Kaszek Ventures

Kaszek is the franchise that built modern Latin American venture capital. Founded in 2011 by Hernan Kazah and Nicolas Szekasy, the former co-founder and former CFO of MercadoLibre respectively, the firm has raised roughly $2B across seven funds and is universally cited as the most prestigious early-stage signal in the region. Kaszek backed Nubank when it was David Velez and a deck, and that single decision arguably did more to legitimize LatAm tech to global LPs than any other check in the past fifteen years. The portfolio reads as a regional honor roll, including Nubank, Kavak, Creditas, Gympass, Loggi, QuintoAndar, Notco, Konfio, Contabilizei, and Digital House, and the firm’s brand has reached the point where being on a Kaszek cap table is itself a fundraising and recruiting asset for founders who use it ruthlessly to attract downstream capital and senior operating talent. The partnership operates from Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Montevideo, Mexico City, and Bogota, which gives portfolio companies actual on-the-ground go-to-market support across the region rather than the absentee-board pattern common with US firms claiming LatAm coverage; Kazah and Szekasy still anchor the partnership and split most board seats with their senior team. For healthcare specifically, Kaszek has been measured rather than promiscuous. Its anchor digital health bet is Pipo Saude, the Sao Paulo-based digital health benefits broker for SMEs that Kaszek co-led at Series A with Monashees and ONEVC in 2020 in a $4.6M round and that subsequently attracted Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital to lead a $20M expansion round in 2021, eventually reaching a R$100M round led by Thrive. Pipo’s thesis is straightforward and unsentimental: Brazilian SMEs spend a punishing share of payroll on private health plans, the broker layer is dominated by analog incumbents using fax machines and Excel, and a software-first benefits platform compounds with every employee added to the network. Kaszek has explicitly named healthtech as one of the sectors it is leaning into for its 2023-vintage funds, alongside fintech infrastructure, blockchain, marketplaces, and climate tech, and that signal is consistent with a partnership that has watched Brazilian payer and provider workflows deteriorate while consumer expectations around digital-first experiences have flipped. On AI, Kaszek’s framing has been pragmatic; the firm is not trying to back foundation-model labs out of LatAm, but it is actively looking for application-layer AI that monetizes against the region’s most expensive and most dysfunctional workflows, which puts healthcare squarely in scope. Stage and check size in the $1M to $5M band understate the firm’s actual capacity; Kaszek runs early-stage and opportunity vehicles in parallel and routinely follows on into Series B and beyond at meaningful ownership, and the close-to-$1B raise across two vehicles in 2023 expanded the firm’s growth-stage capacity significantly. The firm leads or co-leads the majority of its early-stage deals and runs a famously hands-on partner model that has become a template other LatAm funds explicitly copy. Founders who fit are LatAm operators building category-defining technology businesses with a clear thesis on how their wedge unlocks a regional rather than single-country opportunity; healthcare-specific fit means payer infrastructure, provider software, benefits and broker tech, pharmacy and prescription rails, AI-native clinical productivity tools, and consumer-health franchises that can plausibly cross from Brazil into Mexico and the Spanish-speaking markets. Kaszek partners are notoriously skeptical of GMV theatrics and reward cohort discipline, retention curves, and credible unit economics over growth-at-all-costs narratives. Founders who do not fit include US healthcare teams seeking a passive LatAm strategic, regulated medtech and biotech (out of scope), founders without a credible thesis for crossing borders within LatAm, and consumer wellness brands without a software or marketplace wedge. The intro path is canonical: a portfolio CEO referral, ideally from a fintech or marketplace anchor that knows the partnership well, a senior operator from MercadoLibre’s diaspora (the Meli alumni network is essentially Kaszek’s extended scout team), or a Stanford GSB or Insper alumni introduction that lands with credibility. Cold inbound is read but rarely converts, and a poorly targeted cold pitch can burn future optionality with a partnership that has long memory. In the pitch, lead with founder-market fit and a concrete unit-economic story; bring cohort-level retention data wherever possible, demonstrate regulatory literacy where applicable (ANS, ANVISA, COFEPRIS depending on geography), and articulate the path to regional rather than national category leadership. The caveats: the firm is brand-conscious and selective, partner bandwidth is finite and concentrated on the highest-conviction breakouts, its preference for founders living in the market means returning-diaspora founders need to demonstrate ground truth quickly, and the prestige of the brand can occasionally cut against founders because getting a Kaszek term sheet creates pressure to perform that not every founder welcomes.