A new venture firm aims to prove that the most successful startup ideas don’t have to be born or scaled in Silicon Valley.
Fluent Ventures, a global early-stage fund, is backing founders replicating proven business models from Western markets in fintech, digital health, and commerce across emerging markets. The more cynical might describe this as a clone factory, but founder and managing partner Alexandre Lazarow calls the firm’s strategy “geographic alpha.”
Fluent’s premise is that many of the world’s most valuable startups are not entirely new concepts that haven’t been tried before, but more simply, local adaptations of models that have already succeeded elsewhere.
The San Francisco-based firm, founded in 2023, is deploying $40 million across a fund, an incubator, and a structured co-investment vehicle with limited partners. It is writing initial checks of $250,000 to $2 million, from pre-seed to Series A, and plans to make 22-25 investments, with follow-ons.
“We are contrarians at heart,” said Lazarow, who previously invested at Omidyar Network and Cathay Innovation. “We believe the world’s best innovations are not the exclusive purview of Silicon Valley.”
Fluent is not exactly working in a bubble: The last decade has seen a massive decentralization in the technology industry. In 2013, just four cities had produced a unicorn. Today, that number exceeds 150.
And that has been on the back of rinse and repeat, with many of the top tech players in emerging markets mirroring successful startups that have been built elsewhere, such as Amazon clones in e-commerce, Stripe clones in payments, and neo-banking apps in fintech. The first breakout neo-bank was Tinkoff from Russia. “That movement scaled globally, and [it] was one of the insights that motivated my investments in Chime in the U.S. and Banco Neon in Brazil,” said Lazarow.
Lazarow insists Fluent doesn’t just copy-paste.
“That rarely works, in our opinion. Local adaptation is critical,” he said.
The firm points to ride-hailing as an example. Uber may have pioneered the category, but in Indonesia, Go-Jek localized it by incorporating motorcycle taxis and super app functionality similar to China’s WeChat. Now Uber Eats is essentially chasing that evolution, Lazarow argues.
To that point, Fluent Ventures, in addition to finding adapted models, screens for local product-market fit and founder-market alignment.
While the firm passed on several construction marketplaces globally, it backed BRKZ in Saudi Arabia, a localized take on India’s Infra.Market. The founder, a former Careem executive, was a strong operator in a region with surging infrastructure demand, Lazarow noted.
Despite calling itself a global fund, Lazarow says Fluent doesn’t aim for equal allocation across every geography. Instead, it goes deeper in the regions where it sees the most potential. Right now, that means a focus on Latin America, MENA, Africa, Southeast Asia, and selective U.S. markets.
Its current portfolio includes Minu, a Mexican employee wellness platform; Sabi, a Nigerian B2B commerce startup; Prima, a Brazil-based industrial marketplace; and Baton, a U.S. M&A platform for SMBs.
The firm says these companies have raised multiple follow-on rounds since Fluent’s early checks. Collectively, startups from Lazarow’s prior and current portfolios have generated over $30 billion in enterprise value, with seven reaching unicorn status.
Skeptics still question the exit landscape in emerging markets, perhaps especially since valuations have gone up in these markets, with more unicorns than a decade ago. Yet Fluent sees momentum building. IPOs of startups like Nubank, UiPath, Swiggy, and Talabat prove that global outcomes can emerge outside the U.S. and Europe — and then, as in the case of Nubank and UiPath, those companies can still go public in the U.S. if they choose.
“Exit markets are also maturing in these regions,” Lazarow remarks. “New secondary firms are rising. Stock markets are looking to build local listing capabilities. Yes, the U.S. has much more developed IPO and M&A markets. But under the hood, some of the largest and most profitable exits are already happening outside.”
Fluent has also built out a different kind of network around the kinds of founders it invests in. More than 75 unicorn founders and VCs back the fund, including David Vélez (Nubank), Nick Nash (Sea Group), Akshay Garg (Kredivo), and Sean Harper (Kin), alongside institutional LPs and family offices from around the world. According to Lazarow, many are active contributors, helping portfolio companies with talent, fundraising, and expansion.
The firm also relies on a small group of venture partners from ZenBusiness, Terminal, Kin, and Dell, bringing both sector depth and geographic reach.
In a world where venture capital might be rethinking overexposure to the U.S. and China, Fluent believes its approach offers LPs something few firms can: diversification.
“We believe the best ideas come from anywhere and scale everywhere,” says the partner whose firm claims a spot on Kauffman Fellows’ top‑returner index, thanks to his earlier personal stakes in Chime, ZenBusiness, and Sidecar Health.
Other global VCs with an emerging markets focus include Accion Venture Lab, Alter Global, Endeavor Catalyst, Flourish Ventures, Global Ventures, Quona Capital, and Speedinvest.