventures from the region. The manager tells us that, to date in Colombia, the company has raised a total investment of over US$3.4 million, in companies such as Alfred, Simetric, OhMyFi, Addi, 1DOC3, ePayco, Fluvip, and Vozy, among other active startups.

I chatted about entrepreneurship with Fabricio Zabala, Head of Scouts & Wayra Portfolio. Nicolas Ruiz’s photo.

Wayra Worldwide, he has accumulated investments of over $72 million in startups in Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Mexico, Peru and the United Kingdom. Likewise with an active portfolio of more than 400 startups, and there have been 98 exits (startup sales or participation).

Wayra Hispam in the region- since 2011 became the first initiative to support entrepreneurship made by a large company, assuming, from the start, the challenge to become a pioneer in corporate innovation through collaboration with startups in Latin America and Europe. In 2018, it went from being an accelerator to the investment arm of the company.

“We have carefully analyzed the investment behavior of Venture Capital during 2022 in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia We were really surprised to see a LAVCA (Association of Private Capital Investment in Latin America) report that Colombia is the country that has most successfully capitalized on growth in 2021.. Investment in our country in 2022 is 76% of what we saw in the 2021 boom. This motivates us to continue to promote a very large number of talented entrepreneurs in the region and in Colombia, generating synergies to promote Telefónica Movistar’s digital transformation » said Fabrizio .

Currently, the company has a portfolio of more than 100 active startups and more than 60% of them working with Movistar in the region, both internally, generating efficiencies or supporting different business areas, or externally where the operator resells digital products or services to its customer base.

In this regard, Fabián Hernández, CEO of Telefónica Movistar, stated in a statement: “The startup world is powered by teamwork. To that end, at Wayra we work to promote innovation and provide opportunities for entrepreneurs. We want to continue to promote this ecosystem in the area and its territory; Colombia has shown that it has great potential, determination and talent to drive an entrepreneurial ecosystem”.

Wayra Methodology

The relationship between large companies and startups through investments, acquisitions, alliances or cooperation in open innovation, has grown rapidly around the world. A very different reality to that experienced in Latin America, where only 16% of large companies do so.

With this premise, the area Corporate Venturing & Partners was created, which was under the leadership of the Chilean regional Sebastián Gonzálezhave supported more than 100 Latin American companieswith methodologies ranging from identifying challenges, to implementing solutions.

Fabricio Zabala predicts that for this year Wayra Hispam plans to invest US$1.5 million in 8 startups, 3 of which will be follow-up companies that are already part of its portfolio and 5 will be new vertical startups such as Fintech, e-Learning, Big Data, Cybersecurity, AI, Logistics, and others.

It was a delicious lunch, which allowed us to learn more about models for powering startups in our region. Hopefully there will be more initiatives like this.

Remember to let me know about possible topics and guests for this blog, for my TV shows Business in Your World and for our book collection A Very Inspiring Business Story. You can find me on my email juany@agenciastm.com and on my social networks: tweetR, LinkedIn, Facebook And Instagram. I invite you to read a Very Inspiring Business Story -Pandemic Version-, which you can get your hands on this National Library link. This is a very powerful and useful text.

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