Expansion: At the economic level, both in Mexico and internationally, a slowdown is expected. Will this affect the industry?
Denis Iris: Yes, note that something very interesting is that last year, despite all these war and economic problems, many international venture capital funds raised record capital, but now all those investments are being much more cautious.
What we saw in 2020 and 2021 is no longer going to be lived, all this issue of investing in projects is going to be much more reserved, but I would hope that it will not last more than 12 months, moreover, hoping that starting in 2024, it will return to have that investment.
Expansion: In addition to the current situation, what is needed for the entrepreneurial ecosystem to grow?
Denis Iris: We are a multi-sector fund, that is, we invest in technological and scientific innovation projects as well as in the traditional one, and that allows us to see the whole panorama in Mexico, where there is talent, but capital is lacking. Leave the amount of funds in Mexico and the United States, if we compare the size of the funds, the average funds here in Mexico are 20 million dollars, and in the United States they are 100 million dollars, so something very important It would be that the insurers, and especially the Afores, will allocate a higher percentage to this industry, because there are very good venture capital funds that are precisely having the same thing as the entrepreneurs: all the claw to be fighting in the promotion of these projects .
A fund of the successful ones here in Mexico, which will be around 250 million dollars, which must be a maximum of 5, how many projects can it really promote, and we are talking about 5.5 million companies in Mexico, since there are a number of entrepreneurs very large that they cannot start due to lack of this capitalization, there are also many scientific researchers in public universities, where the projects stay, because they also do not know how to capitalize, many flee Mexico because they cannot find the resource and we have this leak of talent.
So I think that one of the keys is to push the Afores to increase their participation in this category, and that would detonate the entire ecosystem.