In November 2022, the company B Balloon Latam, after a capital raising of $ 1,627 million, added Sandro Solari, the brothers Melanie Kaufmann and Lionel Kaufmann, and the Izquierdo family (Marchigüe investments) as investors. “I am sure that this is the way to reduce the essential gaps in the well-being of the people who inhabit the territories,” says Sandro Solari.
“I met Sebastián at 3xi, he seemed to me to be a person full of life and with a sense of purpose, a businessman who was open to dialogue and committed to rural entrepreneurship. Seeing their work on the ground, we agree that we are living in a historical moment of great division and mistrust that is mainly affecting the most remote and abandoned communities in our country,"
This is what Sandro Solari, a businessman, says, who since November 2022 has been a partner at Balloon Latam and a member of the board of directors. It joined company B after a capital raising of $ 1,627 million, a round in which the brothers Melanie and Lionel Kaufmann and members of the Izquierdo family also participated. What captivated you? This is the story.
The wrong email
The first time that Sebastián Salinas (35), a commercial engineer at the UAI, worked on a rural issue was in 2010. It happened at the Piedra Azul High School in Puerto Montt in an Endeavor entrepreneurship program.
Four years later he received an email by mistake, it was for a professor to whom he was an assistant, who had the same name. Beyond the anecdote, thanks to a mistake he traveled to Galvarino, to the Crafts with Meaning program of the Mustakis Foundation.
In the instance he applied something he had learned in classes, the Canvas business model, founded by the Swiss Alex Osterwalder, which is based on the creation of innovative methods through four areas: customers, offer, infrastructure and viability economical.
Salinas wrote to the Swiss on LinkedIn, telling him that his method had a social adaptation that was not being used. He thought he would never respond, but he replied: “Your story is incredible, using the model and how you adapted it. Why don't you tell it on my blog?
The story that Salinas later wrote was read by people from all over the world. Several contacted him. And one of them, an Englishman whose mother had an orphanage in Kenya, was key: he invited him to express his experience there and help those who leave the orphanage to enhance their tools to find work. Salinas traveled to Kenya for a month, living in the city of Nakuru.
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“It changed my life,” he confesses. And he thought: “I would be willing to pay to live an experience of this type, why don't I sell these types of experiences to train social leaders through the development of projects in a community?”
Thus he created Balloon International, a program - a subsidiary of EmpreDiem, another B company that he had set up a few years before - to work on rural projects. With Balloon, people would pay to work in a community, and a percentage of those resources would be invested in the best projects.
The "no" of 14 funds
“No, no, no,” they were told many times. Balloon's departure was not easy. From the outset, 14 Chilean funds denied capital to Salinas. They considered the initiative nascent, while others questioned the way the money was being spent. But the entrepreneur did not give up. With the little support he got, in 2012 he set up a pilot in Huilo Huilo. The following year he tried in Lonquimay, Malalcahuello, where a Spaniard, a Colombian and two Chileans came: they worked for six weeks on 60 local projects. Each one paid between US$ 2 thousand and US$ 3 thousand. In 2014 he received his first Corfo fund.
Three years later he knocked on the door of the FIS Ameris fund. “They told us, 'you don't fit the fund, but we can send your deck to our investors,'” he recalls. It was there when they met Marchigüe, a fund linked to the Izquierdo family, from where they were advised to give Balloon its own life, separate it from EmpreDiem and establish itself as an independent company. After the move, they would invest $ 380 million for the company's 10%. And they did it.
The $1,627 million for the 12% and the lab
With annual growth of 30% and new projects in mind, the founder of the social impact company structured a new round of capital. Unlike the first investment - where they valued the company using how much money was saved to the State as a reference -, this time they used a more traditional method based on assets, growth and expenses.
At the end of last year, in November, $ raised $1,627 million for the company's 12%, with investors such as Sandro Solari, Qupalco (a fund linked to Lionel and Melanie Kauffman) and a new investment from Marchigüe. $ 1,200 million were for company shares and the rest corresponds to debt taken with the FIS Ameris fund. The board of directors is thus made up of Solari, Melanie Kaufmann, in addition to Alejandro Horman, José Tomás Edwards (representing Marchigüe), Eugenio García - who was creative director of “No” - and Soledad Ferrer, former director of América Solidaria.
With the capital from its recent round, one of the main projects to be financed is the Balloon Lab, a company builder led by Cristóbal Escalona and which already has three projects underway: a rural development fund that seeks to lend money (between $ 1 million and $ 10 million) to rural entrepreneurs at a rate of UF + 0.3%, which had a bad debt rate of 4%. This was deployed by the Avina Foundation and the Conciencia y Vida foundation. They are currently raising a second fund of $ 1,000 million.
The second project is dedicated to nano forests. “We have 1,800 local projects in Araucanía, many of them related to land, so what we are doing is entering the carbon credit industry by adding all these entrepreneurs with their land,” says Salinas.
The third initiative is called Cleo and prepares risk management in natural disasters to which rural communities are exposed. This involves research documents, threats to which they are exposed and social preparation against them.
The dream, Salinas confesses, is to become something similar to the Grameen Bank, created by the Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the father of microcredit. They also have as references the NGO Brac, based in Bangladesh.
Installed in Cunco
Chile is a rural country, where 263 of the 346 communes are rural, representing 83% of the territory. Salinas reinforces this fact during the conversation, and reiterates the importance of working with communities. For this reason, and so that it is not just a discourse, for the last seven years he has been traveling to the Araucanía Region every month. And that is why this year he decided to live in the commune of Cunco. He is a director of 3xi and says he has a deep relationship with the region. They work in almost all of the 32 communes and also in the province of Arauco, where their mechanism for generating trust has been palín, a Mapuche sport that they have practiced for five years.
He has met countless rural entrepreneurs, says Salinas, “who may not be NotCo, Algramo or Karün (he is a good friend of Moller and Kimber), but they are people that we have to make visible.” This year they held a contest called Invisible Innovators, where more than two thousand projects participated, among them, an entrepreneur whose field was full of ash when the Calbuco volcano erupted. Faced with this limitation, he created volcanic stone bricks and today he builds barbecue areas with this material.
It was all of these stories, in addition to the work of Salinas and his team, that captivated his recent investors. Above all, its work with the most remote and abandoned communities, as noted by Sandro Solari, who concludes: “It is urgent to support them so that they are the protagonists of their own development. Balloon accompanies them by installing entrepreneurial skills and generating a shared vision of territorial development through effective participation. I am sure that this is the way to reduce the essential gaps in the well-being of the people who inhabit the territories. “I feel proud and committed to this purpose.”
