WIND Ventures is the strategic venture capital arm of COPEC, the leading downstream energy player in Latin America (gas stations and convenience stores). WIND Ventures’ purpose is to accelerate global startups and boost their growth in the United States and Latin America. They aim to lead the mobility, energy, and retail sectors’ transformations by opening up COPEC’s knowledge, expertise, and resources to help startups and scaleups around the world. In short, WIND Ventures offers global startups ‘unfair access’ to the Latin American growth markets.
Fund Snapshot
- Stage: Series A+
- Check Size: $2-6M
- Geography: Global, Expansion into Latin America
- Lead/Follow: Lead or Follow
- Revenue/Valuation Thresholds: Revenue generating
About the Fund
Why was the fund created?
WIND Ventures was founded in 2019. COPEC needed to transform and wanted to do it the best way that it could. Prior to WIND Ventures’ launch, COPEC spent a year designing their new growth strategy that aligned with the energy transition trends and felt strongly that an open innovation platform was critical for success. WIND Ventures directly reports to COPEC’s Chief Strategy Officer with CEO and Board support.
What domains in climate tech does WIND Ventures have the greatest expertise in?
WIND Ventures leverages COPEC’s vast knowledge, expertise and resources to accelerate growth, primarily within Latin America, for startups and scaleups across the world in the new mobility, energy and convenience sectors. The team includes long time climate tech venture capitalists but also brings a product-market fit expertise for Latin America.
What type of portfolio support does WIND Ventures provide?
WIND Venture’s value beyond capital is the WIND growth platform that opens up COPEC’s vast resources to global entrepreneurs for “unfair” access to Latin America and the United States. Specifically, startups can leverage the WIND Garage, an innovation garage located in Santiago, Chile and Bogota, Colombia. Additionally, COPEC has over 3,500 gas stations globally – most with convenience stores – and is a ‘most trusted’ brand through Chile and Latin America. Through Copec’s WIND efforts, it now has a leading EV Charging business as well as renewable energy and energy storage businesses that look for global startup partnerships for collaborations.
About Investments
What is WIND Ventures’ investment process?
When making investment decisions, WIND Ventures thinks about a few different pieces, but leans heavily into how it, and its resources, can help the Founders succeed.
To do this well, one key piece is the geography of the startup and running a product-market fit analysis to ensure the value proposition resonates in Latin American.
Beyond the typical venture diligence buckets such as team, path to profitability, etc., WIND Ventures spends time on the potential collaboration details including evaluating the value to customers, willingness to pay and the likely adoption rates.
What would make WIND Ventures consider deviating from their typical criteria?
WIND Ventures has a perfected playbook in offering global founders a distinctive and real value proposition – access to Latin America. As such, they can be flexible in their typical investment criteria as long as it does not hinder its playbook.
About The Author
Daniel currently works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a Product Manager. Outside of his day job, he is a Principal at C3, Tech Scout at For ClimateTech, and Venture Scout at Prithvi. He also works with various climate incubators/accelerators (Cleantech Open, Techstars, and Joules Accelerator) and runs The Impact and Innovate Climate – both are newsletters covering startups in the climate space.