20
May
Brazil as VC hotspot?
Chris Morrison over at VentureBeat has just posted an article about Brazil being a new venture capital hotspot. I can’t say I’m surprised. Last year we did a project for a major F500 firm about key software growth markets, and Brazil was one of the hottest.
There are some amazing stats about the Brazilian software market:
- $13 billion market
- 15% year over year growth
- Tech spending expected to double by 2010
- 6000 new PhDs in Computer Science per year
- $400 million of investment in 2007
Obviously something is going on in the Brazilian market and, to add fuel to the fire, Brazil has just announced that they would use their sovereign wealth fund to make venture investments. Not that the tech business really needs any incentive, as it’s been calculated that losses due to lack of IT investments in agribusiness, textiles, health, electrical appliances and auto making cost the country around $21 billion/year…
One of the interesting things about Brazil has been that the government has been very open about encouraging the use of Open Source throughout Brazil’s computing infrastructure. They also have a target of having $2 billion in tech exports by 2009, something which may come from Brazil’s leadership in several green tech areas, notably fuel biomass production.
Given all this, and their recent discovery of huge new oil fields, Brazil may yet become the first global Latin American powerhouse since the 19th century.