Where Argentina And Spain Are Scoring Startup Goals
Crunchbase News — this year, I’ve been watching the World Cup with the play-by-play in Spanish, only because that streaming app was way cheaper. With the final game between Argentina and Spain approaching on Sunday, however, it’s seeming like a real perk.
For this matchup, “¡Gooooooooool!” is really the only acceptable way to announce a new score. And if you can make that stretch a good 21 seconds in one breath, all the better. Here at Crunchbase News, meanwhile, we’ve been prepping for the final in a less vocally demanding but much more data-intense manner. Since both contenders are far more famous for soccer than accomplishments in the startup realm, we figured a small step to rectify that was in order. To do this, we put together a snapshot of recent startup funding tallies and trends for both Spain and Argentina. As you’ll see, neither accounts for a particularly large share of global or even regional investment. Both however, have an intriguing pipeline of recently funded companies. Argentina We’ll start with our second World Cup-related profile of Argentina. After it won the final in 2022, we wrote a venture funding-themed story calling the country’s startup scene “small, scrappy and sometimes very successful.” Four years later, that description still holds. Argentinian startups typically pull in a few hundred million dollars in venture funding annually. Investment is, however, lower than for Brazil and Mexico, the two most populous Latin American nations, which commonly lead in funding. Argentina’s startup ecosystem has also delivered some big hits over the years. The most famous Argentine-founded internet company — online marketplace MercadoLibre — commands a market cap around $94 billion on Nasdaq. (It’s currently headquartered in Uruguay but traces its roots to a Buenos Aires garage.) More recently, Buenos Aires-based fintech Ualá has been making waves in the regional startup scene. It’s raised $1.1 billion in known funding to date, including a $195 million March financing.
