Corporates in Peru look to startup founders for help

Yesterday fans of Universitario, a historic football team in Peru, became fans of Joinnus, a once-small startup launched in Lima. The fans used Joinnus’s ticketing platform to purchase 30,000 seats in 10 hours. This beat the previous record, for a Peru national team game, of 72 hours.

Joinnus is one example of a startup that a large corporate player in Peru has invested behind. In 2017, Grupo RPP, a large media company, backed Joinnus’s tireless founders Carolina Botto and Domingo Seminario with a financing round.

In another example, BCP, the largest bank in Peru, announced it had teamed up with the startup Culqi to help improve the bank’s payments platform.  Culqi is led by Amparo Nalvarte and Nicolas Di Pace, who launched the startup after graduating from Universidad del Pacifico.

These founders are teaching some of the biggest corporations in Peru how to innovate and scale. Technological disruption has come to traditional sectors like media, banking, and retail in Latin America. Even the most dominant incumbent players are turning to startups. Learning from startup founders is one way, and perhaps the best way, for them to stay ahead. 

This is exciting for Peru’s startup community. Even with the odds stacked up against startups, founders do have a chance to make it big – 30,000 adoring fans big.