Brazilian VC Base Partners Closes Over $135 Million For Second Latin America-Focused Growth Fund

São Paulo-headquartered Base Partners filed paperwork with the SEC indicating that it’s finished raising a little under $135.4 million for its second growth-stage venture capital fund.

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The filing states that 43 limited partners backed the new fund, which is significantly larger than its first. According to Crunchbase data and media reports from August 2017, Base Growth I topped out at a comparatively small $75 million, which it has presumably deployed.

Crunchbase data lists only a handful of deals for Base Partners, including participation in rounds raised by India-based esports venture Mobile Premier League’s Series A round, cloud security company Netskope’s Series F round, and a Series E round raised by software containerization giant Docker. This being said, the firm’s website lists several other portfolio companies, including the likes of U.S. payments giant Stripe, video-conferencing service Zoom (which recently went public), and Chinese social media giant ByteDance, among others.

The firm has two general partners, according to the filing. Fernando Spnola is the firm’s managing general partner. Before diving into venture capital, he worked on the public equities side at firms like Skopos and Núcleo Capital. Arthur Mizne is the firm’s co-founding general partner and is also a finance industry veteran. He was previously a portfolio manager at Synthesis Asset Management and founder of M Square, an investment firm catering to a “select group of Brazilian families and institutions,” according to that firm’s website. M Square’s site says the firm is a “partner” of Base Partners, but did not explain the context or structure of that relationship.

The new fund comes amid a period of excitement in Brazil’s tech and VC scene. According to recently-compiled LAVCA data reported on by Mary Ann Azevedo for Crunchbase News, Brazilian companies raised $1.97 billion in VC 2018.

According to Crunchbase data, 2019 is on track to at least match VC dollar volume highs set by Brazilian startups. In July, Nubank—another company listed on the portfolio page of Base Partners’s website—raised $400 million in its Series F round, which valued the payments company at $10 billion, post-money. Other supergiant rounds1 raised by Brazilian startups this year include fitness experience startup Gympass’s $300 million funding round, consumer lending company Creditas’s $231 million Series D, and the $150 million Series E deal inked by leading local logistics firm Loggi.

To deploy its new fund in the best deals, Base Partners will need to compete with other seekers of outsized returns in Latin America. Just last week, Kaszek Ventures closed $600 million across two new funds. Last year, Monashees received $150 million for its eighth flagship venture capital fund. But perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is SoftBank and its subsidiary investment arm, the Vision Fund. SoftBank and its related entities led the aforementioned rounds raised by Gympass, Creditas, and Loggi. In March, the Japanese telecoms giant announced its intent to invest $5 billion in Latin American tech ventures through a dedicated pool of capital it calls the SoftBank Innovation Fund.

In April, Mary Ann Azevedo explained that the new SoftBank fund dedicated to the region was a sort of inflection point. For that report, LAVCA’s venture capital director, Julie Ruvolo, told Crunchbase News that “Latin America’s moment has arrived.” We’ll have to see how Base Partners—and its deep-pocketed competitors—capitalizes on the zeitgeist.

Photo: iStock