These were relatively small markets in terms of shipping volume and Velodyne filled the demand. Lidar was a niche market up until about five years ago, the founder explained, for the technology was mostly used by a small community of amateurs and areas such as military, surveying and mapping. “They were designing things more like a college student designing in their labs,” Bao said of Velodyne. Back at Baidu where Bao oversaw sensors and onboarded computing systems for autonomous driving, he also worked on Baidu’s investment in Velodyne five years ago. Junwei Bao, Innovusion’s co-founder and CEO, is not deterred by the industry’s existing giants. Innovusion runs core development teams out of Sunnyvale, California and Suzhou, an eastern Chinese city near Shanghai that the autonomous driving unicorn Momenta also calls home. “The company combines decades of industry know-how with an entrepreneurial drive to revolutionize the wealth management space in the country.”
“GBM is the leading broker in Mexico in terms of trading activity and broker accounts,” he said. So, despite being a decades-old company, SoftBank sees big potential in the strength of the digital platform that GBM has built out. In the midst of this shift, SoftBank was impressed by GBM’s “clear vision and playbook,” Franck said. “However, the landscape is quickly changing as, through technology, Mexicans are being provided more education around investing and more investment alternatives.”
“The investing culture in Mexico has historically been low compared to the rest of the world, even when specifically compared to other countries in Latin America, like Brazil,” he added. Juan Franck, investment lead for SoftBank Latin America Fund in Mexico, believes the retail investment space in Mexico is at an inflection point. When it comes to institutional clients, he believes there is “enormous potential” in serving both the large corporations and the SMEs “who have received limited services from banks.” “We will be targeting clients through our own platform and internal advisors, as well as growing our base of external advisors to reach as many people as possible with the best investment products and user experience.” This has resulted in less than 1% of individuals having an investment account,” Montero told TechCrunch. “The financial services industry is dominated by big banks and is inefficient, expensive and provides a poor client experience. GBM’s mission is to transform Mexico into a country of investors.”īecause Mexico is such a huge market - with a population of over 120 million and a GDP of more than $1 trillion - GBM is laser-focused on growing its presence in the country. “We are improving our already robust financial education offering,” he added, “so that Mexicans can take control of their finances. Montero said that half of its team of 450 are tech professionals, and that the company plans to also continue hiring as it focuses on growth in its B2C and B2B offerings and expanding into new verticals. The company is planning to use its new capital in part to invest “heavily” in customer acquisition. Specifically, it services 40% of the largest public corporations in Mexico and a large base of ultra high net worth individuals. Most of GBM’s clients are retail clients, but the company also caters to “most of the largest investment managers worldwide,” as well as global companies such as Netflix, Google and BlackRock.
In the first quarter of 2021, that number had grown to over 1 million - representing more than 30x growth from the beginning of 2020.įor some context, according to the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV), there were only 298,000 brokerage accounts in Mexico at the end of 2019, and that number climbed to 940,000 by the end of 2020 - with GBM holding a large share of them. Last year was a “historic” one for the company, he said, and GBM went from having 38,000 investment accounts in January 2020 to more than 650,000 by year’s end. Co-CEO Pedro de Garay Montero told TechCrunch that GBM has built an app, GBM+, that organizes and invests clients’ money through three different tools: Wealth Management, Trading and Smart Cash.