Understanding the jabuticaba factor: How QED’s Camila Vieira mastered local nuance in Latin American fintech investing

Today, we’re joined by Camila Vieira, a Partner at QED Investors focused on Latin America. Camila brings a wealth of experience to our conversation, having established herself as one of the region’s most influential fintech investors.

Camila joined QED in 2022 as the company’s first employee based in São Paulo, Brazil, where she focuses on early stage investments. As an investor and operator with experience working across different regions, she brings a well-rounded perspective to the table, connecting founders and startups to valuable resources while leveraging QED’s deep fintech expertise.

Prior to joining QED, Camila built her career at the intersection of technology and financial services. She started at Moody’s, a credit rating agency, before joining Goldman Sachs to focus on corporate credit and economic risk. Later, as part of Goldman’s investment banking division, she helped fintech, software, and e-commerce companies raise capital and navigate the transition from private to public markets.

She went on to join the global strategy and corporate development teams at Ceridian, a global software company servicing more than 160 countries. More recently, Camila spent time at Hotmart, a Brazilian tech unicorn whose platform facilitates sales of digital products, enabling creators to build, monetize, manage, and grow globally. There, she led strategy and operations, ESG, and investor relations.

Today, we’ll explore the dynamic Brazilian fintech ecosystem, discuss cross-border investment opportunities, and uncover lessons that US investors and financial professionals can apply when looking to diversify their portfolios into these high-growth regions.

Before we jump in, I just want to tell you about a new initiative we’re running at Tearsheet. 

4dFI is an exclusive group of out-of-the-box builders and investors knitting together a community to invest in the next wave of fintech startups.

We’re bringing together current and former banking executives interested in investing in and learning about emerging market fintech startups. 4dFI’s network will be able to both help new companies reach maturity faster, while startups can provide new ways of thinking to our community members.

At 4dFI Capital Partners, I’m joined by Russell Weiss, experienced product and startup builder and Josh Liggett, who has led fintech and blockchain diligence, investments, and strategic partnerships at OurCrowd.

If you are interested in learning how emerging market fintechs are changing the financial services landscape around the globe and would like to play a part in crafting this new future, signup on https://tearsheet.co/4dFI.

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Staying committed through market cycles

In some ways, when you invest in emerging markets, you have years where everybody’s excited about what you’re doing, and then some years where you are the outlier and everyone is walking away from what you’ve been focusing on.

I think from a QED standpoint, we’ve been investing a lot of time for a while, but one of the differentiations is that we’ve actually stayed and continue to be excited. I think we have more of a long-term view, and that means that for every conference that was applicable to us—both from banking, payments, cross-border, vertical SaaS plus fintech—all the themes that we’ve been excited about, we’ve been vocal about being present and really showing that we are a global firm that continues to be excited about the region.

In parallel, the world is surprising us with new stuff happening every day. From a regulatory standpoint, both Brazil, the US, and Mexico—there’s just so much that has happened in the past couple of months.

We do spend quite a bit of time with regulators and within tech associations, trying to be the voice of our portfolio as well, both as a way to improve regulation but to help our portfolio companies. We want them to know how to work alongside regulators instead of against them.

I think it has been a mix of building the awareness for the market that we are around, we’re open, we’re excited, and then also trying to keep up and in some ways influence what’s happening around us.

The value of staying in market for LPs and portfolio companies

I think we can think about this in two layers—one, the value to the portfolio companies, but then two, the value to our LPs.

From a fund perspective, if you’re only investing in LATAM when everybody’s excited about it, guess what? Your average valuation is going to be extremely high, which means you better be right. In reality, investing is a statistical game. We are building a portfolio that hopefully all of our companies perform, but we know that statistically, that’s not what happens.

Having stayed in the region for ups and downs also means that our valuations, our entry valuations, are quite different versus if you only invest at peak. So I think that’s one piece that for LPs, there’s a lot of value in there—just if you’re right about the long-term outcome, you better build the best portfolio. And building the best portfolio means just picking the right companies, not necessarily only when the market agrees that that’s a good company.

From a company standpoint, it’s really knowing the nuances, what’s possible, what’s not possible, how to move the needle to get things done. That goes from hiring the right people to knowing who to call at the regulators, knowing exactly what terms in a debt fund you can push, you can negotiate, you can get better, and mostly just knowing the nuance.

There’s a Brazilian fruit in Portuguese called jabuticaba, and that’s a term that a lot of the local funds would use. They’ll say “this is a jabuticaba risk”—it’s something that only if you know Brazil, you will get it. I think for QED, for me to be Brazilian and have the global experience but be able to really catch the jabuticaba understanding, it’s something that we take pride in and we try to bring that back to our portfolio companies as learnings.

It’s evolving. It’s an evolving thesis for sure. QED as a whole, we are a global fund. For those that don’t know, QED initially started more as North America and Latin America, but now we are very much across Africa, Asia, Europe as well. In markets where our presence is growing, we’ve learned that playbook—the more you are plugged in, the better you actually perform.

The future will tell systematically if we’re getting it right or wrong, but we feel highly convicted that this is the way to do global plus local.

Building local presence vs. partnering with local funds

You can, and we have, right? Before I joined, we had amazing years and amazing investments, including Nubank, Creditas, and others with our team being in the US.

I think what we, as a fintech specialist—our core secret sauce is that somebody at QED has done, built, or tried something within that thesis that we typically invest in. That’s what we try to do, and that can be the only secret sauce. And that’s fine. Then you partner with the local funds that know and do that.

With the local funds growing and more local funds emerging, which is healthy for everybody, that does raise the bar of what I as a specialist need to know. I think at QED, as we build our defensive moat, it becomes: okay, we’re going to do the fintech specialist, but we’re also going to add the local flavor.

For regions where the local funds aren’t as developed, only doing the fintech piece is enough because your comparison bar isn’t very high. So I think for us, it’s a mix of how convicted are we—can the local expertise really add a differentiation or is it just marketing to say we have it?

We try to keep the best setup to really optimize for portfolio, for LPs, but also for team dynamic. If you look at our global team, we’re actually not that large versus other global funds—we’re quite tiny. That’s because if you are trying to build an operator-heavy fund, you need the quality to be high. If you pitch that you’re operating and then you have very weak operators, then that team doesn’t feel great, the companies won’t appreciate that.

That feedback loop of what is it that we tell founders—we tell founders we’re going to be the best fintech advice on the board. Not necessarily marketing advice, we’re going to be the best fintech. To be the best, you do need the global and local. If you get that local through other means, I think that’s flexible.

For us, being able to intertwine insights on the spot is what we try to do. Since I joined, I’ve spent a lot of time on portfolio support, doing that extra layer of what the US-based team was doing before. And what else can I do? A lot of that was regulators, capital markets, talent structuring—things that are unique to Brazil.

Maybe I’m here to be the jabuticaba expert, and I’m totally fine with that.

Emerging themes in the Latin American fintech ecosystem

We can think about LATAM in phases.

When we initially started in LATAM, you have very little infrastructure available. You had a limited amount of talent that were willing to take the risk to leave the big banks to start fintechs. So we did see a lot of the first phase of LATAM to be very B2B focused and more banking-oriented—do more of what we know, do it better, do it with a better experience. It felt safer to do and execute with what was available.

The second phase was as B2C started to see a lot of the fintechs focusing on the shift to B2B trying to happen. You had a lot of companies built around B2B but they just weren’t as successful at getting to market or having the actual B2C infrastructure work for B2B. So you had a lot of B2B companies that kind of worked, kind of didn’t, but didn’t close—they’re fighting their way through it.

In parallel, we saw the expansion of vertical SaaS plus embedded finance, plus now stablecoin cross-border and all these new themes that we’ve been thinking about.

The way I’ve been seeing LATAM is that in that process, talent just exploded in amount. We just see the ecosystem growing way faster. Now you have some of these teams emerging. You have companies that were always going to do vertical plus embedded—AI is just empowering that all together. B2B banking companies are keeping the software phase and going straight into more of a vertical AI play structure.

You had the Central Bank of Brazil and a lot of regulatory change in Colombia and Mexico as well that took that old infrastructure to be way ahead of even the US now—with Pix, with other centralized ways of reporting as we think about fraud, as we think about account-to-account payments, cash in, cash out.

If we look at the evolution of LATAM, you went from limited talent to B2C, to a struggling mix of companies trying to really catch up to the US. And now with the right talent, with the right infrastructure, with the right regulatory environment, we’re seeing this vertical SaaS plus embedded really kick off. We’re seeing B2B kick off. We’re seeing cross-border kick off.

Both in Mexico and Brazil, there has been a lot of changes around energy and climate. There are a couple of investments that we’ve made in this thesis that we’ve been extremely excited about. Of course, with Trump and tariff conversations, both Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil are positioned in an interesting way to benefit and get hurt from all the changes.

We’ve been tracking as companies figure out what to do, as customers decide what to do—who is uniquely positioned to empower that experience.

It’s been more exciting. Now is way more exciting because three, four years ago, I would look at a vertical SaaS company, for instance, and say, “Makes total sense. No one has been able to consolidate this market. The manual work is just too cheap for you to go and build the best payroll company.” And now that’s not quite true. AI really has come to make a lot of the themes that we loved in other regions but didn’t think were possible in LATAM to now start to make sense.

I’m super excited about a bunch of themes that are getting unlocked by a mix of what I mentioned.

QED’s Latin American portfolio

In our portfolio, I can’t take credit for this because a lot of those investments were not investments I made and have been in the portfolio for quite a bit. But across credit, we have Creditas, Daki, Fasulo, Loft, Motu—a variety of companies that are really bringing financial services from everywhere to gig economy, to solar financing, to auto financing. We really do have quite a mix of fintech products in place, and the companies are performing quite well.

The other beauty of LATAM is we always have high rates and inflation is our last name. As global companies now, especially US companies, are trying to figure out how to navigate that, our fintechs were born and bred to really build around instability.

It feels good to look at where our portfolio is now. Most of those companies adapted to a tougher 2021 and 2022 market. We’ve been on high rates for quite some time now, and companies continue to perform. Companies that are credit-only are performing despite the high rates.

I think it’s an exciting time. A year ago, we were looking a lot into how true is that pitch? Will delinquency rise with higher rates? How will the market change with Trump? And now we feel in a much better place.

Hopefully, as the market opens for IPOs and so on, I think our portfolio will have a couple of LATAM companies come for air, which hopefully will help us but also the local ecosystem to show that we can have winners and we will continue to have winners.

Lessons from Nubank’s success story

I’m still a very strong believer in the Nubank story and what they’re building. But if you take a more pragmatic approach to Nubank—how often do VCs say there’s so many companies doing that already, that’s such a crowded market?

Think about credit and banking in Brazil. There’s so many banks. There’s so many options. The average Brazilian has four to five credit cards. Why do you need the sixth?

I do think we can try to attribute it to whether or not they were Brazilian or they weren’t part of the ecosystem. But I think the one trend that you still have in Nubank today is just that unwillingness to accept the status quo. Part of that is talent, and part of that is really knowing what else it could be and having that vision clear.

What we say at QED is that unwillingness to be okay with the status quo comes with a lot of testing. You may not have the right answer, so just making sure that you know how to test and you know how to accept when a test has worked or has not worked—that, to me, is the biggest learning from Nubank.

Building a culture around being okay with failure but not accepting anything but success. Most companies die because they stay on the thesis for too long and they’re not willing to see that maybe this is not the way. They focus more on—I sometimes say founders fall in love with the how instead of the what they’re building. It’s like, okay, we have a problem, let’s go solve that problem, let’s figure it out, what is it that actually has product-market fit?

But a lot of founders fall in love with the initial how, and then if that how is wrong, they didn’t test around it.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Mexico is very different than Brazil. As Nubank entered Mexico, most companies when they enter a new country say, “I’ve done this well in my core market, I’m going to copy and paste.”

The more we talk to Nubank—and we know them quite well—you see that they don’t have that approach. They have the testing approach. Mexicans just bank differently. They buy differently. They interact with money differently. If I go and say here is a credit card with plain credit and don’t think about how to unlock offline—because a lot of people do offline purchasing in Mexico—how do I do cash in and cash out?

As you play out where this testing comes in, the experience for new markets can look very differently.

I don’t know that I attribute it to them not being Brazilians. I do think Brazilians tend to love everything that’s outside of Brazil but they criticize a lot of the stuff that’s in Brazil. But I think this key trend of successful founders is really just test, test, test, test, test.

We have a couple of portfolio companies that have been extremely successful. When we joined the board, we bring this testing approach, and you just feel that tension as they’re learning how to do it. Then when that becomes the status quo of how they operate, it’s always funny to look back and say, “Remember when you used to just do and not test?”

We have that interaction with founders quite a bit, and that’s a playbook we try to follow. A lot of that comes from Capital One. If you look at Nigel Morris and Frank Rotman, you hear them mention testing and data: What does the cohort say? I see myself seeing a lot of that, and that’s definitely a QED thing.

The impact of returning diaspora on Latin American talent

If you look at Mexico, I would say most successful founders have spent time in the US. So the easy answer is definitely yes.

In Brazil as well, I would say the what’s outside of Brazil is pretty—you see the founder of Creditas is not Brazilian, the founder of Nubank is not Brazilian. In some ways, having that aspiration and seeing that it can be done, and it can be done in your country, I think inspired a lot of Brazilians to leave the big banks—they wouldn’t go do fintech—to leave the Central Bank and start their own fintech.

We have seen that evolution in Brazil, in Mexico, and Colombia. A lot of them went to business school in the US and came back.

I do see now a maturity where before they were coming back from MBAs and going to operate in Mexico. Now they have done MBA plus operating in the US, and they’re coming back.

I do think talent, as we continue to evolve, the ecosystem only tends to get better. Because a little bit of the US experience isn’t only business school. Operating is hard, and you just learn so much from failing at it, from just really trying to figure it out. What is it that I don’t know? What is it that others have tried to do? In building team and leadership, there’s so much that comes from operating, whether it’s a success or not. Most successful founders have gone through that.

I’m excited about that second layer of just operating.

The emergence of second-time founders

Yes, and that’s always tricky for venture capital. You want founders to have enough drive to really be incentivized to stay there for 10 years, for 15 years. But at the same time, you want them to have some operating experience.

We do see this gray area where some founders have sold their initial company. It wasn’t—they made money, they bought an apartment, but they’re not set for life. Or at least their ego is not set for life. They’re still hungry. They want to deliver more to the world.

I think we’ve enjoyed working with second-time founders. Second-time founders sometimes tend to listen less, and sometimes they’re right because they’ve just done more. Sometimes that just means they’ve closed off their learnings and the insights from others.

I do think it can be a positive, it can be a negative. A lot of what we try to do is founder assessment and reference checks and talent assessment, but it’s an art. It’s not a science.

Looking ahead: Key investment themes

I’m split in two ways.

First, stablecoins, cross-border, CFO tools—everything that was super hard for LATAM to adopt in the software phase. We’re spending a lot of time around that, and that goes from CFO tools but also fraud and know-your-customer, risk underwriting, everything that now we can process data faster and better.

The second phase, I would say, is just landing the plane. We do have a lot of LATAM companies that are either becoming the consolidator of the region or are large enough or trending to be potential IPO candidates. So the second phase for us is very much landing the plane for our portfolio, and that can be IPO preparedness, M&A, really making sure that the risk and build-up of the teams are adding up to what a potential public company would need to have.

From an investment standpoint, we are focusing more on generational companies and fewer potential companies. They’re good and they’re growing, but they don’t have the potential to have a huge outcome outside of LATAM. That puts us a lot into global companies—multi-country companies where the TAM is large enough.

I do see a trend where we will continue to invest in Brazil-only companies because the TAM is very, very large, but our bar for that is higher.

That’s exciting for QED. We’ve now built enough track record cross-region to have a better filter of what works, what doesn’t work, what’s possible to get to mid-size but not huge size. We are very much looking for that huge outcome.

I think it’s a good evolution and a good time for us, but we continue to be here and make sure that we land that plane.