In Mexico, as elsewhere, venture capital fundraising fell off a cliff in 2022.
Bucking the trend, that’s the year that the Coppel family, which runs one of Mexico’s most popular department store chains, launched its own VC firm, 1200VC, a $150 million fund that is backing impact technology across the Americas and Europe.
“The funding landscape in Latin America is not retreating, it is evolving,” Esteban Coppel Gómez told ImpactAlpha on behalf of the family. “The pullback after the recent capital bubble has created a healthier environment that rewards discipline, operational depth, and long-term alignment.”
The venture fund grew out of the Coppels’ family office, Talipot. As other investors have retreated, a handful of wealthy Mexican families are instead stepping up their allocations to impact investments in an effort to build a more vibrant ecosystem for startups and entrepreneurs tackling the country’s social challenges. In Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America, family businesses make up the backbone of the economy, accounting for three-quarters of all businesses valued above $1 billion.
“While some international capital has stepped back, this moment favors patient, informed investors—particularly regional families and global family offices willing to engage with the real economy rather than financial cycles,” said Lupe Rodriguez, who runs Talipot’s investments.
The Servitje family, which controls the snacks and bakery giant Grupo Bimbo, is preparing to make its first impact investments to complement its grantmaking in Mexico’s many underserved communities. The Sánchez Navarro family, once one of the biggest landowners in the country, co-founded CO_Capital in 2018 to target ventures addressing poverty and climate change. The fund is part of CO_Plataforma, an impact investing platform working to build Mexico’s impact ecosystem.
“The biggest obstacle in the financial sector is how we approach growth and profit maximization,” CO_’s Tania Rodriguez Riestra said at the Global Impact Investing Network’s impact forum in 2024. “We need to shift to thinking about what it looks like to operate within planetary boundaries.”
Ensemble, a Mexico City collaborative, is bringing together family foundations and corporate foundations to build partnerships around supporting the city’s social sector. Latimpacto has also worked to convene the region’s family investors and foundations around impact investing. Other families work at smaller, more regional scales. In Monterrey, for example, several industrial families invest locally within Nuevo León.
Maria Hollan helped her family’s office, Timke Ventures, expand beyond philanthropy with two direct impact investments. “Then I realized you can have impact as a complete portfolio,” she told ImpactAlpha in a video interview.
Diego Serebrisky of Mexico City-based venture firm Dalus Capital says the fundraising falloff has…
Read More: These Mexican families are stepping up to impact investing even as others
