Chingona Ventures, a three-year-old, Chicago-based enterprise outfit that invests in pre-seed startups, primarily within the Midwest and primarily based by missed people who’re centered on large markets, has closed a brand new fund with $52 million in capital commitments. Restricted companions within the new fund embody PayPal Ventures, Norwest Enterprise Companions, Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, Foundry Group, and the Workplace of the Illinois State Treasurer’s Illinois Development and Innovation Fund, amongst others.
It’s an enormous step up from the outfit’s $6 million debut fund and an indication of confidence in Samara Hernandez, an engineer who spent six years at Goldman Sachs earlier than becoming a member of the enterprise agency Math Enterprise Companions in 2015 as an investor after which placing out on her personal in 2019 with Chingona, the place she stays the agency’s sole basic accomplice.
Whereas it’s a little bit too early to evaluate the success of her portfolio, Hernandez has been lively, managing to work checks of between $100,000 and $250,000 into 27 corporations with that first fund, and investing in eight extra along with her second effort. Amongst these portfolio corporations is Career Karma, a four-year-old startup that matches workers and contractors to job coaching packages (and which raised $40 million in January) and Suma Wealth, a monetary wellness platform for the Latino group that has raised $6.6 million to this point, per Crunchbase information.
Each startups underscore Chingona’s areas of curiosity, which embody fintech startups, in addition to startups centered on well being and wellness, meals tech, and the way forward for studying.
Additionally they play to Hernandez’s strengths, together with an understanding of the huge and rising Latino market within the case of Suma Wealth. (Hernandez, who was born in Mexico and raised within the U.S., notes that certainly one of each 4 children being born at this time within the U.S. is Latino, but that Latinx corporations nonetheless appeal to lower than 1% of enterprise capital funding on this nation.)
She can also be prepared to again founders who’ve heard no from different backers, as with Ruben Harris, the cofounder of Profession Karma. Although Harris and his cofounders had handed via Y Combinator, he had a community, and he lived, on the time, in Silicon Valley, he reached out to Hernandez chilly over Twitter after numerous different conferences the place he was handed over. “They didn’t consider his technique however I believed in him so I ended up investing,” says Hernandez. (Profession Karma earlier this yr expanded on its preliminary technique, which was to assist aspiring college students and dealing professionals navigate their approach to the precise bootcamp. Harris additionally just lately moved to Miami from the Bay Space.)
Certainly, with way more capital at her disposal, Hernandez says the plan is to do extra of the identical, with barely bigger checks, starting from $250,000 to $1 million.
Chingona — a Spanish phrase for a lady who’s fearless and will get issues achieved, says Hernandez — desires to “be the primary and largest verify right into a spherical,” she says. “What I noticed with fund one is that numerous these founders actually need somebody to guide and to put in writing the largest verify and assist catalyze the spherical.”
With traders like PayPal and Perception now trying to her for a few of their deal stream, she’s more than pleased to cleared the path.
