Carmen Contreras, CEO of Start-Up Chile, spoke with naifman about the opportunities for Chilean start-ups in Europe, advances in entrepreneurship in the last decade, the international perception of the country as an innovation hub and the role of women in the start-up ecosystem, among other topics.
It’s a well-known fact that Latin America’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has experienced remarkable growth in the last decade. In this context, Start-Up Chile has emerged as a beacon of innovation and growth. Founded in 2010 under the umbrella of Corfo, this public accelerator is a pioneer in offering equity-free financing to start-ups around the world, promoting projects from more than 85 countries, including the United States, India, Brazil and, of course, Chile.
To understand the current state of the organisation, we spoke with Carmen Contreras, CEO of Start-Up Chile, who is a passionate advocate for innovation and entrepreneurship, and recognised for her in-depth knowledge in the analysis of potential markets and investments in start-ups. Under her leadership, the accelerator has continued its mission to turn Santiago into the epicentre of revolutionary ideas and emerging businesses with global potential.
In this interview, Contreras shares her perspectives on the significant advances she has witnessed in the last decade in Chilean technological entrepreneurship, as well as the evolution of the international perception of Chile as an innovation hub, which technology areas have the greatest growth potential and the current challenges faced by start-ups in the region. In addition, we will hear about her evaluation of the recent call for the BIG 8 generation and the opportunities she identifies for Chilean start-ups in international markets, especially in Europe.
Read on to discover how Start-Up Chile is shaping the future of entrepreneurship in the country and beyond.
What significant advances has Start-Up Chile seen in technological entrepreneurship in the country in the last decade?
Start-Up Chile was created in 2010 and marked a watershed moment in Chile’s innovation ecosystem, as it situated innovation as an engine for the creation of technology ventures and economic diversification in the country. Over our 14 years of operation we have seen great changes around technology entrepreneurship in Chile in several areas.
In the first place, we have seen a very significant growth both in the number of technology ventures that are developed locally, as well as in their sophistication. More and more entrepreneurs are designing innovative and disruptive technology solutions to solve problems that affect the population in various industries, such as Biotech, Fintech, Logistics, Productivity and Retail, among many others.
Another development we have seen is that private companies have also recognised the value of innovation, building specific departments to address this issue, and integrating start-ups that can deliver a valuable service for their own operations. Multinationals have established Corporate Venture Capital and Venture Client programmes in addition to increasing calls for open innovation aimed at attracting the participation of entrepreneurs. Despite this positive change, we believe that this type of measure still needs to be implemented more transversally in large companies in the country.
Other institutions supporting technology entrepreneurs have also emerged in the ecosystem, and this has promoted expansion in terms of the creation of start-ups and some spin-offs from universities.
Finally, there has been an increase in venture capital and start-up investment funds in Chile in recent years, which has had a very positive impact by increasing the number of start-ups in Series A. However, we need investment in Series B and C in Chile, since this lack means that many start-ups are leaving for the United States or Europe in search of private capital. A very significant advance in this area is the creation of the ScaleX alternative exchange in 2022, which enables start-ups to raise capital in a regulated market with institutional investors. We expect to see this financing alternative grow in the short and medium term.
How has the international perception of Chile as an innovation and technology hub changed in recent years?
Chile has established itself strongly as an important innovation hub in Latin America, thanks to public policies that promote innovation as an engine of economic and social development – such as Start-Up Chile and the recently announced Start-up Campus – in addition to a series of efforts by different private actors and universities to enhance the local ecosystem. In particular, the public programmes of the National Economic Development Agency (Corfo) and the National Research and Development Agency (Anid), deliver subsidies aimed at scientific development, innovation and entrepreneurship that are particularly relevant to the early stages of development, and this makes our ecosystem unique within Latin America.
This has attracted the attention of players around the world, who are interested in collaborating or coming to our country to develop their businesses and scale to new markets. In our case, in each generation that enters our programme we see a significant number of entrepreneurs from different countries who have taken an interest in Chile as a place to grow their project, thanks to its levels of connectivity, its ideal size for testing a solution and the various commercial agreements we have with different countries, which give us a strategic position in Latin America.
In addition to this, there are large national start-ups that have gone out into the world and achieved international recognition, such as NotCo, Betterfly and Buk, which serve as examples of what is found in our ecosystem.
What technological or innovation areas in Chile do you see as having the greatest potential for growth?
Artificial intelligence is an issue that is becoming very relevant worldwide and Chile is not far behind. Many solutions have been developed based on this technology and several of them are part of our portfolio since it is a transversal technology that together with others has a great potential to generate disruptive innovations for the world. Industries also have a high growth potential, especially in terms of solutions that are highly in demand here, such as logistics, Fintech, mining, energy transition, electromobility, Agtech, Medtech and decarbonisation, among others.
In Chile there is special interest in the development of solutions that seek to contribute to the challenges of decarbonisation, adaptation to climate change and the transformation towards a sustainable economy and economic development. This means that a lot of public resources are aligned with these objectives and there may be many industries and technologies that could be developed in this area.
What challenges do you anticipate for the start-up ecosystem in the region in the short and medium term and what role does Start-Up Chile play in overcoming them?
I think one of the main general challenges that the ecosystem has is to reduce the existing gender gap. We know that start-ups that include female entrepreneurs in their founding team have better survival rates than those with no female presence, both in Chile and abroad (according to data from our Annual Alumni Passport survey), but even so women are still in the minority in the world of innovation.
The reasons for this situation are principally the low participation of female students in STEM degrees and cultural influences that mean that women have fewer support networks for their entrepreneurship as well as a greater workload in terms of other unpaid activities, especially in Latin America.
To contribute to resolving this challenge, at Start-Up Chile we launched the Female Founder Factor, an initiative that provides special support for women entrepreneurs in our programme. Among its commitments, it states that at least 50% of the start-ups selected in the Build programme must be led by a woman, and in the case of the Ignite and Growth programmes, start-ups with women leaders can access a higher percentage of co-financing. In addition, during the acceleration programme, we seek parity among the experts who teach the academies, we promote the presence of women mentors on the boards, and we develop meeting points between female founders and other women who are an active part of the ecosystem. All this allows us to generate a more positive environment for women entrepreneurs so they will want to enter and continue growing in the ecosystem, but at the same time it works as an inspiration for the new generations of girls, who can see this as a real possibility for their futures.
What is your assessment of the last call – that closed on May 7th – for your BIG 8 generation, which covers the Build, Ignite and Growth acceleration programmes?
We received over 700 applications from all over the world, which makes us very happy. Currently, our team and a group of external judges are evaluating each of the applications, so we cannot offer an analysis of the call yet, but in general terms we received a wide variety of projects that use technology to solve the everyday problems that we meet in Chile and in other markets, and we are eager to define which ones will be part of our new generation that begins in September 2024.
How important is Start-Up Chile to the ability of start-ups to sell their digital projects?
Our acceleration programme is aimed at early-stage start-ups, therefore the greatest work done here is to develop their MVP, find the product market fit, build relevant alliances and – for those who are further along in the process and enter our Growth programme – scale to other markets. In this context, we offer academies and other training opportunities for entrepreneurs addressing each of these topics, within which marketing and sales strategies are explored to support the offer of their digital products or services to their target audience.
What opportunities do you identify for Chilean start-ups in the Spanish and European market in general?
Many! As an accelerator, we believe the European market offers great opportunities for collaboration and exchange of experiences, while start-ups can find instances of connection, growth and scaling to new markets. This is why at Start-Up Chile our calls are open to entrepreneurs from all over the world and we hope to see an increasing presence of applicants from Spain and Europe in general. This will mean that in our activities and Co-work, valuable links can be generated for the development and strengthening of start-ups, which are mutually positive for all ecosystems. Additionally, other areas of Corfo and the Chilean Government are strongly encouraging the inclusion of our start-ups in more developed markets such as European countries, through initiatives like our GoGlobal programme. We believe that the start-ups developed in Chile have enormous potential to expand to reach global markets and to bring the innovative solutions created in our country to the world.