LatamList – Magma Partners, a leading early-stage investment fund in Latin America, announced the recent integration of Claire Díaz-Ortiz to the Magma Partners team to lead Brava, an initiative that aims to invest in more female founders in Latin America.
Díaz-Ortiz was an early employee at Twitter, where she was first hired to lead corporate social innovation, famously “got the Pope on Twitter”, and built awareness for AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa by founding Hope Runs, a nonprofit organization in Kenya.
She is also an advisor for January Ventures, a US and UK based early-stage venture capital fund that invests in high-growth female-led startups, as well as an investor at Portfolia, an investing community for female investors in the US.
Brava, along with other partner funds, is committed to investing in 20 female-founded startups in Latin America over the next three years, having already closed its first four investments: Jefa, a challenger bank for women, The Intern Group, a leading provider of international internship programs across the globe, Prometeo, an open banking platform, and FlickPlay, a multimedia tech company using AR to engage its community.
“We’re doing this because female-founded startups have better returns and to highlight the disparity in VC funding to women entrepreneurs,” Díaz-Ortiz stated.
According to Díaz-Ortiz, investments in female-founded or co-founded teams increase when there are more female investors across the table. In Latin America, only 8% of VC investing partners are women, compared to 13% in the US.
Multiple studies have also shown that female-founded companies outperform their all-male counterparts, generating more revenue, greater returns, and faster exits.
Read more on the Magma Partners’ blog or on TechCrunch.
