In Mexico, as elsewhere, venture capital fundraising fell off a cliff in 2022.
Bucking the trend, that’s the year that the Coppel family, which runs one of Mexico’s most popular department store chains, launched its own VC firm, 1200VC, a $150 million fund that is backing impact technology across the Americas and Europe.
“The funding landscape in Latin America is not retreating, it is evolving,” Esteban Coppel Gómez told ImpactAlpha on behalf of the family. “The pullback after the recent capital bubble has created a healthier environment that rewards discipline, operational depth, and long-term alignment.”
The venture fund grew out of the Coppels’ family office, Talipot. As other investors have retreated, a handful of wealthy Mexican families are instead stepping up their allocations to impact investments in an effort to build a more vibrant ecosystem for startups and entrepreneurs tackling the country’s social challenges. In Mexico, as elsewhere in Latin America, family businesses make up the backbone of the economy, accounting for three-quarters of all businesses valued above $1 billion.
“While some international capital has stepped back, this moment favors patient, informed investors—particularly regional families and global family offices willing to engage with the real economy rather than financial cycles,” said Lupe Rodriguez, who runs Talipot’s investments.
The Servitje family, which controls the snacks and bakery giant Grupo Bimbo, is preparing to make its first impact investments to complement its grantmaking in Mexico’s many underserved communities. The Sánchez Navarro family, once one of the biggest landowners in the country, co-founded CO_Capital in 2018 to target ventures addressing poverty and climate change. The fund is part of CO_Plataforma, an impact investing platform working to build Mexico’s impact ecosystem.
“The biggest obstacle in the financial sector is how we approach growth and profit maximization,” CO_’s Tania Rodriguez Riestra said at the Global Impact Investing Network’s impact forum in 2024. “We need to shift to thinking about what it looks like to operate within planetary boundaries.”
Ensemble, a Mexico City collaborative, is bringing together family foundations and corporate foundations to build partnerships around supporting the city’s social sector. Latimpacto has also worked to convene the region’s family investors and foundations around impact investing. Other families work at smaller, more regional scales. In Monterrey, for example, several industrial families invest locally within Nuevo León.
Maria Hollan helped her family’s office, Timke Ventures, expand beyond philanthropy with two direct impact investments. “Then I realized you can have impact as a complete portfolio,” she told ImpactAlpha in a video interview.
Diego Serebrisky of Mexico City-based venture firm Dalus Capital says the fundraising falloff has finally bottomed out. In the first half of 2025, Mexico for the first time surpassed Brazil as the largest market for VC fundraising in Latin America. He says the downturn has produced a more seasoned generation of founders and fund managers.
“Family offices have slow-downed [their commitments], because probably they consider they have enough exposure, and they want to see how that evolves,” Serebrisky told ImpactAlpha. “They invested too much in a very short period of time at the peak of the cycle. And now that has created, in my mind, an indigestion.”
Durable platforms
The Coppel family kept investing through the downturn.
The family runs Coppel, one of Mexico’s largest department store retailers, with stores across Mexico and Argentina serving lower and middle-income populations. They also run BanCoppel, which provides credit to customers shut out of traditional banking.
Founded in 1941 by Enrique Coppel Tamayo in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, Coppel built its business by selling household goods to working-class families in a post-war period where many lacked the cash to make expensive purchases. The company offered credit when people couldn’t afford to pay upfront, pioneering a model that was rare at the time. Today, it’s one of Mexico’s most beloved and relied on retailers.
“From the beginning, value creation was understood as inseparable from institutional strength, economic inclusion, and responsible growth,” the family told ImpactAlpha.
Through Talipot, a family office run by next-generation family member Esteban Coppel Gómez, the family formalized impact as part of its investment strategy, integrating it into underwriting, governance, and long-term risk assessment rather than treated as a separate mandate.
The Coppels define impact as “sustained improvements in economic agency and institutional resilience, alongside competitive financial returns.” That includes expanding access to essential services, strengthening market institutions, and deploying technology to improve productivity across borders.
Through 1200VC, Talipot has invested in Earth AI, which uses AI to help mining companies locate critical mineral deposits more precisely. It has made fund investments in climate-focused venture funds such as Lowercarbon Capital and Third Sphere.
“Meeting the region’s capital needs will require strong governance, collaboration across families, and a willingness to build durable platforms rather than pursue isolated deals,” the family says. “Impact ultimately means stewardship — of capital, institutions, and the conditions that allow prosperity to compound over generations.”
Talipot also invests directly in operating companies. One holding is Cranemere, a holding company that acquires family-owned businesses and holds them indefinitely, offering an alternative to private equity, strategic buyers, or public markets.
“Cranemere will buy and will keep the founders involved,” says Rodriguez. “We’re not about pushing the founders out.”
Leaning in
The Servitje family has spent several years rethinking how to deploy its capital for impact.
Grupo Bimbo is the world’s largest baking conglomerate, with over 100 brands across the Americas, Africa and Asia. The Servitje family has built an estimated $7 billion fortune since Bimbo was founded in 1945.
María Cecilia Gabriela Servitje Montull, daughter of Grupo Bimbo founder Lorenzo Servitje, runs the family’s philanthropy arm, Foundation Sertull. For years, the foundation had made hundreds of mostly short-term grants but the family found that many initiatives failed to produce long term community impact.
“They were trying to make things work in the short term, and they were frustrated because they didn’t see change,” Servitje tells ImpactAlpha.
About two years ago, she convinced the family to change course. The foundation cut back the number of projects to focus on fewer, longer-term projects. Near Mexico City, the foundation is financing the restoration of forests and water sources while paying community members to care for the land. In Acapulco, they’re backing 400 small businesses that are rebuilding after Hurricane Otis devastated the coastal city in 2023.
Servitje is now pursuing what she calls “systemic” work, to find ways to help Mexico’s long-divided public and private sectors work together. “In Colombia, you can see that. The private and the public, they’re working,” she says. “Also in Brazil. In Mexico, it’s impossible.”
She cites the foundation’s positive results from its support for individual private schools. But she has been frustrated about her inability to work with the public education system to scale that impact.
“It’s really hard when we try to work with the system and with the government,” she says. “It hasn’t worked, and that’s something where I want to find a project that works. Where you can see all groups trying to work in the same place.”
That has led her to impact investing as a way to catalyze large scale systemic change. At the family’s annual assembly this year, she brought the conversation to the broader family — more than 80 members gathered to discuss impact funding, particularly environmental investments. With seven other regional family foundations, she is mapping where capital should flow before starting to write checks.
Group Bimbo’s corporate venture capital arm in 2019 became the anchor investor in the Latin America Impact Fund managed by Sonen Capital along with Fondo de Fondos, a Mexican private-equity manager.
She anticipates that the family will make its first impact investment within one to two years.
“When you’re not in the investment world, trying to understand the language is difficult. It’s like trying to learn a new way of speaking. It’s totally different from philanthropy,” she explains.
“Changes happen really slow, more cultural changes.”
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