The companies that invest on Startupi are: Aceleratech, ASA Capital, e.Bricks Digital, Initial Capital Investment Jacard, Kravla Partners, Mountain do Brazil, Redpoint e.ventures, Trinity Investments and several angel investors, among which the best known are Hsieh (co-founder of Baby.com.br) and Cassio Spina (founder of the organization Anjos do Brasil, which has other members participating in this investment).

With the amount raised and the new network of counselors, Startupi increased operational staff, which now includes Amanda Demetrio (journalist with experience in Globo and Folha de São Paulo) and Ricardo Lima (which accumulates experience as a consultant and owner of a web coworking space). Furthermore, in the face of the market growth of startups, the company will launch a new website with more features and services to market.

The goal aligned to the new strategy of “Startup Intelligence” is in fact going to contribute to the maturing of this market with data and analysis and promote a great event that portrays and acts as a service in this new moment of the market.

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The team was pitched to me as the “TechCrunch of Brazil,” and in fact it has attracted the backing of Roi Carthy, who covers Israeli startups for TechCrunch. (Carthy invested through his firm Initial Capital, which backs early-stage Israeli and Brazilian companies.) Other investors in the round include Redpoint eVentures, a partnership between Redpoint Ventures and BV Capital’s eVentures.

“Covering Israeli startups at TechCrunch for five and a half years, I can attest to the importance of having a leading force and voice in a startup ecosystem,” Carthy told me via email. “In Brazil, no one embodies this more than the tireless and passionate team of Startupi.”

The site was founded in 2008 by journalist Diego Remus and New York angel investor Michael Nicklas to make up for the lack of media coverage on Brazilian startups. There’s now a four-person team, including Remus, entrepreneur Bob Wollheim, tech journalist Amanda Demetrio, and former coworking space owner/multimedia consultant Ricardo Lima. (Demetrio and Lima are both recent hires, thanks to the new round.)

Wollheim said that Startupi currently sees about 100,000 unique visitors per month, and that it has plans to triple that number. The company also runs its own events like Startupi Camp and Startupi Con. (Like the rest of Startupi, those events pages are in Portuguese.)

Here’s the full list of investors:

• Redpoint e.ventures,
• Initial Capital
• Trindade Investimentos,
• Mountain do Brasil,
• e.Bricks,
• Demiurgus,
• Aceleratech,
• Kravla Partners,
• In Hsieh, co-founder of Baby.com.br,
• Cassio Spina, founder of Anjos do Brasil association, and other angels of this group.

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Check a copy of the article below, wich includes a quote from Carlos Souza, director of Veduca:

Peter Propper and Simon Croisetiere, partners of OndaLocal, were enterviewed. You can see an original copy of the publication below:

A survey conducted by the incubator Mountain do Brazil showed that from 305 Brazilian startups evaluated in 2012, only three received funds, 1% of the total.

The few startups were Veduca (portal that brings together subtitled video lessons from universities around the world), Janamesa (site and app fro food delivery) and Onda Local (advertising service for small and medium enterprises).

More than half of the startups (172) were rejected right away and 91 were instructed to review their projects. Other 42, 14% of the total, were called to a meeting.

“The investment in Brazilian startups is reduced due to features that limit the viability of the business,” said Nicolas Gautier, director of the Mountain, in Brazil for a year.

Gautier says that the entrepreneurs tend to behave more like employees and not as a company. The unpreparedness and inexperience of the company team tends to leave the investor afraid.

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The sense “The Private Equity & Venture Capital Industry”, shows that in 2009, there were approximately $ 36 billion invested in companies. Since then, it is estimated that this number has increased by at least 10% per year.

After the initial euphoria, with the Brazilian startups moving toward greater maturity, investors tend to become more demanding. To learn what types of business are more likely to receive investments this year and how an entrepreneur can do to raise that money, Época Negócios spoke to three major investors about their plans for 2013. Check out what each of them said:

Nicolas Gautier, from Mountain do Brasil:

Nicolas Gautier, director of Mountain do Brasil.

Mountain do Brazil, fund that operates primarily in the area of technology, focus their investments on internet, mobile and e-commerce companies, areas still considered hot in the Brazilian market. Last year, the fund analysed 350 projects, of which only 3 received investment. The reason?

“There are still many businesses with low quality, mainly due to lack of instruction and mentoring of business,” says Nicolas Gautier, a Swiss who moved to Brazil attracted by investment opportunities.

According to him, the funds are getting more selective, since the number of startups in Brazil did not stop growing. This year, Mountain plans to invest up to 5 companies. Gaultier gives the recipe for those who want have their company selected:

“Having a highly trained team is the main point. Is also important to have a clear business plan, expansion potential and operate in a market with low competition,” he says.

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The tactic is possible thanks to the world of “big data”-analyzes of all electronic data generated throughout the operation of a company or institution, such as audios, social networks, clicks, videos, customer behavior, swings, weather, GPS cameras, and customer service.

Bruno Mengatti on reunion with JánaMesa team: decisions in real time.

Small businesses in Brazil can already access a piece of these tools with the so called “customer intelligence” (intelligence facing the customer) due to a cheapening of some programs. The example of the beginning of this story is the start-up (start-up technology-based) JánaMesa, online service delivery meals.

Its founder, Bruno Mengatti, 24, and two more people monitor the entire operation of the site. “A very cool case was a pizza with drinks promotion we did once. We tought that consumers would love, but we found out that they preferred to buy only pizza. We saw this in the graphs and fixed it at the same time,” he recalls.

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Jánamesa is a site of online delivery that gathers 1,500 restaurants and eateries of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The goal is to expand the service this year to Porto Alegre, Brasília and Belo Horizonte, reaching all the host cities of the World Cup in 2014.

With the corporate delivery service, the company has an administrative account and each employee has their own login registered. The administration can set the rules for requests, set limits for each employee and pay everything  in a single account. This is a way to avoid that each employee have to pay the purchase with their own money and ask for refund, which creates more work for the accounting area.

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