Santiago, Chile, has been the center of attention lately for its increasingly popular entrepreneurship scene. The city is home to a closely-watched experiment that is attempting to build an entrepreneurship hub from nothing: Startup Chile, a ‘start-up for start-ups’. A seed accelerator that provides equity-free investment to qualified startups, Startup Chile was created by local policymakers to bring the best minds in entrepreneurship to the country, and revitalize the economy with their help. Coupled with the fastest incorporation rates in the world, it seemed like the Chilean capital was set up for success to encourage business creation and add thousands of jobs as a result.
Endeavor Insight conducted research to evaluate the state of Santiago’s tech ecosystem, and to understand how technology entrepreneurs are connected in the city now, five years after the first class of Startup Chile companies graduated. Here is what the study found:
- Santiago has a sizable tech ecosystem: Endeavor Insight found over 160 tech companies that were connected to each other in the city, and this number has grown rapidly over the years. Serial entrepreneurship is quite common among local entrepreneurs.
- While Chile struggles with unemployment, the technology companies (in this study only) created over 2,000 jobs. Because these jobs are mostly attributed to young firms, the economic impact of the ecosystem is likely to increase further over the next few years.
- The network of Santiago tech entrepreneurs is no doubt reaching significant size, but the number of significant success cases within the ecosystem is not very large, and while inspiration among tech founders is common, other meaningful connections, such as mentoring and angel investments, are rare.
To learn more about Endeavor Insight’s research about the Santiago entrepreneurship ecosystem, please visit santiagotechmap.com.
Contributed by Lili Torok.
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