Pre‑Everything Conviction: Latitud Principle #1

LatAm has great builders out there – but not all of them make it. Not because they lack ambition or talent. Because they’re deemed too raw, too early, too unknown.

We believe startup stories shouldn’t end like that. We know it truly begins before the first profit. Before the first product. Before the first check.

Even before the first thought.

It begins pre-everything.

At Latitud, this is our first and foremost conviction: backing founders and startups pre-everything gives us not only access to outsized risk/return profiles.

Even more importantly, it gives bold people and ideas a solid, necessary foundation to create with more clarity and speed.

The why of pre-founders

Being a pre-everything fund means seeing, sourcing, and picking when the deciding factor is a person’s true obsession, ambitious resilience, and commitment to drive that something home (whatever it is, wherever it goes).

Origins are varied. They could be an exited entrepreneur. A seasoned operator who left their mark, from big techs to fast-growing startups. A hacker who lived and breathed bootstrapping personal projects.

The common theme is their desire to start something. At this stage, this could be anything – considering we’re talking about startups. But they might not even have an idea yet, less so a fully formed thesis.

We call these people pre-founders. The common theme is their desire to start something.

They’re not on day 0, executing on first answers.
They’re even before the popular “power-point stage.”

They’re in the blank document stage.
They’re on day -1, excited about the questions.

They might not even have an idea yet, less so a fully formed thesis. Their current routine is piecing together a puzzle when half the pieces are missing.

It looks a lot like:

• Having an unsettling feeling that something big is missing in the world, and not being able to stop thinking about it.
• Testing problem and solution statements by talking to very, very potential customers.
• Leveraging AI to build early, duct-taped, borderline embarrassing backends and frontends. It’s a hypothesis-tester, not even a product yet.
• Planning to or already quitting their job not after raising – but to make raising inevitable.

The unfortunate reality is that many great ideas — ones that could change industries, create jobs, and drive massive impact — never get the chance to succeed. Most VCs only want to chat once you have it all figured out.

But these chaotic early days are the actual make-or-break moment, when bets that define companies are made. This is where we need to be because:

• Bad news: the wrong problem, a bad solution, or an unscalable business model can kill a company way too soon.
  
• Good news: when we combine outstanding pre-founders with top playbooks and connections, the pieces end up fitting. With strong fundamentals, it almost feels like they entered a cheat code for growth + margin.

We’re truly excited about that “pre-everything” stage. It’s more common for us to say “too late for us” than “too early for us.”

The why of pre-seed

As pre-founders turn into founders and go out to raise their first check, we see two possible fundraising paths:

1. The Pre-Seed Path.
2. The Out-of-the-Gate Seed Path.

There is no one-size-fits-all here: each founder needs to consider aspects like previous experience, risk/return profile, and the startup’s business model or thesis (building in infrastructure, your MVP could cost more than $500k).

But in our experience…

The Pre-Seed Path tends to be advantageous for most.

Through it, you're raising to build and validate something. You're willing to separate your fundraising into two cycles, potentially diluting a bit more (not always), to increase alignment with investors.

Larger or multi-stage funds may demand high velocity and growth in the short term. Instead, pre-seed investors are solely focused on the honest advice and warm intros that’ll give you the necessary signals to raise the best next round possible.

That’s our stance at Latitud. Excluding some cases, we advise portfolio founders to:

• Raise a pre-seed round within $250-750k from investors with larger risk appetite and expertise in early days challenges and playbooks – angels, accelerators, micro and pre-seed funds (like us!). Dilution is usually 10% or less.
• Use that capital to execute on their zero-to-one. They assemble the founding team, build an MVP, iterate, and validate key hypotheses before going out to…
• Raise a “large seed” round, within $2.5-5M. These are raised from more institutional seed funds, with dilution staying around 20%.
• Execute towards product-market fit. Hopefully, with no real need for additional funding.

The how: what pre-everything conviction looks like

The journey of a founder is a lonely one – especially when you're just starting out. When everybody around you is moving at lightning speed thanks to AI, it's even easier to feel like you've already lost the battle.

We know because we’ve seen stories of pre-founders and pre-seed rounds play out time and time again. Hundreds of early-stage conversations led us to a deep understanding of the opportunity born from LatAm founders, and patterns to seize it. We’ve since supported thousands of founders and invested in dozens of them.

That compounding experience made it inevitable not only for us to believe – but also to build systems to make that conviction more scalable. Here’s our most recent iteration on how to help founders navigate their pre-everything with conviction:

1. For the pre-founder phase, we designed The Latitud Residency Fellowship.

Our residency is a path from first idea to first product with speed. We select pre-founders with no company or fundraising efforts – just an urgent drive to explore ideas to solve a pressing, massive problem.

With a 1% acceptance rate, our program combines a small, take-the-leap check with a few intensive weeks of learning and building. Lessons come from potential customers and the playbooks of the top founders, operators, and investors across both LatAm and San Francisco. (Read more about how our latest visit to SF went, and why we think this bridge is a must for top founders from LatAm.)

In these two months, resident fellows go from pre-founders to super early founders, from day -1 to 0. They reach thesis clarity and commitment, and are ready to transform demo into MVP.

That’s when founders should consider raising their first institutional round. They already validated founder-market fit, market opportunity, and an initial product hypothesis through pure hustle. Now, they need to compromise just enough dilution and raise just enough capital to test their product’s value and customer acquisition channel as quickly as possible.

2. That’s when our fund comes in. Latitud’s Fund II is aimed at the super early founder stage.

We’re comfortable leading your pre-seed round, investing alongside and even before angels. We invest in entrepreneurs building AI and software-first businesses aiming for high scalability in LatAm, the US, or beyond. Although sector agnostic, we have a soft spot for fintech, vertical SaaS, healthtech, marketplaces, e-commerce enables, and proptech.

Think of our ideation program but on steroids: more capital, longer support, and even more tailored intros. All of our tested playbooks so you can go from zero to one with your MVP, plus set yourself up to raise the best seed round possible down the line. Some of the companies invested in by Latitud include Hyperplane (exited to Nubank), BHub, Pomelo, Tapi, Finkargo, and Stark Bank.

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Conclusion

If there’s one thing we’ve learned backing LatAm’s boldest, it’s this: the earlier you bet on signals of greatness, the further it can go. Behind every iconic company, there’s someone who chose to believe in it before the world did. And so, we’ve built our entire strategy around this conviction.

As always: we recommend you do your own research, including hearing other founders, on every potential investor – us included.

We hope this article was a good starting point. ;)

Latitud Principles is a series about our core fundamentals as a pre-seed venture capital fund. Here, we dive deep into why and how we back the earliest stages of LatAm founders and tech conquering the world.

Stay tuned for Latitud Principle #2 and beyond.

About Latitud

Latin America spans the greatest range of latitude on Earth — from the deserts of northern Mexico to the glaciers of Patagonia. No other region covers so much vertical ground, crossing climates, cultures, and time zones.

But to us, latitude is more than geography. It’s a metaphor for ambition.

Latitud is the ecosystem compass for Latin America, backing world-class talent before anyone else sees them. As the first-check partner for LatAm founders building good shit for the region and beyond, our high-risk, high-conviction checks have become the most trusted signal for global, top-tier VCs betting on LatAm.

We back those who dream aggressively and act decisively, solving deep, complex problems that transcend borders, industries, and languages. From pre-founder to pre-scale, we support the region’s boldest entrepreneurs as they chart both their starting point and their north – their latitud and longitud.