LAT VC announced today the appointment of Laura Moreno Lucas as Partner.
Laura was previously a Managing Director of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and is founder of Pandocap, a strategic financial advisory services firm. LAT VC is a $100M purpose-led venture fund that invests in the early-stage U.S Latino-led and owned businesses with large and high-growth opportunities such as Recruitology, Yaydoo, Flow, and Omnitron.
“We are pleased to have Laura join our team given her experience and her passion for Latina(o) entrepreneurs,” says Sol Trujillo, Founding Partner of LAT VC.
Laura to grow the investor ecosystem at LAT VC
Laura is a two-time founder who had an exit with Ladada, a fashion subscription company. Having worked with many entrepreneurs at 500 Startups and immigrated from Mexico when she was seven years old, she understands the difficulties faced by Latino business owners.
In her role at LAT VC, she will be leading investor and external relations, focusing on expanding the founder and investor ecosystem that recognizes the market shift driven by the massive $2.7 trillion U.S. Latino cohort, which is generating 1 in every 4 new entrepreneurs.
Laura to bridge investment gaps while LAT VC
Despite the high creation rate of Latino-owned businesses, they received less than 1% of $487bn invested across a sample of the top 500 largest VC deals in 2020, according to Bain & Company, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative, and Latino Donor Collaborative.
Additionally, Crunchbase recently revealed that VC investment in Latino-founded startups in the US has stalled at around two percent at the early stages, per their dataset.
“To remedy the disparity, we will be bold with sizable capital, global expertise, and resources to not only accelerate positive outcomes but also help founders retain wealth,” says Lucas.
Alongside Sol Trujillo, Gary Acosta, Kennie Blanco, and new partner Oscar Munoz, Laura and the team are on a mission to change the face of venture capital and entrepreneurship.
