LatAm List – Argentina’s economy may be in crisis, but startups are still on the rise. Argentina’s biggest entrepreneurship and investment community, the Argentine Association of Private, Venture, and Seed Capital (ARCAP), reports that 2018 has been an inflection point for the industry.
In 2017, Argentine startups raised US$26M in venture capital. In the first half of 2018, they raised US$125M; that’s five times more capital in half the time.
ARCAP has seen membership grow by 48% in the same time period. Many actors in the ecosystem credit this rapid growth to the new entrepreneurship law in Argentina that allows entrepreneurs to register a business in under 24 hours, rather than the weeks it used to take.
“Today, the bottleneck in the industry is capital, because local and global actors are still concerned about approaching Argentina. However, VC has grown in the past three years as firms have opened offices here or brought more people over. When this process started, we hit a sticky spot in our economy and global investors have backed off again, but as we continue to grow, we continue to see more capital coming to Argentina,” said ARCAP Public Relations Director, José Sosa del Valle.
Read more in the original article for La Nación.
