Monashees Opens San Francisco Office to Bridge LatAm Startups and AI Gold Rush

Monashees Sets Up Shop in San Francisco to Connect LatAm Startups to AI's Center of Gravity

Monashees, the São Paulo-based venture capital firm that practically invented startup investing in Brazil, has opened an office in San Francisco. The move, completed in September 2025, is a deliberate step to keep its portfolio companies — and Latin American founders more broadly — plugged into the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom.

The firm, which launched in 2005 when Brazil had no startup ecosystem, no limited partners and no follow-on investors, now manages a $370 million fund and invests at the pre-seed, seed and Series A stages. Partner Fabiola Quinzaños, who relocated from Mexico City to lead the Silicon Valley outpost, says the pace of AI development makes a Bay Area presence essential. “If you're not here, it's very difficult to keep pace and stay up to speed with where the AI frontier is going,” she explained in an interview. “You even have a gap with Wall Street, so imagine the gap with Latin America.”

The San Francisco office will serve as a bridge: it helps Latin American founders absorb the tools and best practices of the world's top AI companies, and it gives Monashees access to the large diaspora of Latin American AI researchers working at US universities and labs. The firm recently hired a Mexican-born Ph.D. from MIT with deep AI expertise to deepen those connections.

The firm is also deepening its ties to Big Tech. In partnership with Google, Monashees launched the Gama Fund, a co-investment vehicle that will back AI-native and deep-tech pre-seed or seed-stage startups in Brazil with up to $2 million per deal. A summit in San Francisco later this year will bring together LatAm founders building AI businesses. Meanwhile, portfolio companies like preventive-maintenance startup Tractian and music platform Music AI are already proving that LatAm-born businesses can go global, often with engineering teams in the region and commercial operations in the US.

From Brazil's First Fund to a Global Footbridge: Inside Monashees' Bet on AI

The Three Waves That Brought Monashees to San Francisco

The firm's journey mirrors the maturation of Latin America's tech ecosystem. Wave one, starting in 2005, was about planting the flag: proving that venture capital could work in Brazil and backing the first generation of domestic startups. Wave two, around 2010, saw Monashees expand across the region, leading Rappi's seed round and backing founders from Mexico to Argentina. The current third wave is what the firm calls “Global LatAm” — backing Latin American founders regardless of whether they build locally or globally. That ambition, Quinzaños says, required a permanent Silicon Valley presence.

Why AI Demands a Silicon Valley Footbridge

The core rationale is not just fundraising, but speed. AI innovation cycles are measured in weeks, not years, and the density of talent, capital and labs in the Bay Area is unmatched. Quinzaños argues that founders who build AI-native companies need exposure to the “champions league” of tech to understand what world-class execution looks like. At the same time, Monashees does not expect all founders to relocate permanently. The real arbitrage opportunity, she says, lies in “coming here, learning and bringing back the best practices” to lower-cost, high-talent teams in Latin America. The firm's hiring of a dedicated AI researcher is a structural bet that the knowledge transfer will be more scientific than anecdotal.

The Talent Equation: Revenue in Reais, Costs in Dollars

A major tension for LatAm startups expanding to the US is currency mismatch. If revenue is in Brazilian reais or Mexican pesos, a fully US-based headcount quickly becomes unsustainable — especially when competing for AI talent against labs that pay top dollar. Quinzaños is explicit that early-stage companies must avoid that trap. The emerging model, seen at Tractian and Music AI, is to base senior researchers or data scientists in the US while keeping the bulk of engineering in Brazil or Argentina. AI tools that enable smaller teams reinforce this approach.

Google Gama Fund: A Signal of Big Tech's Latin America Bets

The partnership with Google is more than a marketing exercise. It points to a deeper strategic alignment: large US technology companies see Brazil's digitally savvy population — the highest-volume market for Uber and the third-largest for ChatGPT — as a fertile testbed. The real-time payment system Pix, used by over 90% of Brazilian adults, adds a unique data layer that AI startups can exploit. For Monashees, co-investing alongside Google provides credibility and a potential path to later-stage follow-ons, while Google gains early visibility into promising AI applications in a critical emerging market.

What the Bridge Means for Founders, Investors, and Tech Giants

For Latin American founders eyeing the US:

• Model your cost structure with brutal honesty. If your revenue is in reais or pesos, keep your US footprint lean. Follow the Tractian model: hire a few senior people locally but build the main engineering team in Latin America.
• Leverage networks like Monashees' researcher hire to tap the Latin American AI diaspora. The firm's explicit goal is to connect you with researchers who may never have considered a return to the region.
• The Google Gama Fund signals that strategic co-investment is available for AI-native Brazilian startups. Fundraising may therefore be less about cold VCs and more about demonstrating traction to Big Tech's eyes.

For venture capital firms covering Latin America:

• A Silicon Valley beachhead is becoming table stakes for early-stage funds that want to claim an AI angle. Without it, your portfolio companies risk missing the knowledge transfer that founders themselves are demanding.
• Watch Monashees' target of roughly 30% of portfolio companies being LatAm-born but globally active and 20% US-born. That mix changes the competitive dynamics for seed-stage deals across the Americas.

For technology companies seeking Latin American partnerships:

• The Gama Fund model — a co-investment vehicle rather than a corporate venture arm — may be replicable. It allows a light-touch way to seed AI ecosystems without building an internal team on the ground.