Contxto – When it comes to combatting pollution or climate change, there are two types of people. On one hand are those that don’t care enough to act. Conversely, there are those who care but don’t know how to approach the challenge.
Well, Denda from Chile recently raised US$1 million from several national investors to address this issue. Leading the round were national funds SUDAMERIK and Dadneo, plus two angel investors that joined the startup’s leadership team.
Sustainable alternatives
Nowadays, those trying to be more eco-friendly and sustainable have a hard time choosing from so many alternatives. On top of that, needing to choose from different brands and explore various websites can also be time-consuming.
Denda is a sustainable product aggregator trying to fix this. To make life simpler for the environmentally conscious, users can find the most useful sustainability products according to their lifestyles. Fortunately, all of this is available over one platform.
“At Denda, we offer innovative and useful products that will allow you to improve your quality of life through savings, lower energy consumption, healthy nutrition, wellbeing and comfort,” said Denda over its LinkedIn. “All of which reduces environmental impact.”
Accelerated by Chile’s ENGIE Factory, the website is where people can seamlessly explore and find the most life-enhancing products. Whether it is something for healthy nutrition or energy efficiency, you can certainly find it over the online marketplace.
At first, its Linkedin profile appeared to be outdated since it mentioned plans to have a regional presence by 2017. However, it’s already operating in Chile and Mexico.
“It’s possible to raise capital in Chile!”
Last week, the startup closed a US$1 million round in what I imagine to be a seed-round. When it comes to the time required to raise this amount, it went faster than the Denda CEO ever expected.
“I’m very happy because last week something happened that I didn’t even believe could happen in Chile, closing an investment round in less than four months,” said CEO Felipe Parragué over a Linkedin post.
Part of Denda’s growth strategy was to also incorporate two angels investors, Dirk Van Nievelt and Arturo Parker. Moving forward, these two will join the company as co-founders.
“I believe that the key to this process, that can be a nightmare for some, was to involve committee members in Denda, making them part of what we were achieving and helping them see all of the verticals that we could take with our concept,” said Parragué.
Everything went very fast since they realized that we can really change many things in favor of people and the planet.
CEO Felipe Parragué
Today, this investment is all in Corfo’s table, including the process and the actual deposit. According to Parragué, it’s ultimately not an easy task to raise capital in Chile, particularly for eCommerce. However, he believes that when you have an amazing team and generating long-lasting positive impact, anything is possible.
Something I’d like to add here. After writing about Socialab Ventures and other startups such as Wheel The World and Algramo, there’s no doubt that Chile’s strength when it comes to startups is social entrepreneurship.
I’m amazed at the ratio of Chilean startups tackling issues such as inclusion, global warming and overall life quality.
-VC
