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The 10 most innovative companies in Latin America in 2022

Latin American businesses are finding new ways to improve trade, transactions, education, and more. These companies, including dLocal, Mercado Libre, and iFood are leading the way.

The 10 most innovative companies in Latin America in 2022

BY Adam Bluestein6 minute read

Explore the full 2022 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 528 organizations whose efforts are reshaping their businesses, industries, and the broader culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact with their initiatives across 52 categories, including the most innovative media, design, and consumer goods companies.

Not surprisingly, companies from the region’s two largest economies—Brazil and Mexico—are well represented on this year’s list of Latin America’s most innovative companies. But they’re bumping up against businesses based in emerging startup hubs like Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Lima. In 2021, Latin American startups raised $14.8 billion across nearly 800 deals, according to PitchBook data, making this the fastest-growing region in the world for venture funding. There is a sudden abundance of unicorns, such as Mexican startup Kavak, an online marketplace for preowned cars, which rode the COVID-era used-car boom to a nearly $9 billion valuation and opened 40 logistics and reconditioning hubs in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Uruguay’s first unicorn, dLocal, which enables cross-border payments for merchants in emerging markets, launched a program with Amazon allowing non-domestic merchants for the first time to sell their products through Amazon’s online store in Brazil. COVID-19 also drove strong demand for delivery of food—and successful companies in that space found innovative ways to reward their partners and benefit local communities. Mexican online grocer Justo.mx saw sales growth of 1,850% last year, while also managing to shorten supply chains and cut waste by sourcing fresh produce directly from local producers. Restaurant-delivery service iFood teamed up with payments partners to offer no-fee digital bank accounts to its 236,000-plus restaurant customers across Mexico and Brazil. Logistics startups like Nuvocargo and Nowports helped exporters meet growing demand for Latin American goods, enabling paperless transactions and bringing a new degree of transparency to cross-border shipping by land or sea. Regional demand for online education is surging, with companies like Mexico City-based Crehana and São Paulo-based Gran Cursos responding to growing calls for professional development courses, and expanding accessibility through audiobooks and other platforms. Latin America remains a fertile ground for fintech innovation, from Argentinian company Mercado Libre, which started letting customers in Brazil trade cryptocurrencies through its Mercado Pago app, to Quipu Market, a micro-payments platform allowing small merchants to conduct digital transactions using virtual tokens, boosting sales and building a credit history.

1. Mercado Libre

For making e-payments easy

Founded in 2007, this Buenos Aires-based online marketplace, the “eBay of Latin America,” has become a digital payments powerhouse. The company’s Mercado Pago e-payments app can now be used just about anywhere you can use a credit card in Latin America, and its payments business now exceeds its e-commerce business. In November, the Nasdaq-listed company with a $48 billion market cap (as of early March 2022) became the first payment service provider licensed to issue prepaid debit cards in Chile. In December, it announced that users in Brazil could now buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrencies through the Mercado Pago app.

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Recognize your company's culture of innovation by applying to this year's Best Workplaces for Innovators Awards before the final deadline, April 5.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Bluestein writes for Fast Company about people and companies at the forefront of innovation in business and technology, life sciences and medicine, food, and culture. His work has also appeared in Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek, Men's Journal, and Proto More


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