Chingona Ventures’ Four-Year Anniversary 🎉

Written by Rocio Meza and Dilara Bereket

Our team is in awe that it has been four years since our Founding Partner, Samara Mejia Hernandez, launched Chingona Ventures. Samara launched the fund to invest in businesses that are catering to the massive generational, technological, and demographic shifts occurring in the U.S., which will ultimately upend how consumers spend money, use products, manage their health, and engage with society. Since 2019, we have raised two funds ($5.9MM in 2019 and $52.9MM in 2022) with limited partners including PayPal Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Pivotal Ventures, Foundry Group, and the Office of the Illinois State Treasurer’s Illinois Growth and Innovation Fund, among others. We have invested in 39 portfolio companies across these sectors. This is only the beginning — read more below to learn how far we have come.

The team has grown from one General Partner, Samara, to a team of four, including Rocio Meza (Associate), Grisel Hernandez (Senior Analyst), and Lori DeLuca (CFO). Through our internship programs, we have also hosted part-time interns from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and HBCUVC. Since inception, we have reviewed over 3.7K deals, which roughly equates to 6–7 deals per day. Of these 3.7K deals, 77% come from diverse founders (Women, Latinx, African American, Asian, LGBTQ+, Veteran, Middle Eastern, and Native American). Although we don’t have diversity requirements for investments, we track pipeline diversity to ensure we take a comprehensive view of potential deals. No matter the founders’ background, we review every single deal, both through cold and warm leads.

In four years we have deployed over $10.5MM in capital, with an average check size of $500k. In Fund I, we deployed $4.5MM in capital across 27 companies, from financial wellness that inspires, informs, and empowers the Latinx community to democratizing the way we create and take professional exams. So far in Fund II, we deployed $6MM across 12 companies spanning FinTech, Health/Wellness, EdTech, and B2B software. Fintech remains our largest category — below are some of our FinTech portfolio companies:

• Boom: Boom is an Android/iOS app that enables renters to build credit with the rent payments they already make, reporting to all three credit bureaus.
• Curu: Curu is a financial solutions platform that personalizes a credit acceleration plan for consumers and matches them with financial solutions tailored to their goals.
• Earlybird: Earlybird is a financial application to simplify investing for the next generation.
• Finix: Finix is a payment processing platform for businesses.
• Kudos: Kudos is a consumer smart wallet that maximizes consumer rewards and benefits while shopping online.
• Paerpay: Paerpay is a contactless payment and ordering solution for restaurants and vendors.
• Scout: Scout is a professionally managed retail investment platform with themed investment categories targeted toward Gen-Z.
• Sigo Seguros: Sigo Seguros provides affordable insurance solutions to Latinx, immigrant, and working-class populations via a bilingual mobile platform.
• Suma: Suma is a financial wellness company that inspires, informs, and empowers the Latinx community.
• Topl: Topl is a blockchain solution to prove and monetize sustainable and ethical practices.

While we don’t exclusively invest in underrepresented minorities, we are proud to report that out of all of our CEOs across Fund I and II, 48% are women, 66% are people of color, and 30% are immigrants. All of these stats beat the national averages within venture capital.

To provide a high-level overview of the deals we’ve seen to date, we’d like to share a summary of our deal data collected over the past couple of years:

By systematically documenting deals that we review, we are able to assess how valuations change over time. Pre-seed valuations for potential deals in our pipeline rose from 2021 to 2022 by 16% but rose by only 3% in the last year. While current valuations in this environment have been more conservative when compared to previous years, we have seen pre-seed valuations of industries such as Health & Wellness, Future of Work, and Female Technology steadily rise during the last two years with FoodTech having a big moment early in 2023 with a 75% increase in valuation from 2022.

When looking at seed valuations of our potential deal pipeline, there has been a decline in the aggregate and in specific industries such as Health & Wellness and Future of Work. Despite such trends, we remain bullish in these areas and lean on early product traction and validation to support our investment strategy. Our findings are consistent with AngelList reporting that over the last two or three months, early-stage deal valuations have dropped significantly, and early-stage investors have gotten more selective, focusing on startups that can meet more substantial revenue targets than were required in the past.

While pre-seed valuations have grown year over year, seed valuations have almost gone back to 2021 numbers. This may signal startups needing more time and capital before raising a Series A. Data from last quarter also confirms that rounds are taking much longer to come together. According to entrepreneur and investor Leslie Feinzaig, the average time between a seed round and a Series A stood at 798 days in Q4 of 2022 –the highest in five years. At Chingona, we take a partnership approach with our portfolio companies to help them set and meet KPIs post-investment and assist with fundraises down the line.

Other notable highlights from the past four years include:

• Samara Mejia Hernandez was featured by Venture Forward, CNBC en Español, and the Latino Corporate Directors Association during Women’s History Month.
• Samara Mejia Hernandez was honored by Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza during the organization’s Women’s History Month celebration.
• Crunchbase highlighted us as a women-led investment firm.
• We were on Beta Boom’s list of top Latinx-led funds alongside many of our friends.
• We spoke on the SheConquersCapital episode about Chingona Ventures’ thesis and everything VC-related.
• We were part of the Investor Stories 283: Why I Pass on The Full Ratchet podcast, led by Nick Moran, General Partner of New Stack Ventures.
• We were featured on The Road Untraveled: VC Perspectives with Brian Hollins’ podcast.
• We spoke at eMerge Americas in Miami, along with Elias Torres, Andrew Collins, and Bo Ren.
• We joined the Rise of the Rest Beyond Silicon Valley Summit and spoke on their panel regarding underfunded founders.
• We were panelists at TechChicago Week, organized by P33 and World Business Chicago.
• We spoke on the VITALIZE Podcast and shared more about what changed from Fund I to Fund II.
• We were interviewed by the National Association of Investment Companies and gave our perspective on fintech and the Latinx community.
• We spoke at the L’ATTITUDE conference about connecting Latinos in Tech
• Samara Mejia Hernandez has joined the Venture Forward board as a Director alongside Barry Eggers, and Courtney McCrea,
• Samara Mejia Hernandez was featured on Business Insider as one of the Top VCs in the Midwest!
• Grisel Hernandez also joined the team as our Senior Analyst! Read more about Grisel here.
• Rocio Meza joined the fund full-time as a Senior Analyst. Learn more about her background and why she joined here. She was later promoted to Associate.
• We attended the Kauffman Fellows retreat hosted in California — after many online interactions, the fellows were excited to meet in person.
• We organized and attended the Latinx Founders Collective — thank you to Silicon Valley Bank for sponsoring the event.

We are excited about what’s to come in 2023 and beyond! Our Chicago-based investment firm primarily invests in pre-seed and seed startups in FinTech, Female Technology, Health & Wellness, Future of Work, Future of Learning, and FoodTech. Check out our requirements and process here. Feel free to share our latest link for business submissions if you know of anyone who would like to join Chingona’s portfolio of extraordinary founders.