Hola FounderFamilia!

With Hispanic Heritage Month starting tomorrow, we are thrilled to come together to elevate our FounderFamilia community. In this issue, we're celebrating the launch of LaFamilia Foundation, diving headfirst into the latest community happenings, highlighting our Hispanic Heritage Month programming, and encouraging founders to apply to our 3rd Annual Pitch Competition.

What to expect:

• 💢 Major Updates: Introducing LaFamilia Foundation

• 🏆 Community Wins & News: Fundraising, Accelerator Wins, & Major Milestones

• 📅 Programming: HHM & Book Chat

• 👩🏾‍💻 Who’s Hiring?

• 💁‍♂️💁‍♀️ Community Spotlight: Shofeur App Launch & Amela Newsletter

• 🔊 Call to action

💢Major Updates

🎇Introducing LFF

Going forward, LaFamilia Foundation will house our two established and influential organizations- FounderFamilia and VCFamilia, respectively the largest organizations of Latine founders and venture capitalists in the world.

Our new logo blends the distinctive elements of the VCFamilia logo, characterized by its triangular sun rays, and the FounderFamilia logo with its building blocks. When combined, these components give rise to our new emblem, which serves as a powerful symbol of circularity. It signifies the creation of a self-contained ecosystem that encapsulates the potent network effects enabling our collective growth. Our mission is to disrupt the prevailing cycle of overlooking Latine funders and founders, aspiring to forge a unique path – the wheel of progress we aim to set in motion.

Follow our new LinkedIn page here!

🏆Community Wins & News

💰Fundraising

Leadsales Raises $3.7M Seed Round

Last year, we had 8 incredible finalists for our 2nd Annual Pitch competition which included Angle, Avvinue (now PawTrip), L5 Automation, Lazo, Leadsales, Mentaport, Neomoon and Nixtla It is an understatement to say that Judges Miriam Rivera of Ulu Ventures, Mario Ruiz of Infinity Ventures, and Edrizio de la Cruz of Y-Combinator had a tough decision to make. After much deliberation, however, they awarded VCFamilia’s $50k cash prize to Leadsales, a startup helping small and medium businesses in Latin America manage their sales via WhatsApp and social media.

We now celebrate a monumental milestone for Leadsales and their founders Roberto Peñacastro and David Villa! They have not only partnered with Meta to create a specialized CRM tool, but they also recently closed a $3.7M seed funding round co-led by Miriam Rivera’s Ulu Ventures, one of the judges at last year’s VCFamilia pitch competition!

Congratulations to Leadsales on this incredible accomplishment. If you are a founder interested in this year’s pitch competition- keep scrolling to learn how to apply!

Correcto Raises $7M Seed Round

Abraham Lopez, a FounderFamilia member, just raised a $7M seed funding round for his startup, Correcto led by Octopus Ventures. Correcto is a startup that offers its customers a writing tool based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning that provides users with writing suggestions, tone analysis, and many other features, thus improving written communication in Spanish.

A huge round of applause for the Correcto team, your familia is proud!

🎊Accelerator Wins

Cedalio Pitches at YC Demo Day

“I’ve seen a lot of batches in the last decade and a half, and I can say without a doubt: this is a good one. It’s one of the strongest YC batches ever; the technical talent runs deep,” says Garry Tan, President of YC.

Luciana Reznik, a FounderFamilia member, got the opportunity to pitch her startup Cedalio as part of YC’s S23 class. Cedalio is a platform that helps build apps with information that is auditable by default. Data used in the application can be traced back to its origin for verification.

After receiving over 24,000 applications, YC funded 229 early-stage startups who last week had the opportunity to pitch at the YC Demo Day.

Suffice it to say that being a YC-backed founder is a huge accomplishment- Luciana, well done and well deserved- un fuerte aplauso!

NiftMint x a16z

Seattle startup Niftmint, founded in 2021 by Jonathan G. Blanco, a FounderFamilia member, has been accepted into Andreessen Horowitz's Talent x Opportunity (TxO) accelerator program for the fall 2023 batch!

Niftmint offers APIs that enable brands to create, sell, and manage non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on their e-commerce platforms. As part of the accelerator program, Niftmint secured its first external funding of $100,000 from a16z TxO, supplementing its previous non-dilutive grants totaling $200,000.

Felicidades Jonathan and the Niftmint team- we can’t wait to see where this opportunity takes you!

Entidad in PledgeLA Founders Fund 2023 Cohort!

PledgeLA and Grid110 have announced the selection of 19 companies for the PledgeLA Founders Fund 2023 cohort, after reviewing nearly a thousand applications from Black and Latinx entrepreneurs in Los Angeles County. The 2023 cohort boasts diversity in founder representation, with a focus on industries like Health & Wellness, Technology, CPG, Media & Entertainment, and Real Estate.

Entidad, a technology service provider that works with mission-driven organizations such as nonprofits and social enterprises to scale the impact of their work, is one of those 19 startups. Entidad is led by our very own Jesus Torres, a valued FounderFamilia member! Over the next three months, Entidad and the other participating founders will receive intensive support, co-working opportunities, and access to follow-on capital, along with a non-dilutive $25,000 cash stipend.

What a beautiful thing it is to be a part of such a mission- a celebrar Jesus!

🎖Major Milestones

Canela Media x Storybook Partnership

Canela Media, a woman-led tech company founded by FounderFamilia member Isabel Rafferty Zavala, announced an exciting new partnership with Storybook, an app designed to provide bedtime stories and tools for parents to assist their children's bedtime routines, incorporating touch, meditation, and positive affirmations. Storybook is led by Francisco Cornejo, another FounderFamilia founder and a finalist in the 2021 Pitch Competition.

As part of this collaboration, Canela Media's streaming service, Canela Kids, will leverage Storybook to feature a series of educational and soothing vignettes aiming to strengthen the parent-child bond and enhance the quality of children's sleep.

Please support Canela and Storybook by downloading the Canela Kids ( App Store & Google Play) and Storybook (App Store & Google Play) apps.

Bravo Isabel and Francisco- your familia is looking forward to the next surprise Canela Media and Storybook have in store!

Nixtla releases TimeGPT

Another VCFPitch Competition ‘22 success story for finalist Nixtla, a startup that builds forecasting and time series software for data scientists and developers, and its founders and FounderFamilia members, Max Mergenthaler and Azul Garza.

Nixtla has just introduced TimeGPT, a powerful pre-trained model designed for time series data. TimeGPT is significant because it addresses the fundamental importance of time series data across various sectors like finance, healthcare, and meteorology. Nixtla aims to create a versatile, universal model for forecasting and anomaly detection, bridging gaps in the field of time series analysis.

Azul and Max, your familia is rooting for you and wishing you the very best of luck!

📅Programming

🎟Upcoming Events

RSVP for all Hispanic Heritage Month 2023 Celebraciónes below!

To view all of the events, check out our HHM’23 webpage

The Underdog Founder by Edrizio de la Cruz Book Chat

Join us for a book chat on September 19th to celebrate the release of The Underdog Founder, with author Edrizio de la Cruz.

About the book:

Success in Silicon Valley has become the new American dream. However, for Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs without vital resources, turning this dream into reality is a long shot.

Underdog Founder shares Edrizio De La Cruz’s improbable odyssey from selling guavas in a Dominican barrio to co-founding his startup, Arcus, in Silicon Valley. Arcus was recognized by Forbes as one of the most successful startups of 2021 and was later sold to Mastercard. This no-nonsense playbook is for the entrepreneurial dark horse, a memoir and business narrative that presents seven key principles to rise above racism, poverty, imposter syndrome, and every imaginable and unimaginable startup obstacle.

• 📅 Date: Tuesday September 19th

• ​​⏰ Time: 1:30pm PT/4:30pm ET

• ​🖥 Location: Virtual

RSVP here!

📣 Spread the Word

3rd Annual Pitch Competition

Deadline: September 24th, 2023

We are bringing some of the best VCs in the industry to judge the final round of pitches of top Latino startups. We will select 8 finalists before the final round of the pitch competition on October 12th.

Requirements to enter:

• Minimum of one Latine founder

• The company’s founder stock must be >33% owned by Latine founders

• Maximum $2.5M in total capital raised to date; and

• The company must be incorporated in the U.S.

👩🏾‍💻Who’s Hiring?

Let us know if you or any other startup you know is in need of filling a position and we’ll post it here in this section of the newsletter.

To be featured here, fill out the form below!

💁‍♀️💁‍♂️Founder Community Spotlight

Shofeur Launches their App!

Shofeur’s marketplace is revolutionizing the professional chauffeur industry, by implementing modern and simple-to-use software throughout. Shofeur provides enterprise software to family-owned party bus/limo companies ("operators"), which enables them to list their vehicles in the Shofeur marketplace. Additionally, Shofeur provides prospective customers a modern, app-based marketplace for a safe, simple and transparent reservation process.

Feel free to check out the app here!

Amela Community & Newsletter

Anais Cisneros of VCFamilia launched the Amela newsletter! Amela is a community of women founders that seeks to reverse misconceptions about women founders and highlight the differentiated opportunities that women founders bring to the table.

For all of our fluent Spanish speakers, subscribe to Amela’s newsletter here!

“La newsletter semanal de Amela es un lugar para aprender sobre startups, estar al tanto de las noticias de tech en Latinoamérica y el mundo, y descubrir increíbles oportunidades. Si te gusta, suscríbete y compártela.”

FounderFamilia is a grassroots community for founders, so please let us know if you’d like to be featured. We are stronger together, and we want to amplify your wins- click below to be featured in our next newsletter!

🔊Call to Action: Referrals

Do you know someone who would be a perfect fit for our community? Send them this link and have them apply to our community!

See you next week investors!