La Frontera 🌵 Podcast, Episode 17 - Why Sustainable Impact is the Next Big Venture Opportunity in LatAm
Daniela Pacheco
We sat down with Daniela Pacheco, Managing Partner of New Ventures Capital (NVC), to explore how impact investing can drive both social change and solid returns across Latin America. Daniela shares how her family’s entrepreneurial legacy and global experience led her to build NVC’s $20M fund (backed by Switzerland’s Botnar Foundation) focusing on early-stage startups in health, fintech, education, and climate. We dive into why women’s health and youth are at the core of NVC’s thesis, how Daniela’s team actively hunts for founders in overlooked places, and how she balances philanthropic purpose with venture-scale ambition.
Episode 17 Summary
Impact + Returns, Not Either/Or: NVC was born to bridge a gap between philanthropy and venture capital in LatAm. Daniela reveals how impact investing and high returns aren’t mutually exclusive — they “should collide” to fuel scalable solutions for youth and women . By co-designing a $20M fund with a Swiss foundation, NVC proves you can do good and do well.
Healthcare’s Untapped Opportunity: Only <5% of VC funding in Latin America goes to healthcare , yet the region faces massive healthcare gaps. Daniela launched LatAm’s first women’s health fund and mapped 400+ startups, finding huge needs (and markets) in areas like telemedicine, diagnostics, and reproductive health. Women make 80% of healthcare decisions but hold just 4% of leadership roles, a disconnect NVC turns into opportunity .
Finding Founders Off the Beaten Path: Unlike many VCs waiting for pitch decks, Daniela’s team hustles to source deals proactively by speaking with ~1,000 companies a year via cold calls, LinkedIn, and on-the-ground networking . This aggressive approach led NVC to back unconventional winners like a last-mile internet startup taking on telecom giants. Where others saw risk, Daniela saw resilience (and outsized returns).
Team & Grit over Hype: Daniela stresses that a startup is only as strong as its founding team. She uses the “Three Rs” framework — Roles, Rewards, Relationships — to evaluate founders’ fit and commitment. Red flags (like a CTO with only 2% equity) can predict breakups. “Co-founding a startup is like a marriage, sometimes even harder than being married!”. NVC looks for teams with true chemistry, complementary skills, and ‘ride-or-die’ determination to weather the startup storms.
Disciplined Growth in a New Market Reality: In an era of tighter capital, Daniela advises founders to ditch blitzscaling myths and focus on fundamentals. Growth is great, but unit economics must work from day one. As she notes, “The best returns come from companies that prioritize unit economics and move at a manageable pace. Scaling with discipline rather than speed alone often earns founders the right to grow – and investors the right kind of upside.” In short, sustainable growth > hype-fueled burn.
In Today's Newsletter
New Ventures Capital (NVC): Disrupting Impact Investing Across Latin America
💰 Assets Under Management: $20M (Fund 1, backed by Botnar Foundation)
📍 HQ: Bogota, Colombia
🎯 Stage Focus: Pre-seed and Seed
🌎 Geographic Focus: LatAm - with deals done in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and now expanding to Central America.
📊 Check Size: $100K–$350K initial, with follow-on up to $500k
🏆 Portfolio: 14+
🚀 Notable Investments:
Smartbeemo is leveling the playing field, creating a world where the entrepreneurial dreams of Latin people of all walks of life become a reality.
Plenna transforms the way young women access healthcare. Its mission is to accompany women throughout their lives, from adolescence to motherhood, by providing high-quality, specialized, and comprehensive care.
Fibrazo evaluates and analyzes marginalized regions and neighborhoods where there is no broadband internet access and provides a unique solution by extending fiber optic internet to neighborhoods in need.
Unique Model: VC with a focus on impact on youth generations in LatAm.
Exit Strategy: Typically M&A and secondaries with IPOs remaining the holy grail.
Learn more here: www.nvcapital.vc
Bridging Two Worlds: Impact Meets Venture Capital
Daniela Pacheco is on a mission to prove that impact-driven startups can deliver venture-level returns. NVC itself was founded as a bridge between traditional donors and the startup ecosystem: it emerged when a group of family offices and foundations sought “more sustainable solutions for their impact”. Partnering with Fundación Botnar (a large Swiss foundation focused on youth), Daniela co-created a $20M early-stage fund to invest in market-based solutions to social problems. The message was clear: philanthropic capital can catalyze scalable businesses addressing health, education, climate and more.
At NVC, impact isn’t a box to check, it’s central to the investment thesis. Daniela disagrees that investors must choose either impact or profit. “A lot of people believe you can’t do both. At NVC, we believe differently; these are two worlds that should collide,” she says. At NVC, she shows that you can do both — backing companies with clear social benefits and high growth potential. Daniela’s team also helps startups articulate and measure their impact (through custom “impact empowerment” workshops). One windfall of mission-driven companies is that the mission can help with hiring, by inspiring young employees and building loyal communities of users. In Daniela’s view, diversity and inclusion aren’t just nice to have: “the data speaks for itself… it just makes business sense”. Investors worldwide (from development banks to BlackRock) are pushing for more diverse teams because it leads to better outcomes.
NVC’s gender lens highlights this philosophy. By investing with a focus on women and youth, Daniela targeting underserved markets. Women control consumer decisions in Latin America, especially in health, so backing women-led solutions is smart business. “Women are incredible consumers… diversity is a competitive advantage,” Daniela notes, pointing out that bringing more women into leadership will unlock even better returns.
“If you really want your company to build that next unicorn, the biggest advice is hire people who are different than you, who are gonna question you – not yes-people… It’s an incredible tool for success.”
Healthcare’s Big Gap = Big Opportunity
One sector where NVC’s impact-focus and contrarian approach shines is healthtech. Latin America’s healthcare system is riddled with challenges and ripe for innovation. Only about 5% of VC funding in LatAm goes into health, a tiny slice compared to fintech’s ~50% share. The common refrain was “not enough health startups,” but Daniela’s experience says otherwise. In fact, NVC helped launch the region’s first women’s health fund, mapping out 400+ healthtech companies in the process.
What they found was eye-opening: huge gaps in access and a misalignment between who needs solutions and who builds them. “I think the main problem in healthcare is access. ~170 million people in LatAm have no access to healthcare – 70% of them are women,” Daniela notes. Yet women are dramatically underrepresented on the provider side: “only 4% of [health sector] managerial roles are women, while 80% of healthcare decisions are made by women”. This was a “big aha moment” for her team. The disconnect between the female consumer base and mostly male-led startups presented a massive opportunity to invest in solutions that truly understand the end-user.
Daniela’s Empodera accelerator and “Health Heroes” program shone a light on this. They showcased women’s health startups to investors and discovered many had “80% of their clients as women and no women on the tech or product team”. For savvy investors, this spells upside. NVC’s bet is that founders who bridge that gap – by building products for the actual users (often women) and hiring talent who represent those users – will win big. It’s already backing startups doing exactly that: for example, Brazil’s HUNA AI, which uses AI on blood samples for early breast cancer detection without expensive mammograms. Or Plenna in Mexico, providing a one-stop, female-focused healthcare platform. These companies tackle critical needs (like affordable diagnostics or comprehensive women’s wellness) that incumbent systems ignore, while unlocking profitable new markets.
Crucially, NVC isn’t just writing checks, it’s also exploring innovative financing models to fuel these solutions. Daniela discusses framing some health investments as revenue-based or debt deals rather than pure equity, since traditional VC models don’t always fit social businesses. The goal is to catalyze impact on a sustainable, scalable basis, whether via venture rounds or alternative funding. Impact with integrity, but also with ingenuity.
Daniela’s approach to investing can be summed up in one word: proactive. Coming up through Endeavor (the global entrepreneur network), she learned early the value of pounding the pavement to find great founders. At NVC, that ethos is core. While some VCs wait for warm intros, Daniela’s team “actively look[s] for companies and deals”, often in unsexy or overlooked corners of the market. NVC analysts have a mandate to reach out to at least two new companies every week, and the firm isn’t shy about cold emails or LinkedIn messages. The result: 3–4 people screening around 1,000 startups a year, giving NVC a shot at gems others might miss. “You have to get out there because the best deals are competitive. Sometimes you have to fight your way to win,” Daniela says of the hustle. It’s a strategy that requires hustle and curiosity, but it pays off in both deal flow and community building.
A great example is Fibrazo, one of NVC’s more notable investments. Fibrazo is a Colombian startup bringing fiber-optic internet to underserved coastal communities. Many investors passed on Fibrazo, wary of the operational complexity and the prospect of competing with incumbent telecom giants. But Daniela saw what others didn’t: an essential service in huge demand, and founders with the grit and experience to pull it off. The Colombian telecom market is an oligopoly with lousy service in smaller markets. Fibrazo offered flexible, affordable plans to folks big companies ignored: “democratizing internet access in neighborhoods where the big players would never bet”. Importantly, the founder’s background impressed NVC: “he had worked in Africa and other continents, understood the technical side and the business model. Where others saw risk, we saw resilience, and that made all the difference.” Today, Fibrazo is thriving and has become one of NVC’s best-performing deals, validating this contrarian bet.
The takeaway for investors? Great opportunities often lurk where consensus says “too hard.” By remaining curious and building relationships everywhere (even a casual “who built your website?” can lead to meeting the next Rappi), Daniela has created an edge for NVC. For founders, her advice is to leverage your networks too: “Founders know the best founders”, so those warm referrals from fellow entrepreneurs can be golden. And if you’re tackling a tough, meaningful problem that others overlook, the right investors (like NVC) will value your vision and tenacity.
The “Three Rs” of Team Success
When evaluating startups, Daniela puts people above all. “I think one of the biggest reasons startups fail is team cohesion,” she says. In 2020 - 2021, LatAm saw a surge of new startups, sometimes with co-founders that barely knew each other. NVC witnessed the fallout: “We’ve had two companies break up because of [founder conflict]. It’s like a marriage, even harder than being married sometimes.” Now, Daniela rigorously diligences founder dynamics before investing. She credits a professor from her USC master’s program for a framework she uses, the “Three Rs”: Roles, Rewards, Relationships .
What does that mean in practice?
First, Roles — does each founder have a clear, necessary role, and do they cover the key skills between them? (Beware of ambiguous titles like co-CEOs or missing expertise.)
Second, Rewards — is equity split fairly relative to contributions? If a crucial tech lead only owns 2%, that’s a red flag (a likely “flight risk” who might not stick around).
Third, Relationships — have the founders worked together before or been through challenges as a team? Startups are a gauntlet, and founding with a total stranger can be a recipe for blow-ups. NVC favors teams who have “immense skin in the game” and personal trust – for example, Fibrazo’s founders were longtime colleagues who even moved countries together to build the business. That kind of bond signals resilience.
Daniela also emphasizes founder coachability and openness. As part of diligence, NVC will probe how entrepreneurs react to feedback and tough questions. Are they transparent with data? Do they admit what they don’t know? “The most talented people are super open… they have nothing to hide,” she observes. A bit of ego is expected in founders, but too much ego — the kind that “won’t pivot when they have to or won’t listen to anyone” — is dangerous. For investors, the lesson is to double-click on team dynamics, not just the deck and metrics. For founders, it’s a reminder that self-awareness and humility can be as important as hustle. As Daniela puts it, you ultimately want a leader who will “ride or die for that company” and still be willing to learn and adapt.
Wrapping Up
Daniela’s insights come at a pivotal time for the LatAm startup ecosystem. As the funding frenzy cools, her focus on purposeful, sustainable growth feels especially timely. Rather than chase the next hype cycle, Daniela is betting on founders who truly understand local problems and who are in it for the long haul. It’s a reminder that building in LatAm is a marathon, not a sprint, and that impact-driven entrepreneurs (with the right support) can create both profit and progress.
For our La Frontera community, this conversation was a powerful nudge to double down on what matters: solving real problems, staying close to your customers, and surrounding yourself with people who challenge you to be better. We hope you found these notes as inspiring as we did!
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