Endeavor has spent nearly 30 years finding founders in markets that global venture capital overlooks and says it has backed more unicorns than any other non-profit. Managing director Constanza Castro Feijóo talks to The Fintech Times about the Multiplier Effect, and why the organisation has decided to stop being a secret.
In 2013, Endeavor took 80 founders from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa to Silicon Valley. The centrepiece was a fireside chat with a well-known venture capitalist. Asked what the founders in the room could do to win his firm’s backing, he told them there was nothing they could do – if their companies ever grew large enough, they would relocate to California, and only then might he be interested.
Marcos Galperín, the founder of MercadoLibre, stood up and walked out without saying anything.
Endeavor co-founder and chief executive Linda Rottenberg, who was sitting beside him and retold the story at the organisation’s gala in New York last December, has built its argument around the proposition that the venture capitalist had it backwards. “Talent lives everywhere. New ideas can grow anywhere. The future begins Elsewhere,” she told the room.
Elsewhere is the word Endeavor uses for the places the map leaves out: markets that global venture capital overlooks, where founders are nonetheless solving expensive problems at scale. It is a description of geography and an argument about where value is going to come from, and after nearly three decades of making it fairly quietly, Endeavor has started saying it much louder.
What Endeavor actually is
Founded in 1997, Endeavor is a non-profit that finds high-growth founders in overlooked markets, puts them into a global network of peers and mentors, and co-invests in them through its own fund. It operates in more than 50 countries with around 600 staff on the ground, and its network now runs to more than 3,100+ entrepreneurs who between them generate around $100billion in revenue.
Constanza Castro Feijóo, who runs Endeavor’s London global hub, explains what the network is for. “We are entrepreneur-first,” she says. “That’s one of our core values, and it means we are there for whatever the entrepreneur needs.”
Endeavor organises its support around three pillars: access to capital, access to markets and access to talent. But Castro Feijóo describes how it works in practice more simply. It connects a founder with someone who has already walked the path they are about to walk. “Endeavor’s role is to support a founder who’s building a globally consequential company to go faster,” she says, “and to avoid lots of mistakes that, without that advice, they would be having.”
Endeavor Catalyst, the rules-based fund it launched in 2012 to help close the funding gap in those markets, has made more than 400 investments, over 84 of them in Europe. It backs only Endeavor entrepreneurs, takes up to 10 per cent of qualifying rounds, and participates in the overwhelming majority of them. Endeavor says 91 per cent of its investments sit in countries whose potential is overlooked.
The organisation supports over 88 unicorns across 26 countries. Fourteen of them were the first unicorn their country had produced.
The Multiplier Effect
The idea the whole model rests on has a name, and Endeavor has trademarked it.
“This is the process whereby a single founder can jumpstart and sustain an ecosystem by multiplying its impact,” Castro Feijóo says.
MercadoLibre is the case she knows best, having worked alongside Galperín at the company. To make e-commerce function in Latin America, it had to build the things that were missing underneath it: payments, in the form of Mercado Pago; logistics; and consumer credit through Mercado Crédito.
What happened next is the pattern Endeavor points to. MercadoLibre’s former chief financial officer went on to co-found Kaszek, now among the largest venture firms in Latin America and a backer of much of the region’s startup base. The fintech Pomelo spun out of Mercado Pago. Former employees started companies of their own, and the founders invested in the next cohort directly.
Endeavor says many of Latin America’s roughly 50 unicorns trace back to earlier Endeavor Multipliers.
It maps these chains company by company: mentorship given, investments made, businesses founded by former employees, spinouts. “This is the Multiplier Effect in action,” Castro Feijóo says.
It also explains an unusual feature of the organisation’s governance. Endeavor is increasingly run by the founders it selected. Verónica Pascual, founder of ASTI Mobile Robotics, chairs Endeavor Spain. In Argentina, the chair is Martín Migoya, co-founder and chief executive of NYSE-listed Globant, with Galperín as vice chairman. Around a third of Catalyst’s limited partners are Endeavor entrepreneurs.
Why fintech keeps coming up
Financial technology is over-represented in the network, and Castro Feijóo’s explanation is structural.
“In the markets we operate, we lack a lot of the financial products and services that for you maybe are the norm here – access to credit, the ability to save in another currency, to move money,” she says. “That’s something that for us is a luxury.
“These founders are not improving financial services. These founders are creating the infrastructure and the solutions from scratch.”
Moniepoint, the Nigerian business banking platform, is among the network’s unicorns. Cashea has rebuilt credit and trust for eight million Venezuelans in the wake of hyperinflation. Coins.ph issues stablecoins so the Filipino diaspora can send money home faster and more cheaply. LemFi was founded by Ridwan Olalere out of frustration at how hard it was to send money out of Nigeria, and scaled from London.
Because the underlying problems repeat across markets, so do the companies. Castro Feijóo calls this expanding from elsewhere to elsewhere, and it is her core piece of advice to any founder leaving a home market.
Tyme is the example she reaches for first. The digital bank has South African roots; Endeavor introduced its founders to Nubank‘s David Vélez at its New York gala, and Vélez went on to lead a $150million investment into Tyme’s Series D in late 2024, taking the group to unicorn status. Tyme has since pushed further into Southeast Asia.
EBANX followed a comparable path out of Brazil. “They were enabling global merchants to accept local payment methods, like boletos or local cards, from Brazilians who lacked international credit cards,” she says. “They recognised that consumers in Latin America, Africa, Asia all face exactly the same friction.”
dLocal did the same from Uruguay and is now, in her words, “expanding and rocking it in Africa today, and the rest of the world, because it’s the same single problem.”
Her instruction to founders follows from it. “Don’t treat our own local market’s missing infrastructure as a disadvantage,” Castro Feijóo says. “Treat it as a global blueprint. Study very well the market that looks similar to yours, and go there.”
The founders who struggle with that, she says, are often the ones who trained in London or Palo Alto and learned to build for systems that already work. “The broken systems that we have in the markets we operate – see them as an opportunity. That’s what I would like to see.”
Getting in is deliberately hard
Endeavor selects founders rather than companies, through a multi-stage process ending at an International Selection Panel: a three-day event where mentors from across industries and geographies interview candidates and must reach a unanimous decision.
The process starts long before that. Endeavor’s staff on the ground scout candidates locally, but founders also self-refer, or arrive through co-investors, mentors and other entrepreneurs in the network. Each one goes through a first and then a second opinion review. Castro Feijóo describes those reviews as a form of mentorship in themselves, whatever the outcome – a Malaysian biotech founder going through the process is being assessed by one of Endeavor’s mentors, and is also, in effect, being advised by her
Last year the organisation screened more than 10,000 companies and selected 83, taking around 1 per cent of those reviewed into the network.
Panellists weigh three things: the business, the human and the timing. “We look for the most ambitious founders, but also those that are transparent, those who have open minds, that are coachable, that are courageous,” Castro Feijóo says. “The fact that a founder is vulnerable, or humble, or open enough and coachable to receive this feedback and rapidly iterate – that is critical.”
The mentorship that follows is narrower than the word usually suggests. “Our mentorships are not something that lasts for one, two, three weeks, months,” she says. “It’s a one-hour session with a very clear scope for that meeting, a very clear problem.”
The mentors are largely the network’s own. Revolut co-founder and chief technology officer Vlad Yatsenko was selected as an Endeavor entrepreneur earlier this year and now mentors other founders in the network. He is also one of the people Castro Feijóo cites when she talks about recognition going to the wrong places.
Requests to interview Revolut and Checkout.com‘s founders are constant, she says; the mentoring itself is invisible. “On a bi-weekly basis, I’m connecting him with five founders from our network who have a very particular problem on something,” she says.
Sherry Coutu, founder of Interactive Investor and the ScaleUp Institute, sits on Catalyst’s panel and runs second-opinion reviews on candidates. Checkout.com founder Guillaume Pousaz sits on Endeavor’s global board.
Done being a best-kept secret
For most of its history, Endeavor has kept a low public profile. Castro Feijóo calls it “the best world-kept secret”.
That is changing. At the New York gala in December, Endeavor launched the first print edition of *Elsewhere*, a magazine devoted to founders in unexpected places, and Rottenberg used the same evening to set out Vision 2035, a plan to double the organisation’s footprint to 100 markets.
The reason for the shift, in Castro Feijóo’s telling, is that the low profile has started costing its founders something. Even substantial Endeavor companies arrive in the UK largely unrecognised. Tyme’s co-founder and chief executive Coen Jonker was in London during UK FinTech Week; interest in speaking to him was limited.
“I wouldn’t have thought how unknown they were here in the UK,” she says. “They are really banking the unbankable people.”
Attention, she thinks, concentrates on a small and familiar group. “I’m surprised about why we’re talking always about the same five founders,” she says. “What I want is the world to know the stories of those who are not that known.”
She puts the underlying problem more directly: founders from frontier and emerging markets are, in her perception, still looked at with scepticism from the UK. She wants Endeavor to work as a corrective. “What I’m hoping here in the UK is that through Endeavor we can give that kind of badge of honour and confidence – for investors here, for other founders to partner with these companies,” she says. “We are the organisation with the boots on the ground in these countries.”
Why London
Endeavor opened its London global hub less than two years ago, and Castro Feijóo is careful about the wording. “That’s the difference between a global hub and a local office,” she says. The job is not to build a UK portfolio, but to plug the rest of Endeavor’s network into Britain when its founders arrive.
They arrive steadily. “The last month only, 13 companies came asking for support because they’re launching operations here, because they’re hiring people here,” she says. “They come to hire people here. They come to access the UK’s capital network.”
It makes her a dissenter from the prevailing gloom about British fintech falling behind. “For me, I have completely the counter-narrative,” she says.
She acknowledges the complaints. “For our top, top, top founders, the tax policy hasn’t been the most well received, and some of these founders are having to get creative,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean they’re removing their operations, or they stop hiring here. We see London still growing.”
More of those founders are currently arriving from the Middle East and North Africa than from Latin America, she says, though a growing number of Latin American companies are registering here.
What she wants from the UK, then, is less capital than credibility. On the evidence of who keeps arriving, the founders have already made their decision.
“They still see London as their launchpad to scale.”
The post ‘The Future Is Elsewhere’: Endeavor’s Constanza Castro Feijóo on Fintech’s Overlooked Markets appeared first on The Fintech Times.
