We are an early-stage venture capital fund, located in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.
We are sector agnostic but stage focused, investing primarily in Pre-Seed and Seed stage technology companies exploring their activity in Brazil.
We look for founding teams with sharp and bold visions that want to transform and impact Brazil, Latin America and the World in a responsible way.
At Iporanga we see ourselves as sponsors of innovation, investing equity capital, acting as part of the teams, being side by side with founders, providing connections and years of accumulated expertise in helping companies grow from startup to scale-up stages.
Diary of
our Journey.
2009
Our journey started a while back around the year 2009. That year we launched Iporanga as a more traditional asset management business running a Macro Fund (that we still manage).Throughout the years we saw an opportunity to operate an arbitrage in the liquid
markets and decided to hire developers to help us modeling and implementing our algorithmic trading and risk systems. At some point, we were outnumbered by over 15 developers working in the house and changing our culture and the way we saw the world for good.
Our team.
Since 2013, Leonardo Teixeira has been involved in more than 30 investments in technology companies, the most notable ones being Olist, Netshow.Me and Bxblue.
Besides Iporanga, Leonardo participates as board member for Anjos do Brasil, Insper Angels (being also a co-founder) and Caffeex Technologies LLC (being also a co-founder there).
Prior to 2013, Leonardo worked at Macquarie Group and Barclays PLC in São Paulo, London and New York as an Associate Director.
As an academic background, Leonardo holds a BA in Production Engineering from Poli – USP, an MBA in Finance from Insper, Executive Education in Venture Capital from UC Berkeley and LEAD Certification in Corporate Innovation from Stanford University
Renato spent most of his career in technology and has been in the entrepreneurial ecosystem since 2009 when he founded an Adtech startup, Ocapi, sold in 2015. After that he worked for Start-Up Brazil Program and in the last 5 years acted as Country Manager for Telefonica Open Innovation, leading investments in VCs and Wayra Brasil, doing over 30 investments in startups like Teravoz, Gupy, MOL, Pier and Monkey.
Prior to that worked at IBM and LATAM.
Renato holds a BA in Business Administration from FAAP, specializations in Global Management from IESE (Barcelona) and Venture Capital from UC Berkeley.
Natalia Berti has over 15 years of professional experience with a diverse business background, having worked across multiple industries and functions, including investment banking, asset management, real estate and the industrial sector.
Prior to working at Iporanga, Natalia was the General Manager for Latin America of C&D Technologies, a leading global technology company.
She has also worked at BHG, Brazil’s largest hotel owner and one of the leading hotel operators and RB Capital, a capital markets and asset management platform, with over R$2.7 billion under management.
Natalia holds a BA in Business Administration from Insper, a MS in Economics from Fundação Getúlio Vargas and Executive Education PLD degree from Harvard Business School.
Leo Kalim is CFO of Gorila Fintech, founding partner at Iporanga and also participates in the Investment Committee of Iporanga Ventures.
Leo Kalim has over 20 years of Emerging Markets experience, formerly trading FX and IRS at Goldman Sachs and before that he was EM portfolio manager at independent hedge funds and some of the largest Brazilian asset managers (Unibanco, HSBC, BankBoston).
Leo holds a Bachelor’s degree in economics from FEA-USP and an MBA from MIT.
Guilherme Assis is the CEO of Gorila fintech, founding partner of Iporanga and also participates in the Investment Committee of Iporanga Ventures. Before moving to a full role as CEO of Gorila fintech, Guilherme had been running the Venture Capital strategy since 2014, and investing in Brazilian tech companies since 2011.
Prior to that, between 2001 and 2009 Guilherme worked for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.
Guilherme holds a BA in Production Engineering from Poli-USP and a Masters in Mathematical Modelling from IME-USP.