Peru’s startup financing rebounded in 2025, but most of the money was debt. PECAP, the country’s seed and venture capital association, is working on the harder problem: getting more investors to take the first risk.
The Lima accelerator pairs early money with an engineering university and a roomful of founders. Its most useful work can be surprisingly ordinary: changing a pricing model, testing a prototype, or getting a pitch to make sense.
Hapi is a Peruvian-founded, YC-backed fintech that lets people across Latin America invest in U.S. stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrencies from their phones - with zero commissions, no minimums and an account you can open in about five minutes. Built to knock down the high fees and paperwork that historically kept Latin Americans out of the U.S. markets, Hapi has grown from 10,000 users in 2022 to a reported 500,000-plus clients across roughly 20 countries.