Coffee, Brazilian VCs, and NFL in Mexico

Welcome to our new 486 newsletter subscribers! We can safely say last week was our craziest yet: Our Oxxo chart was talked about all over Mexico and featured in several recognized publications. More on that at the bottom.

We’re grateful to everyone who engaged and subscribed. Our commitment is to keep bringing you the best data stories about the incredible place that is Latin America.

Did you know that Brazil is the world’s biggest coffee producer? Even more surprising, only 6 Latin American countries produce half of the world’s coffee. Latin Americans are not big coffee drinkers, however. That title is held by Europeans, which, funny enough, produce no coffee at all.

Cold climates might help explain coffee consumption a little better — Finland, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark consume the most coffee per capita globally.

Coffee consumption began in the 15th century after merchants started exporting it for the first time out of Ethiopia. Since then, human beings couldn’t put their cups down, and coffee plantations reached all corners of the world to meet growing demand. Latin America was late to the game, however: It wasn’t until 1720 —almost 300 years later— that French naval officer Gabriel de Clieu brought the first beans to the tiny Caribbean island of Martinique.

From there, the coffee rush became unstoppable. Coffee plantations spread across Latin America. It was meant to be: Coffee can only grow in tropical climates. Today, the region continues to increase its production to meet the modern demands of coffee drinkers worldwide. To illustrate, Starbucks consumes about 363K tonnes of coffee each year, more than Peru’s entire coffee output.

It’s official: Latin America is the fastest-growing region for Venture funding, and seed funding is no exception. This chart represents seed rounds, which are usually the very first investment that a startup receives, often even before they have a track record or can generate cash of their own. For that reason, seed investments are particularly risky.

Brazilian VC firms are leading this kind of funding for Latin American startups, with six of the top ten VC firms based in São Paulo. Bossanova is the “Venture Capital mais ativo da América Latina,” (the most active fund in LatAm) and, according to its website, has invested in 893 startups to date. Its investments include startups like HubLocal, Mywork, and EasyJur.

One outlier in the chart is Berlin-based Global Founders Capital. As its name suggests, it has participated in funding global heavy-hitters like Canva and Slack. Its most recent investment was just three days ago, in Health Tech startup Nilo Saúde’s Series A. Canary, another firm on the chart, participated in its pre-seed round in 2020.

Brazil’s dominance is remarkable, but it’s nice to see a Chilean firm, Magma Partners, participating in the funding. Founded in 2014, it focuses on early-stage fintech, insurance tech, and blockchain startups in Latin America. Will VC firms based in other LatAm countries appear on next year’s chart?

It’s been an exciting year for American football (farewell, Tom Brady ✌️). The NFL is not only the most popular sports league in the US; it’s also the world’s most valuable. Due to the growing popularity, marketing, and exhibition games played in Mexico, Google Search trends for the NFL in Mexico reached an all-time during last week’s playoffs.

The NFL has been ramping up excitement in Mexico for a few years now, especially after it began exporting one game per season to Mexico City (and London), marketing it as the “NFL International Series.” In 2016, with a game between the Texans and the Raiders, the league began a yearly tradition of one match per year played in Mexico

From casual international fans to serious ones, there appears to be no slowing down of this trend anytime soon. And the League is going all-in on it: In December, it announced its “International Home Marketing Area,” granting 18 teams with international marketing in eight different countries. With this, the NFL hopes to expand their global fan base, conveying that “all 32 clubs will play at least one international game in the next eight seasons.”

NFL Executive VP & Growth Officer Christopher Halpin stated, “This important initiative enables NFL teams to develop meaningful, direct relationships with NFL fans abroad, driving fan growth and avidity globally.”

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That is all for this week. 👋

Cheers!

Instead of the typical comment of the week, we are sharing a screenshot of an article that Expansion, one of Mexico’s top business news agencies (part of CNN), wrote on our chart:

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