500 Startups Mexico City Comes North of the Border with a Mountain View Demo Day Ryan Lawler - TechCrunch
go to original February 5, 2013

500 Startups: In Search of Geeks! Overview of our fund & partners: Dave McClure, Christine Tsai, Paul Singh, Christen O'Brien, Bedy Yang. (500startups)

Dave McClure’s 500 Startups has showed off some of its Latin America flavor. Just a day before its 500 Startups Accelerator Demo Day, the venture firm previewed some of the companies it has incubated in Mexico. Today in Mountain View, Calif., 500 Startups Mexico City held its first demo day since the venture fund merged with Mexican.VC last year.

500 Startups venture partner Cesar Salazar gave a history of the group, from its early days as Mexican.VC. “We realized there was huge potential in the region,” Salazar said. But Mexico entrepreneurs were held back by a lack of capital and a lack of mentorship. So they created their own local incubator. After talks with McClure, the two groups decided to combine their efforts, and 500 Startups Mexico City was born.

The presentation consists of about a dozen startups, most of which came from 500 Startups’ Latin America portfolio. Here are our the companies that presented:

Boletia – This startup helps events organizers sell tickets and find an audience for their concerts, conferences, and other events. In addition to sales online, Boletia also allows organizers to sell through local convenience stores, which is a popular way of purchasing tickets. The startup takes a 6.5 percent fee per ticket. Seven weeks after launch, it’s had more than $100,000 sales in tickets with just one salesperson.

Capptalog – Capptalog provides a way for small and medium-sized businesses to quickly create catalogs to showcase and sell their wares through mobile devices. It provides a SaaS platform on the web for creating and managing product descriptions, upload multimedia, such as photos and videos, and create sales pages for those products. It says there are 5 million SMBs in the Mexican market, and is looking to attempt to capture 72 percent of those.

E-Training – This company seeks to help train the 20 million professionals in Mexico that are underemployed or unemployed. In the Latin America market, the company sees 152 million web users, of which 14 percent are participating in online education. That will grows annually at a rate of 15 percent to 32 million people in 2015.

Femininas.com – This startup is going after the fashion and beauty market in Spanish-speaking companies. There are already 100,000s of customers coming to website every month, and it’s profitable. But it’s looking to expand in a market where there’s no Pinterest or Glam Media to compete against.

Harris – “Obesity is a bitch.” That’s the problem that Harris seeks to solve, by connecting users and nutritionists and allowing both to track a user’s diet. The company offers a SaaS-based platform with a subscription model for its dashboard. It has a large list of foods and nutritional info that users can check out to choose what to eat, and nutritionists can use to keep track of their diets.

Nuperty – Nuperty helps connect buyers, sellers, and mortgage lenders in real estate. The company provides a platform for searching real estate listings, and also provides buyer profiles to financial institutions for those who wish to qualify for loans. The company has generated $100,000 in leads so far and is growing quickly in Mexico, and is looking to expand to other Latin American countries.

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