Five CEOs and founders who won the “Growth” program share their stories. How did they create their companies? How did they win? As every year, Start-Up Chile, Corfo's accelerator, announced the startups that won the Build, Ignite, and Growth funds, one of the most anticipated events in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. Fifty-eight technology startups will receive a total of $2.13 billion in funding.
The group receiving the most funding is the 13 companies in the “Growth” program, with up to $75 million each, for a total of approximately $1.05 billion distributed. They are followed by the 28 “Ignite” companies with a total of $840 million and the 17 “Build” companies, businesses in their earliest stages, with a total of $240 million. “Our new generation is very strong in terms of the level of sophistication of the startups, which will undoubtedly contribute to productive diversification and technological development in Chile,” says Carmen Contreras, CEO of Start-Up Chile.
The story of the winners: Nils Lindeen, CEO and co-founder of Savia, never imagined that what began as an e-commerce business selling fruits and vegetables to people in their homes during the pandemic would end up being a digital platform that facilitates the supply logistics of restaurants, currently working with more than 100 restaurants in Santiago.
“The idea was to shorten the food distribution chain, connecting customers in the city directly with farmers, bypassing the intermediaries,” says one of the 13 winners of “Growth.” Lindeen, an environmental civil engineer from the Catholic University, has always been involved in gastronomy. He worked for over seven years with a restaurant brand he created, which expanded to telocales, but the social unrest and subsequent pandemic forced him to close his restaurants. However, the crisis became an opportunity for him. In 2020, he began working at a Dutch business incubator for impact startups called Enviu.
There he met his partner, Luuk Gremmen, a Dutch programmer and engineer who came to Chile through Startup-Chile Funds. Joaquín Carrasco, co-founder of Marambio, CEO, and co-founder in 2018, is in charge of the startup's development and technology. “Democratizing desalination for rural communities.” That’s the goal of Pablo Cassorla, CEO and founder of the startup Remote Waters. The startup, which he presented at the last COP28, originated as a thesis idea for a master’s degree in sustainability at Columbia University in the USA.
Cassorla, who was studying on a Chilean scholarship at the time, had to fight with his superiors to be allowed to co-write his thesis with a colleague at another university so he could apply to a U.S. Department of Energy competition. “We designed it in three weeks and won in the U.S. and Israel,” he explains. Currently, the startup operates in Chile and Latin America, and has been running for four years. The revolutionary model adapts to the needs of the user who contracts the service; in this way, through reverse osmosis, it can desalinate seawater, well water, or river water. Another winner, Diego Noguera, CEO and co-founder of Carvuk, says that the idea for his startup was born in collaboration with his friend, José Alcalde. While Noguera was working in development at Blue Express, Alcalde was working at Banco Security.
“Let’s do some logistics,” was the first idea, recalls Miguel Orellana, CTO and co-founder José Francisco, CEO of AGA. “Our new generation is coming in very strong in terms of the level of sophistication of startups.” Carmen Contreras, CEO of Start-Up Chile, Ricardo Susaeta, CEO and co-founder of AGA, Pablo Cassorla, EO, and founder Matias Ra, co-founder of OO Mor 7 - ie d El] June Osofsky, CEO and co-founder of AGA. Alcalde quit his job and Noguera started paying him half his salary to help him while he learned about logistics. Later, Nicolás Vega, his third founding partner, joined, getting involved in the technical side. The three applied to the Platanus Venture accelerator and were selected.
However, they realized that logistics was a saturated market: “margins were low, in the end it was a price war,” says the CEO of Carvuk. The Chilean automotive fleet, with more than 6 million cars today, was So what attracted and motivated them to found Carvuk? “But the experience of owning a car was bad (...), so what we did was offer everything that comes with owning a car, from washing and maintenance to dent repair and painting, etc. We wanted people to be able to stop worrying about their car,” says Noguera.
Regarding their future and the awarding of Start-Up Chile funds, the entrepreneur comments that: “What we want to do now is look for new distribution channels, whether B2B or B2B2C, through insurance companies, brokers, financial institutions, or even through the dealerships themselves.”
As well as expanding to cities and other countries.” LA. Chilean Style The booming artificial intelligence industry, or AI, was also present among the winners: Kidsbook and Discovery AI are prime examples of this, albeit in diametrically opposed contexts. On the one hand, Rodrigo Marambio, CEO and co-founder of Kids Book, is an industrial engineer from the University of Santiago and, since his university days, has had an interest in entrepreneurship, he says.
The idea to create this start-up was born in a conversation with Sabrina Orellana, CRO and co-founder, when she told him about the problems parents face when communicating in the context of preschools. Thus, Kids Book was born, a SaaS for early childhood education, which reduces the time spent on administrative tasks by teachers and administrators in preschools by 64%. They currently work with 250 establishments in Chile and also have a presence in Panama, Costa Rica, and Peru. “This year we want to add AI to our portfolio.” Not only will we optimize our work with her, but we will also learn what to foster in each child, thus providing a more personalized education.
In this way, we aim to prevent school dropout, which is very common in preschool.” On the other hand, in the mining sector, there is Discovery AI, a digital tool with an algorithm based on artificial intelligence for natural language processing, which allows for the automated processing of open text fields and optimizes the analysis time of extensive texts. They are currently working with Collahuasi, explains José Tomás Cumsille, co-founder of the company. The entrepreneurs in the Growth program: Similarly, the startups Clariti, Administrado, Buho, Edi Pro, Reite, Digital F2F, ATP Innovación, and ABC Plan were also selected.
