Our Origins
Canastra is, first and foremost, a reference to where we come from. Our founding team, Pedro, Larissa, and Matheus, hails from Minas Gerais, the Brazilian state home to Serra da Canastra National Park, a place of raw beauty, powerful waters, and deep roots in Brazilian identity.
They met in São Paulo, Latin America’s largest venture ecosystem, and founded Canastra Ventures in 2024 to invest in Brazilian founders.
Serra da Canastra National Park, Minas Gerais, Brazil
We created Canastra with a simple conviction
Brazilian founders are exceptional. We guide founders building AI-native startups from day zero, wherever they are, giving them an unfair advantage through our network across Brazil and Silicon Valley.
Our name reflects where we come from. But our vision is to help Brazilian founders turn their boldest ambitions into reality.
Our job is simple to say and hard to do
01.
We back technical and ambitious founders building AI-native startups. We believe exceptional AI startups are built by people willing to tackle difficult problems, challenge the status quo, and pursue what others may consider impossible.
02.
We want to be there from the beginning, signing the first check. We believe in backing founders when few others do, listening closely, challenging their thinking, and building alongside them from day zero.
03.
Our role goes far beyond writing a check. With decades of experience building and backing companies, we help founders access the right people, knowledge, talent, and customers.
Companies where AI isn’t a feature bolted onto an old model, but the reason the business can exist at all. We’re sector-agnostic, as long as the market is large and Brazil is on the map.
The shift from AI-as-a-tool to AI-as-a-workforce. We back domain-specialized agents that pair deep sector knowledge with the creative automation of real work, from monitoring to sales to logistics, cutting cost while scaling faster than a headcount ever could.
Health, education, financial services: slow, regulated, and sitting on enormous budgets. We back teams that use AI to deliver the work end to end, automating the repetitive, keeping humans on the critical judgment calls, and navigating regulation. The client buys an outcome, not another piece of software.
Reliable AI is hard: data, models, compliance, security, and continuous operation all have to hold together. We back the backbone: infrastructure that, once wired into a client’s workflow, becomes the thing they can’t rip out. High dependency, high retention, by design.
Here’s what we look for in each stage.
| Criteria | AI Residency | Pre-Seed |
|---|---|---|
| Annual Revenue (ARR) | — | $0 (early revenue) – $100k |
| Traction | — | Clear path to a Seed round within 18-24 months |
| Round Size | — | $200k – $2M |
| Pre-Money Valuation | — | $2M – $10M |
| Ideal Cap Table | Ideally 100% founder-owned | Ideally 100% founders-owned |
| Product | AI-native product idea, or open to exploring a new one | Validated AI-native MVP with a path to PMF within 18–24 months |
| Team | 1–4 co-founders, at least one tech founder (tech solo founders are welcome) | 2–4 co-founders, at least one tech founder |
| GTM | — | Defined GTM strategy, with pilots already launched and validated |
If your napkin looks like the right-hand column, you're ready to pitch us for investment. If it looks like the left, the residency is where we meet.
We back founders before the world sees them, creating value long before they emerge from stealth, and beyond. If you're building something AI-native with global ambition, we'd like to see it early.
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