(184) Where Investors Are Looking to Invest In '25 | Laura Maydon, Founder and Partner, Ascendo Venture Capital
Welcome back Moneda Moves familia. We are rounding out the first season of Moneda Moves in 2025 this week, but it’s clear that this year in many ways things are not as usual businesses for our communities.
Tension in the US has been high. While new headlines are released consecutively, organizations are standing up for our communities which contribute so much to the cultural fabric of the U.S. and the economy. We are not backing and we are not giving up.
Feel free to add more links to resources in the comments section on Substack and consider donating your time and or funds to organizations committed to protecting our rights.
Finding investment opportunities is a huge part of scaling small businesses into multimillion-dollar companies and Latino founders are more likely to seek external funding to scale their companies. In order to secure funding and scale their business, they need to know how to pitch themselves to investors that will take their businesses to the next level. That’s exactly why this week’s guest is an investing powerhouse with decades of experience growing small businesses and generating millions of dollars in revenue.
Laura Maydon is the founder of Ascendo, a venture capital firm unlocking trillions of dollars of untapped opportunities nationwide that are currently overlooked. Ascendo invests in early-stage companies led by groundbreaking underrepresented founders who are using disruptive technologies that address the needs of growing demographic segments and that empower women, with a preference for Fintech, Edtech, Future of Work, Healthtech, and Enterprise Software.
Before founding Ascendo, Laura founded Endeavor Miami in 2013, the first US affiliate of the global entrepreneurial organization, pioneering Miami’s hub. During that time, Laura built a portfolio of more than 20 companies generating over $250 million in revenues, several with substantial exits. Prior to Endeavor, she held leadership positions at Visa and Panamco. Laura has strong Fintech, M&A, and PE backgrounds.
Laura brings some pretty incredible statistics that remind us just how powerful our cohort truly is. She says that the US Latino economy is leading in growth and that it represents 3.6 trillion GDP. Which would be equivalent to the 5th largest global economy if it were its own country. There is so much economic power in the Latino community - that includes both their spending power and their entrepreneurial growth. And this week, Laura is teaching us how to harness that power.
In this week’s episode, we’re learning all that we can from Laura’s experience as a founder and investor who helped companies generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. We’ll be diving into the entrepreneurial side of things including the specific challenges and opportunities that founders face in 2025, as well as emerging trends across sectors, and the rise of cross-border Latino businesses. Latino-owned businesses are seeing a remarkable amount of growth in the last few years and so we’ll dive into how that will impact the global economy and what our audience can do to capitalize on that growth.
This week, we talked about:
What kind of companies, and founders, investors are looking for in 2025
Why Laura says that cultural competence gives Latino founders a competitive edge
What Latinos can do to funnel our spending power back into their communities
How founders can leverage their diversity as a strategic advantage
You can listen to the episode here.
No te lo quieres perder.
Con poder,
Lyanne
Thank you for joining us! Until next time, catch us here on Moneda Moves.