Maya Capital

Maya Capital is a Sao Paulo-based pre-seed and seed venture firm with a thesis around supporting diverse and ambitious founders modernizing traditional industries including healthcare in Brazil. Stage focus is pre-seed and seed with checks in the $250k to $1M range, and AI is not flagged as a primary focus. The fund has built a reputation for hands-on engagement, founder-friendly terms, and an explicit commitment to backing underrepresented founders in a Brazilian venture market that has historically been homogenous at the partner level. Healthcare interest spans digital health, wellness and consumer health, and healthcare software. The right founder for Maya is a Brazilian operator, often diverse founders or first-time founders, building a digital health, wellness, or healthcare software business with credible Brazilian-market wedge and a willingness to engage actively with Maya’s operating support. The wrong founder is a deep medtech or therapeutics team, a US-pedigreed founder using Sao Paulo only as an engineering hub, or a Series A-plus company looking for an institutional lead at scale. Intro paths run through Sao Paulo’s deep operator network, the YC LatAm and Latitud cohorts, frequent co-investors and follow-on partners including Astella, Canary, Kaszek, monashees, Norte Capital, and Valor Capital, and through Maya’s existing portfolio CEOs many of whom are publicly active. The fund’s intentional outreach into underrepresented founder communities means the on-ramp is somewhat broader than at many traditional Brazilian funds. In the pitch, lead with the founding team’s depth and the underlying customer evidence, the unit economics in BRL with realistic CAC and retention assumptions, and a credible read on the Brazilian healthcare regulatory environment including LGPD, ANS, ANVISA, and CFM where applicable. Show that you understand Brazilian out-of-pocket and employer-paid health spending dynamics and the role of operadoras de saude as the dominant private payers. Be specific about how your business creates real consumer or provider value in a market where many digital health attempts have struggled to monetize. Caveats include the increased competitiveness of Brazilian seed and Series A in 2024-2025, the limited follow-on capacity from Maya alone which means parallel syndicate construction is the founder’s job, and the reality that consumer health businesses in Brazil face structural margin pressure from low ARPU outside the highest-income segments. For Brazilian healthcare founders with strong founder-market fit, Maya is a credible early partner.