Internet and telecommunications group SoftBank led funding rounds for two Latin American companies on Wednesday as it solidifies its presence in the region.
The corporate led a $48m series B round for Colombia-headquartered pet product supplier Laika, according to Bloomberg, and co-led $40m debt and equity round for Brazil-based rural credit provider TerraMagna.
Laika runs an e-commerce platform which sells products like food, toys and accessories to customers in Chile and Argentina as well as its home country. Food delivery service Delivery Hero also took part in the series B round, as did Jam Fund, FJ Labs and assorted private investors.
The company will allocate the series B proceeds to the launch of a cat and dog insurance service early this year in addition to expanding into Argentina, Ecuador and Peru.
The round followed a $5m seed round in July 2020 featuring two unnamed corporates as well as Soma Capital, InQLab, Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital and angel investors Justin Mateen, Justin Kan and Daniel Kan, and a $12m series A in June 2021 backed by InQLab, Y Combinator, Streamlined Ventures and Mateen.
SoftBank’s Latin America Fund co-led the TerraMagna round, which consisted of $10m in equity funding and $30m in debt financing, with Shift Capital, participating alongside Milenio Capital.
TerraMagna’s online platform provides financing for farmers and food distributors, utilising artificial intelligence technology to assess data points like satellite images, environmental and climate data in order to make offers quickly.
OneVC led the company’s $2m round in November 2020, investing together with Maya Capital, Accion Venture Lab and various individuals to increase its overall funding to $2.7m.
SoftBank has been the most active corporate venturing investor in Latin America for a while now, having followed up the initial $2bn allocated to its Latin America Fund in 2019 with a $3bn sophomore fund in September 2021.
The corporate invested in 41 Latin America-based companies in 2021 according to Pitchbook data, and the Laika and TerraMagna deals would be on the smaller side of those.
SoftBank participated in 23 nine-figure rounds over the course of the year, two of the largest being Mexico-headquartered used vehicle marketplace Kavak’s $700m series E round in September and the $420m series E closed by online real estate portal QuintoAndar the previous month.
However, SoftBank seems to be becoming more active at early stage having led a $3.5m round for online recruitment platform developer Worc and a $2.6m round for robotics automation technology startup Botcity last month, indicating it is looking beyond simply owning stakes in market leaders.
Both are based in Brazil, as are most of the corporate’s investments in the region, though investments in hardware product marketplace Tul and buy now, pay later service Addi over the past month indicate it is also increasingly interested in Colombia where Laika is situated, particularly in the digital commerce space.
