500 Startups’ accelerator Mexican.VC unveils new batch, says level will keep on increasing

Mexican.VC has unveiled the list of startups that will participate in its upcoming acceleration cycle. As you may remember, the Mexico-based accelerator is now part of 500 Startups.

While being part of this network is certainly a plus for the startups Mexican.VC will work with, the program’s agenda itself will remain relatively unchanged compared to previous editions.

“The program will take place in our Mexican offices as before,” the accelerator’s co-founder Santiago Zavala explains. “Several of the teams already visited 500 Startups during the Bootcamp [that took place in Mountain View earlier this month], and we hope that all of them will get this chance, but the program will still mostly happen in Mexico.”

Here are the 9 startups that will receive seed funding and mentoring from Mexican.VC:

• Boletia, a web service that helps conference organizers simplify and improve their marketing efforts and close more sales;
• Capptalog, a service that helps sales teams create tablet catalogues to enhance the sales experience and improve their conversion rate;
• Etraining, which uses uses crowdsourcing to find and develop the courses that their audience requires to achieve a better professional results;
• GarageCoders, which developed the aggregated contact book Phone+;
• Nuperty, a real estate marketplace that connects home buyers, sellers and professionals;
• RubberIt, a monthly condom subscription service delivering to all Mexico in a discreet and safe packaging;
• SeMeAntoja, a multi-platform food delivery site that was nominated for the Startup of the Year award during TNW Mexico Startup Awards last July;
• Shopinterest, which let small merchants create an online store by using the Pinterest catalogue they are already building;
• Yaxi, an app that helps Mexicans book safe taxi rides and pay via their smartphone.

You may recognize some names on this list, as some of them have already been around for a few months, which wasn’t the case of most startups in Mexican.VC’s when they were first selected. As a matter of fact, Zavala agrees with us that this batch is less early-stage than in the previous rounds:

“We also think that the starting point seems a bit more advanced. The general level of the class is high, several tacle problems that are quite complicated, including issues that aren’t 100% technological, and others use solutions that are a bit more sophisticated.”

According to Zavala, this sends a positive message about the tech state of Mexico’s tech scene:

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“We are excited to interpret this evolution as a natural consequence of an entrepreneurship ecosystem that keeps on growing. We also expect the same thing to happen again with the next generations,” he says.

As for the startups that will take place in the program this year, they hope that it will represent a turning point for their ventures. SeMeAntoja’s CEO Tavo Zambrano tells us what his team expects from the program:

“For SeMeAntoja.com, it represents a great step forward in trying to expand to all of Mexico and then Latin America. We are trying to disrupt the ordering food market by giving restaurants the chance to freely accept orders online, with a new business model that won’t affect the bottom line of the restaurants.

The profit margins of Mexico’s restaurants are really small compared to their American counterparts. Many people told us that we couldn’t re-invent the wheel or that we would run out of money quickly.

Being part of Mexican.VC does not validate our hypothesis or guarantee that we will succeed, but it sure gives us all the tools to absorb as much knowledge as we can from them and their network of mentors to make this work, scale fast and be profitable. “

Five out of Mexican.VC’s first batch of seven startups are still active – Cactus,Conekta and Nuflick, which stayed in Mexico, and  Fontacto and Yogome, which entered 500 Startups in the latest batch.

Image credit: Santiago Zavala