Last week I took the short flight from Panama City, Panama, to Bogotá, Colombia, to attend Colombia Tech Week. Colombia Tech Week is a full week of events held around the country, with headlining events not only in Bogotá and Medellín but also in growing tech hubs like Cali and Barranquilla. Many events are self-organized, while others are part of ticketed gatherings like Colombia Tech Fest, which took place in Parque del Chicó in one of Bogotá’s most popular business districts.
Parque del Chicó gave the event a colorful, almost carnival atmosphere: tents set up by sponsors and vendors, food stalls, and outdoor stages with bean bags scattered across the lawn. It was a beautiful day, and aside from a long line to get in, a genuinely fun event to attend. I also put together a short video that gives you a taste of some of the talks I attended.
If there was one line that summed up the week, it came from Ivan Montoya of NuMundo Ventures: “The time for Colombian founders is now.” There’s a lot of interesting technology work happening in Colombia right now, and growing investment from US, global, and LatAm VC firms. All of that also adds up to a tech talent pool that’s increasingly worth recruiting from, whether that means hiring locally or building a distributed team that includes Colombian engineers.
Stronger Infrastructure, Not Just Stronger Talent
Latin America has already benefited from strong internet infrastructure, which, combined with green energy capacity that can supply data centers, is making the region an increasingly attractive location for both nearshore talent and internet infrastructure investment.
Major cities in Latin America already have direct connectivity to Silicon Valley, Europe, and Asia through cables backed by major tech companies. Last week, Google announced three more cables joining that network. The Alisios subsea cable connects the Dominican Republic with Panama and Chile. The Canoa cable connects the Dominican Republic with Bermuda, which links onward to Europe and North America via the existing Nuvem and Sol cables. And since the Dominican Republic becomes a hub for these new cables, a third cable called OlaLuz will connect directly from the Dominican Republic to Florida.
Beyond adding new connectivity to the Caribbean and Latin America, Google’s announcement also highlights how these cables add redundant capacity to existing routes, an important factor for reliability. For companies evaluating the region as a base for nearshore engineering teams, this kind of infrastructure investment is a meaningful signal: the connectivity backbone supporting LatAm tech work keeps getting more robust.
Colombia Early Stage 100
In the lead-up to Colombia Tech Week, NuMundo Ventures announced its annual Colombia Early Stage 100 list, compiling 100 top startups with roots in Colombia. Managing Partner Ivan Montoya announced the list just before moderating a panel discussion at Colombia Tech Fest, which I attended.
As Montoya put it in the announcement, “it is clear the Colombian ecosystem is maturing, with more and more ‘venture ready’ founders tackling big problems with big markets.”
With 100 companies on the list, there’s something for everyone interested in the LatAm tech scene. As with much of venture capital these days, over 50% of the companies represented are in fintech and AI, though other industries are well represented too. You can explore the full list here.
What Colombia Tech Week’s Panels Revealed About Scaling Tech Companies
I attended two panels focused on startup growth. Their conversations made one thing clear: scaling a company is not just a matter of sales. The founders talked about hiring decisions, product architecture, and new-market entry in ways that are directly relevant to any organization building or expanding an engineering team, whether in Colombia or elsewhere in Latin America.
- “Conquistando el Mundo: Made in Colombia” featured Andrés Ospina of Robot.com (robotics for humanoid labor, delivery, and interactive advertising), Jorge Tello of Simetrik (AI-powered financial control infrastructure for enterprises), Aron D’Mello of Dapta.ai (a conversational AI voice and text agent platform for SMBs), and Felipe Anzola Hinestroza of Telepatia.ai (AI medical intelligence for Latin American markets).
- “Colombia Early Stage 100: Learn from Colombia’s Top Startups” featured Gabriela Tafur of Idilio.tv (Latin microdramas for Spanish and Portuguese speakers), Christian Knudsen of Littio (a digital bank offering USD and EUR financial services across Latin America), Nicolás Rojas of Dapta, and Cristian Villamizar of Duppla (alternative home financing to help more families buy a home), moderated by Ivan Montoya.
Building Flexible Products and Roadmaps
Simetrik’s growth lead described making the product currency, language, and format agnostic early on, a constraint forced by a single client operating across Africa and Asia, which became the foundation for reusable implementation templates and, more recently, an internal AI agent built to speed up onboarding new markets. Robot.com described a similar split between a core product that gets deeply embedded in a client’s operations, and therefore becomes hard to displace, and a standing research function whose only job is surfacing new use cases before competitors find them. Both stories illustrate the value of investing in product flexibility before it’s strictly necessary.
Making Practical Hires
In the “Made in Colombia” discussion, several panelists said résumé pedigree predicts performance far worse than “scrappiness,” Jorge’s term for resourcefulness paired with a bias toward execution. Telepatía actively screens out the “strategist who knows the theory” unless it comes with a track record of shipping. Duppla’s Cristian Villamizar made a related point in the Early Stage 100 panel: the best operators he knows have a well-developed muscle for both hiring and firing, even though letting people go is hard, and he warned against settling for the talent already on the team instead of continuing to search for better talent. Littio’s Christian Knudsen took it further, arguing the people worth admiring are the ones who deliberately bring in others who are better than them at almost everything, because being the smartest person in the room means you already got the room wrong.
Latin American Talent
The thread tying both panels together is an explicit ambition to build, not just staff, world-class technology from Latin America. Dapta founder Nico Rojas talked about starting his career running a software outsourcing shop with thousands of developers building other companies’ products, and seeing firsthand that “we, in Latin America and specifically Colombia, have the talent to build global software companies that compete with the best companies from Silicon Valley, Europe, Germany, India, anywhere in the world.” Rojas was direct in his belief that there’s no reason Colombian talent can’t build a company at the level of Anthropic, given how much Colombian talent already works inside companies like it.
Andrés from Robot.com made a similar argument about setting ambitious goals: teams that compete globally do so because leadership over-communicates a foundational belief to the team that they can play at that level. For engineering leaders building teams meant to compete against much larger, better-funded rivals, setting a strong vision early is key.
Gabriela Tafur of Idilio talked about how venture capitalists increasingly see Latin American companies as having growth potential beyond their local markets: “It’s about thinking bigger when you build a company. I do think we’re at the right moment to build global companies out of Latin America that aren’t necessarily targeting only a Latin American audience.”
Even with the growth of technical talent evident from the quality of startups the region produces, that doesn’t mean great talent is easy to find. Felipe from Telepatía talked about recruiting continuously, not just when a specific role opens up. When they find people with the right “winner mentality,” combined with the humility and skills to do hands-on work, they bring them in and make space for them.
Expansion Within Latin America
Another point raised as both a strength and a challenge of working from Latin America is that it isn’t one homogenous market. While there are shared cultural threads across the region, each country has its own culture, accents, and, notably, its own legal framework.
Brazil was described as “essentially its own continent,” given the size of its market and the fact that it’s Portuguese-speaking rather than Spanish-speaking. For Brazil especially, it’s important to have a local team staffed with people who understand the local market.
This holds true across Spanish-speaking countries too, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree. Felipe talked about the challenges a prior company faced expanding from Colombia into Chile and Peru. Chile in particular was difficult to enter because it’s a financially sophisticated market, with strong competition and very high customer expectations.
In short, the shared advice across both panels was the same: hire local managers in each country you expand into.
Finding Your Local Partner
I was only able to see a small portion of Colombia Tech Week, but the country-wide scope of these events shows the breadth of technical talent and entrepreneurship coming out of Colombia. As these founders’ stories show, there’s a lot of AI engineering and innovation happening in the country.
And as the panelists themselves advised: if you’re entering a new market, including building a tech team in Latin America, you need a local partner. Not every country in the region is the same, and success requires specialized advice and attention tailored to your specific situation.
Our team at AgilityFeat can be that local partner for your LatAm expansion. Whether you need short-term innovation work through our AI-driven Builder Pods, flexible nearshore staffing agreements, or a fully built-out tech delivery center through our Build-Operate-Transfer model, you don’t have to go it alone. And if the talent pool coming out of Colombia Tech Week has you thinking about a dedicated presence in the country, we can build and operate a Colombia-based BOT team for you, staffed with the kind of local engineering talent these founders described. With our experts as your local delivery partner, you can focus on the technical and business innovation, while your new LatAm delivery team handles the rest.
Further Reading:
- Why Cali, Colombia Should Be on Your Nearshoring Radar
- Colombia’s Top Cities for Tech Talent & AI Development: Bogotá, Medellín, Cali & Barranquilla
- Building Investable AI Startups: The Value of Nearshore Development Partners
- Your Nearshore Team, Our LATAM Ecosystem
- Building Enterprise Growth and Innovation: A 13-Year Nearshore Staffing Success Story
- Product Modernization Through Nearshore Software Development and Staffing: An AgilityFeat Success Story
- What Is Staff Augmentation and Why Does It Work So Well in Latin America?
