Susana Espinosa de los Reyes - Partner, Dux Capital
Podcast Notes, Episode 8 - LatAm VC Trailblazer: Investing Across Borders & Empowering Women
La Frontera đ” Podcast, Episode 8 - LatAm VC Trailblazer: Investing Across Borders & Empowering Women
Susana Espinosa de los Reyes
We first connected with Susy Espinosa through a cold LinkedIn message. From the beginning, she was warm, direct, and generous with her time. Susy is one of the first female venture capital partners in Mexico, and her journey into venture is as unconventional as it is inspiring.
From a cold email that launched her VC career to co-founding Mujeres Invertiendo, Susy has helped shape the venture ecosystem in Mexico and is now actively investing in and supporting Latin founders across both the US and LatAm through Dux Capital. This conversation pulls back the curtain on what itâs really like to fundraise in LatAm, what kinds of businesses are truly venture-backable, and how we can bring more women into investing roles.
Whether youâre a founder, investor, or someone interested in breaking into VC, this episode has a lot to offer.
Episode 8 Summary
Susyâs Unconventional Path into VC: From a cold email in college that landed her an internship to a six-year career at Angel Ventures, all before an MBA in Madrid.
Founding âMujeres Invertiendoâ: How seeing zero female VCs in Mexico drove Susy to co-found an organization empowering women investors and eventually become one of the countryâs first female GPs.
Dux Capitalâs Cross-Border Thesis: Why Dux bases itself between Austin and CDMX, investing in Latinx founders in the US to bridge markets, and how this strategy helps mitigate risk while tapping huge opportunities.
Fundraising Challenges in LatAm: The lack of exits and secondary markets makes raising capital tough. Susy explains how limited exits have many local LPs waiting on the sidelines (and what that means for emerging fund managers).
Hard Truths on Female-Founded Startups: Susyâs candid take on why many women-led businesses in LatAm donât fit the traditional VC model - and why thatâs okay. (Plus, how risk appetite and âimpostor syndromeâ play a role.)
Bringing More Women to the Cap Table: From launching an angel investor academy to mentoring, Susy shares how we can encourage more women to become investors and write checks in the ecosystem.
Mexicoâs Startup Community Boom: The evolution of Mexico Cityâs startup scene â from a handful of founders in 2016 to hundreds of events at Tech Week 2025 â and how a vibrant, party-loving culture is building a tight-knit tech community.
In Today's Newsletter
Dux Capital: Investing in the next generation of founders
đ° Assets Under Management: $4M+ across one fund
đ HQ: Austin, TX with an office in Mexico City
đŻÂ Stage Focus: Seed and Series A
đ Geographic Focus: Mexico, Spain, and the US
đ Check Size: $750Kâ$1.8M initial, with follow-on capacity
đ Exits: One exit with Zubut exiting to Mensajeros Urbanos
đ Notable Investments:
Mozper (Mexico) â Mozper provides the first debit card designed for children managed by parents. The card allows control of expenses to promote financial education from early years, and teach young people to manage money.
Cheddies (USA) â Cheddies is the first company to create a light, crispy, cheesy cracker produced with real regenerative cheddar cheese high in protein.
Innovare (USA) â A Chicago-based edtech platform that empowers school and nonprofit leaders with data analytics tools.
Trato (Mexico) â A legaltech SaaS platform that simplifies contracts so companies have better control and traceability.
Fintonic (Spain) â A Madrid-based fintech company offering a mobile application that serves as a personal finance manager, allowing users to aggregate their financial accounts, monitor expenses, and receive personalized financial advice.
Learn more here: www.duxcapital.vc
đ§Â From Cold Emails to Partner at Dux Capital: Susyâs Path
Susy didnât grow up dreaming of venture capital, she discovered it by accident after organizing TEDx talks at her university and becoming curious about startup founders and how they built their companies and raised capital.
âI saw all these success stories from my university and wondered: why do all my friends want to work at Goldman or Evercore? I didnât want that life. I didnât want to work 7 AM to 2 AM like my dad.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
After taking, and acing, a class with a few local VCs, she was frustrated when she didnât get offered an internship. So, she emailed HernĂĄn from Angel Ventures (and ccâd one of his LPs for good measure), offering to work for free.
âHe wrote back: âDo you have a laptop? Come join my office.â Thatâs how it started.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
She spent six years at Angel Ventures, rising from intern to portfolio manager, and only later pursued an MBA in Madrid. Still, she never saw another woman in a decision-making role. So, she co-founded Mujeres Invertiendo, a network for women in private equity and venture capital.
Today, Susy is one of the few women in Mexico to become a Partner in Venture Capital and sheâs opening the door for others.
đ©Â What Was Missing: Mujeres Invirtiendo
In all her time at Angel Ventures, Susy never once worked with a female partner. So she co-founded Mujeres Invirtiendo, a network of women in VC and PE aimed at fixing the representation gap.
âThere were no female GPs in Mexico at the time. None. So I figured, I canât change my gender, and I canât fast-forward 20 years of experience, but I can get an MBA from a top school. So I did.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
That MBA was at IE in Madrid. But before and after, she organized dinners, networking events, and advocacy efforts to encourage firms to bring in women, not just as analysts, but as decision-makers.
âWe talked to GPs directly. If the data shows diversity improves returns, why arenât you hiring women?â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
It worked. Now, she estimates that 36% of the startups in Dux Capitalâs pipeline are female-led, even though Dux Capital doesnât promote that as a mandate.
âWe donât say we invest in women â we say we invest in the best founders. But if you have women on the investment team, women founders come naturally.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
đ Dux Capitalâs Edge: Cross-Border, Latino, Bootstrapped
Dux invests in Latino founders in the US, a niche with unique challenges and big opportunities. Itâs a deliberate strategy: build bridges between Latin American talent and the US market, and unlock better paths to scale, exits, and liquidity.
These arenât founders with elite networks or pedigree, theyâre operators who have often bootstrapped to seven figures in revenue before raising capital.
The result? Lower risk, stronger fundamentals, and startups that can go the distance.
âMost of the Latinos we invest in didnât go to Stanford. They didnât have rich uncles. They had one shot to prove they could build something, and they did it.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
Susy argues that this model helps mitigate risk. Many of these founders already have traction, especially in B2B or overlooked markets.
âThese are not pitch deck ideas. These are real companies with paying customers, and weâre coming in when the foundationâs already there.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
Itâs also personal for her; she grew up spending time between Mexico and the US, with family split between both sides of the border.
âHalf my life was in the US. Thanksgiving in LA. Summer camps in Boston. So a cross-border fund just made sense.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
đïžÂ Hard Truths About VC and Female Founders
With Susyâs experience starting and operating Mujeres Invertiendo, we were curious to get her thoughts on why more women-led businesses donât get funded in LatAm, even when the percentage of women founders is higher in LatAm than in the US.
Susy doesnât sugarcoat the reality: many women in LatAm run great businesses, but not all are a fit for venture capital. The reason, she explains, is that women often build stable, profitable companies that donât scale exponentially. Itâs not about capability, itâs about risk appetite and business model.
âThereâs a risk tolerance difference. Women often build incredible businesses, restaurants, retail, event companies, but theyâre not built for venture. And thatâs okay.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
She described a pair of women in Mexico who make $20K per weekend selling fancy candy bars at weddings. No CapEx, low overhead, huge margins.
âThey run a 20-person team. Itâs a great business. But a VC has nothing to do there.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
She also called out impostor syndrome as a real factor:
âMen walk in and say theyâre going to build the next Mars rocket. Women ask if their revenueâs high enough. Thatâs not a skills issue, thatâs social conditioning.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
Now, letâs dive into the data. According to the SecretarĂa de EconomĂa, about 1.6 million businesses, or 34% of all micro, small, and medium enterprises (âMSMEsâ) are women-owned in Mexico. This share is higher than the LatAm regional average (some 44% of entrepreneurs in Mexico are women).
As Susy noted, most of these women-run ventures are very small. Over 99% of female-led businesses in Mexico are micro-enterprises.
As we shift our focus to the tech sector, we see something similar.
As Contxto reported: âAccording to a 2020/2021 report by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, Latin America is the region with the highest female representation in the industry worldwide, with 24% of womenâs ventures in early stages. But of the more than 40 unicorns we have identified in the region, only three were co-founded by women: Kavak, Nubank and iFood.â
đžÂ Bringing More Women to the Cap Table
If we want to grow the number of female-founders in tech, weâll need to bring more women to the cap table. More women as investors. More women as board members. More women in the room when investment decisions are made. Thatâs how we build a more inclusive, and more effective, venture ecosystem.
With more women in positions to invest and advise others, along with a vibrant community of female investors and builders, female founder will have a strong network and community that they can lean on as they build and more leaders they can learn from and be inspired by.
But bringing more women to the cap tables doesnât necessarily mean as simple VCs. This means bringing more women into investor roles in general: as angels, LPs, and future fund managers.
âWe ran a pilot angel investor academy with Chava Ventures. It was amazing. We need more of that.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
The challenge, she says, is visibility. Thereâs very little data on how many women are angel investing in LatAm. Angels tend to keep their investments to themselves and rarely post about them online.
âEveryone keeps it private. So itâs hard to track progress.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
She wants to partner with angel groups like Angel Hub to build a pipeline, not just of female founders, but female check-writers.
âWhen women invest, they donât just back women, they diversify everything. They see different markets, different needs.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
đ°ïžÂ On Fundraising and LatAmâs VC Paradox
Raising capital in Latin America isnât just hard, itâs structurally broken. Susy explains that many early LPs in Mexico are still waiting for liquidity from funds raised 8â10 years ago. Without more exits or a secondary market, those LPs hesitate to reinvest, stalling new fund formation across the region.
Dux Capital sidesteps some of this risk by investing in companies that can exit in the US, but Susy is clear: until the local ecosystem sees more exits, venture capital in LatAm wonât be sustainable at scale.
Weâve heard this before on the show, but Susy explained it with clarity and candor. The core problem in LatAm VC isnât bad ideas, a lack of good founders, or a lack of capital â itâs a lack of exits.
âFunds raised in 2012â2015 still havenât returned money. LPs are waiting. They like us, but theyâre not reinvesting until they get liquidity.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
A quick aside: From our conversations, this is where weâd advise new and existing fund managers looking to attract new capital and LPs to be allocating more thought than the typical VC (especially those in the US) towards crafting their exit strategy and communicating it prominently in their LP materials. Their exit strategy should be clear, comprehensive, and reasonable to account for the uniqueness of the LatAm market.
One path thatâs promising, and that some investors have been leveraging, is strategic partnerships with international growth capital funds (more on this in a future episode of La Frontera đ”Â đ€« ).
Coming back to our conversation with Susy, she explained that in Mexico, real estate is still the go-to investment.
âMy grandma invested in real estate. And it worked. And now you can get 15% interest from a bank like NuBank. So why take a 10-year gamble on a VC fund?â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
This is why Dux is focused on US-based exits, where even sub-unicorn outcomes ($60Mâ$150M) can return the fund.
âThereâs no active IPO market in Mexico. Thereâs no real secondary market. Thatâs why we look to the US â exits are real, and liquidity is possible.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
đČđœÂ Mexicoâs Startup Scene: Bigger, Busier, Bolder
Back in 2016, Mexicoâs startup scene was intimate, with a few dozen people who knew each other well (basically 10 analysts in a WhatsApp group, iykyk).
Today, itâs a deep lineup of WhatsApp groups, Tech Week events, and cross-border deals. Susy still sees plenty of room for improvement, but sheâs proud of the momentum.
âWe started with 60 events last year. This year? Over 200. There are pĂĄdel tournaments, yoga, marathons, all packed into one week.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
While she laughs about the chaos, she sees it as a net positive.
She points to the cultural strength of CDMX â its warmth, its density, its informality â as a major reason why founders and investors are moving there.
âWe like to party. And that creates real community. People come to a dinner and leave with 3 intros and a new co-founder.â
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
We at La Frontera đ” can attest to that. While we were in CDMX last summer, we went to a Thursday night dinner hosted by a friend and left with at least five new friends, ear-to-ear smiles, and our stomachs full of incredible tacos.
â Â
Of course, itâs not San Francisco, but we donât have to be San Francisco. We have to be our own best version of whatâs happening in entrepreneurship here.
 Susana Espinosa De Los Reyes
We really enjoyed our conversation with Susy and weâre excited about the future of the startup and VC ecosystem in Mexico and throughout the rest of LatAm. Weâre hoping we can not only be a part of the ride, but also be a part of the force behind it that helps the ecosystem flourish and attract investment dollars.
đąÂ Listen to the full episode here.
Follow Susana, because why wouldnât you?
And check out Dux Capital as they continue to invest in and support Latin founders.
Dux Capital: Investing in the next generation of founders
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