Who bought Latin America's startups

Five of these ten exits happened in a single year. Nubank and dLocal listed in 2021, VTEX listed the same year, Okta closed its $6.5 billion all-stock purchase of Auth0, and Uber took the last tranche of Cornershop. Why five of them land in the same twelve months is not something we can source, so we are not going to invent a reason for it.

The earlier exits were smaller and harder won. Wenceslao Casares sold 75% of Patagon.com to Banco Santander for $529 million in March 2000, one of the largest internet acquisitions in the region at the time. Alec Oxenford sold DeRemate to MercadoLibre for $40 million in 2008, and PedidosYa went to Delivery Hero for $43 million in 2014. Marcos Galperin took MercadoLibre to Nasdaq in 2007 and raised about $333 million, one of the first major Latin American tech listings on a US exchange.

Note where the listings went. Not one of these companies floated on a Latin American exchange. MercadoLibre and dLocal chose Nasdaq, Nubank and VTEX the NYSE. Four founders here are from Buenos Aires and two from Montevideo, and Mexico is not represented on this list at all.