👊🏽 Special Edition: Ganas and I invested in Leadsales!
This is a special edition of Lolita's Newsletter, a bi-weekly newsletter of curated actionable insights and resources for underestimated founders, funders, and friends.
Roby Peñacastro, David Villa (Leadsales), and me
Hi all! I’m so excited to share with you that Ganas Ventures and I joined the Leadsales family, and so can you!
🏃🏽♀️💨 Catch up. This March, we launched Ganas Ventures. Since then, we invested in Latitud’s seed round co-led by a16z/NFX, Around’s seed round led by Leap Global Partners, Shappi’s seed round led by Sixers Innovation Lab, and did another investment which we'll be announcing soon. We’ve also raised +$4M out of our $10M target from unicorn founders, and LP and VC thought leaders, and Ganas and I were featured on the Nasdaq Tower for our leadership in equity within the startup-VC ecosystem! Now, we’re excited to announce our investment in Leadsales!
Ganas Ventures and I have invested in Leadsales, alongside pre-seed round lead investor Ulu Ventures and participating investors Cross Ocean Ventures and angels with US and LATAM commerce expertise like Theo Hamaoui, AngelHub, and TheBoardPeru.
🎉 And congrats to the Leadsales team who was just selected to participate in the Plug and Play x Meta Future of Messaging global accelerator!
🦄👊🏽 Leadsales investment TL;DR. There’s a lot to love about Leadsales. They are…
visionary founders with market-startup-fit in SMB ecommerce
tapping into a growing $41.4B conversational commerce market
at $1M in ARR and projecting to be profitable in Q2’2023
backed by commerce VCs & advisors like Elias Torres, Co-founder at Drift (unicorn)
💰 Founders, apply for investment here. 👊🏽 LPs, apply to invest in Ganas here.
Leadsales. Leadsales is building the future of conversational commerce for SMBs globally. They’re starting by servicing Latin American SMBs and offering them a platform that allows them to centralize their WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram sales and communication.
Team. Co-founders include Roby Peñacastro, Leadsales CEO, and David Villa, Leadsales COO. Roby is a serial entrepreneur that worked at Google, focusing on SMB commerce & growth; and David previously founded Mienvío, a VC-backed Mexican commerce startup, and held numerous operations roles before that. Cesar Ramos, CTO at Leadsales, is a seasoned software developer with experience working with social platforms. Julio Gómez, Head of Growth at Leadsales, is a former founder and has a computer science background. Diana Luján is Head of Sales, Ximena Suarez is Financial Manager, Perla Meta is Product Manager, Frida Estrada leads Collections, and Alejandro Hernandez is Head of Customer Success.
Traction. The Leadsales team has bootstrapped until now. They have achieved $1M in ARR and are projecting to be profitable by April of 2023. They have over 900 SMB customers across 20 countries in Latin America and an average MoM growth of 15%.
Market. The global conversational commerce market is projected to reach $41.4B by 2030 at a CAGR of 23.6%.
Catalyzing the future of conversational commerce. SMBs are restructuring themselves to rely on online conversational platforms (like WhatsApp) as their primary channel for acquiring and servicing their clients. Leadsales is building the platform that will be the dominant operating system for this entire new industry - and will help businesses manage all of their interactions with consumers ranging from CRM, to order fulfillment, even to payment.
Community-driven. Leadsales is all about the community and has an active WhatsApp channel where all its customers can support each other and provide Leadsales with product feedback.
Roadmap. The mid-term goal is to develop a Leadsales app ecosystem, continue to expand in Latin America, and reach 10K customers. Long-term, there will be a focus on ML & NLP and expanding to Africa and South East Asia. It’s all about building the future of conversational commerce.
😇🚀 You can also join the Leadsales family. Join the Leadsales family as an early user and by becoming a Ganas LP.
✨ Lolita Taub, GP at Ganas Ventures | twitter | luma
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Disclaimer: Ganas Ventures is a 506c fund that allows us to publicly solicit for our raise. All are welcome to apply to become an LP; however commitments into Ganas Ventures will only be accepted from accredited investors.