Methodology & data trust
Latin American funding data is scattered: there is no single official registry, and industry reports frequently disagree with each other. Selva's answer is not to claim perfection — it is to make the collection method transparent and to validate the totals against independent industry benchmarks, continuously.
How the data is collected
- 37 sources — startup/VC news outlets across every LATAM market (WordPress APIs, RSS, HTML, headless browser), investor portfolio pages, and curated directories.
- 41,625 articles parsed with rule-based extraction (EN/PT/ES) for round type, amount and participants — amounts are taken from headlines only, never from unrelated numbers in body text.
- LLM back-fill re-reads all articles per company to recover rounds the rules missed; a second adversarial pass audits and purges false positives.
- 5,181 funding rounds, each linked to the article it was extracted from, so every round amount is traceable to its source.
Verification against industry benchmarks
We compare our per-year disclosed totals against LAVCA (approx.) annual VC investment figures, and we publish the comparison rather than describe it. Our venture-like total runs above the benchmark in most years — we count growth and late-stage rounds a VC-only tally leaves out — and below it where we have not reached a year's smaller deals. Both directions are visible in the table, per year, so the claim is checkable instead of asserted.
| Year | Selva, all round types | of which venture-like | Industry benchmark | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | $616M | $423M | $500M | 85% |
| 2017 | $399M | $399M | $1.1B | 36% |
| 2018 | $4.3B | $2.9B | $2.0B | 145% |
| 2019 | $8.3B | $7.4B | $4.9B | 151% |
| 2020 | $7.9B | $6.4B | $4.8B | 133% |
| 2021 | $28.4B | $19.2B | $15.9B | 121% |
| 2022 | $12.4B | $9.2B | $7.8B | 118% |
| 2023 | $6.1B | $4.0B | $4.0B | 99% |
| 2024 | $11.1B | $7.2B | $4.5B | 161% |
| 2025 | $26.9B | $19.9B | $5.0B | 398% |
Benchmark: LAVCA (approx.). Coverage compares the venture-like column, since that is what the benchmark measures; the first column also carries debt facilities, growth rounds, M&A and IPO raises, which the benchmark excludes by definition. We watch both: a year that jumps far outside its neighbours' range means either contamination (a mis-parsed amount) or a coverage hole, and both trigger review.
What the numbers mean (and don't)
- Amounts are disclosed figures converted to approximate USD at long-run average exchange rates — treat them as accurate to the round, not to the dollar. Undisclosed rounds appear without an amount rather than with an estimate.
- Valuations and revenue are the least certain data here: they are extracted from press coverage, not filings, and each one is labelled with where it came from. We do not cross-check them against regulatory filings yet.
- Company self-reported corrections go through domain-verified review (employees of the company only).
- Collection runs continuously, but these pages are a static export: they change when a new build is published, not the moment an article appears. This build is from 2026-10-29 — the date in the footer of every page.