Dominican Republic pushed out its $3M Startup

By Jonathan Joel Mentor | @jonathanjmentor 

When Dominican-American founder Héctor Alex Terrero announced that his startup HEVA had closed a multi-million-dollar pre-seed round to build an AI-native platform for cross-border healthcare, most people treated it like a feel-good diaspora headline: Dominican flag, AI, healthtech, progress. Scroll.

If you actually care about the Dominican Republic startup ecosystem, that announcement reads very differently.

It’s not just a win. It’s a warning.

For roughly two years, Terrero tried to build his startup from Santo Domingo. He launched Moneda, a fintech aimed at financial inclusion, operated from here, and invested time explaining to institutions why AI and venture-scale startups weren’t some Silicon Valley cosplay—they were basic infrastructure for the next decade of the Dominican innovation economy.

The system applauded the narrative. It did not back the founder.

Once HEVA’s center of gravity shifted to the United States, the reaction changed. Within months, Terrero and his co-founder closed roughly US$3 million in pre-seed funding, with a cap table that includes Collide Capital, Flybridge, Benchstrength, Techstars and others—funds that live in the real world of venture risk, not in PowerPoint.

Same founder. Same thesis. Different jurisdiction.  That contrast is the real story for anyone serious about venture capital in the Dominican Republic.

The founder we claim to want—until he needs more than a panel

On paper, Terrero is the poster child for every “innovation” speech in this country:

Dominican-born. First-gen immigrant. Ex–Apple engineer working at the intersection of AI, fintech and healthcare.

He didn’t just fly in for a couple of fireside chats with ANJE. With Moneda, he aimed at the underbanked in this market. With what became HEVA, he moved into a space where the Dominican Republic already sells itself hard: medical tourism and cross-border care.

On any rational map of the Dominican innovation economy, HEVA’s growth should have been tightly coupled with this country:

– Dominican clinics and hospitals as early adopters of an AI-native healthtech platform.
– Dominican regulators learning in real time from a cross-border healthcare startup instead of reading case studies five years late.
– Dominican engineers, operators and analysts getting first-mover experience in global medical tourism infrastructure.

Instead, the compounding now happens out of New York. The legal structures, governance, senior hires, and second-order companies will grow around a foreign hub. Dominican Republic gets to repost the news and call it “Dominican talent shining abroad.” That’s branding. It’s not strategy.

Founders don’t guess. They diagnose the system.

When I wrote in Digital Nomad Weekly about the “entrepreneurship week that forgot entrepreneurs”—a press conference where suits clapped for each other while founders hustled outside—some people rushed to defend the event, the institutions, the optics.

Founders don’t bother with that dance. They go straight for the structural rot.

Summarizing what Dominican and diaspora founders say publicly and privately:

– The Dominican Republic is not structurally equipped for venture capital. There are no robust investor protection frameworks, no serious scalable infrastructure, and almost no alignment between public policy and the risk profile venture investing requires.

– The ecosystem regularly confuses small business with venture-backable startup. One optimizes for stability and quick profit; the other is designed for scale, repeatability and exponential growth. We still bundle them together under “emprendimiento” and then wonder why nothing scales.

– Founders who try to use modern structures—Delaware C-corps, international banking rails, cross-border entities—run into local regulatory and banking friction that makes them look suspicious instead of investable.

– Too many local offers still arrive with predatory terms: small checks in exchange for outsized control and equity, the kind of deals that tell any serious founder, “If you take this, you’ll never raise a real round.”

– And perhaps most telling: the very organizations that claim to champion fintech and innovation like ANJE or ADOFintech have become increasingly disconnected from the caliber of founders and operators they say they serve. Panels, press releases, and networking breakfasts abound; actionable pathways, institutional pressure, and founder-first frameworks do not. In a healthy ecosystem, talent gravitates toward its guilds. In ours, talent quietly avoids them.

– Culturally, a lot of projects are built for Dominicans, not from the Dominican Republic for the world—which is cute for marketing and lethal for scale.

None of this is about a founder abandoning the Dominican Republic. This country can absolutely be a serious base for venture if it’s willing to update its rules and infrastructure.  You don’t need to agree with every line to see the pattern. You just need to look at the outcome.

Startups try to build from here. The capital that understands startups isn’t here. They leave. Money appears.

That’s not personal drama. That’s system logic.

It was the exact export we say we want—and keep giving away

HEVA is an AI-native practice management and coordination platform for cross-border healthcare. In plain speak: it’s trying to be the operating system for patients and providers when healthcare crosses borders—the same borders Dominican health tourism claims to thrive in.

Now line that up against our talking points in Dominican Republic:

We pitch ourselves as a health tourism hub in the Caribbean, competing for international patients and foreign exchange.

We talk about AI, digital transformation and innovation at every forum with a podium and a banner.

We sit in a strategic corridor between North America, Latin America and Europe—exactly where cross-border healthcare needs coordination.

A country that believed its own script would have done everything possible to anchor HEVA’s growth here: sandbox regulation, institutional pilots with local hospitals, public–private partnerships with risk properly shared, even diplomatic support for cross-border healthcare deals.

Instead, that architecture is now being built in a market whose laws, banks and investors behave as if AI healthtech is a legitimate asset class, not a novelty.

We don’t just lose “a startup.” We lose:

– Future high-skill jobs in engineering, product, operations and compliance.
– Alumni who later found their own Dominican or diaspora-led startups.
– Regulatory learning that could shape smarter health, data and mobility policy here.
– Investor confidence in Dominican tech talent and Dominican jurisdiction as a serious base for scaling.

Someone else now compounds those gains. We clap from a distance.

From lost startups move to DR’s risk problem

This isn’t just about one founder. It’s about what his exit says about the way we price risk and opportunity in this country.

Through Successment Venture Labs and our flagship mobility thesis, we’ve been knocking on the same wall from another angle: credit and risk modeling in the Dominican Republic. Our research whitepaper, “The Cost of Obsolete Risk Modeling in the Dominican Republic,” tracks how outdated credit scoring and fragmented data quietly block the same kind of founders, workers and SMEs we claim to champion—especially those in the informal, gig and mobility economy.  And with a pathway to a solution using Dominican born innovation and startup technology.

The short version:

• Our macro story looks stable. Our risk systems do not.
•  Banks and institutions still score paperwork over behavior—formal contracts over actual payment patterns, physical collateral over real earning power.
• Over half the workforce operates informally but demonstrates daily reliability the system refuses to measure.
• Remittances, digital work, mobility and behavioral data represent billions in unleveraged signals of trust and productive capacity.

In other words: we don’t just push out fundable startups. We systematically underwrite against the very people who could power a different Dominican growth story—because our models are built for a past economy and a narrow slice of the population.

Dominican cap tables and our own risk diagnostics point to the same fact: the country is more comfortable exporting its talent than updating its systems.

That has consequences not just for startups, but for everything from digital nomads and remote workers to SME lending, mortgages and long-term capital formation. It’s all the same broken model.

How many more $3M signals do we plan to ignore?

We love the language of leadership:

“Regional hub for fintech and AI.”
“Platform for innovation in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
“Dominican talent competing globally.”

But leadership in the Dominican innovation economy is not a tagline. It’s boring, technical, political work:

• Modern investor protection, so institutional capital doesn’t treat this market as a legal hazard.
• Clear tax and legal regimes for venture-backed startups, distinct from traditional SMEs and family businesses.
• Banking rules that can process modern corporate structures, cross-border capital and new data sources without defaulting to “no.”
• Domestic capital that understands that a real pre-seed or seed round in 2025 is not a favor; it’s a portfolio decision—priced for risk, not for control.

Until that exists, “venture capital in the Dominican Republic” will remain more conference aesthetic than economic engine.

And until that exists, every Dominican founder who raises millions in New York, Miami, Mexico City, São Paulo or London will be both:

a point of pride for LinkedIn, and
an invoice for the value we refused to anchor here.

For those of us building systems instead of slogans—whether through platforms like Successment, mobility infrastructure plays like what we’re prototyping with ZARI Mobility, or convenings like Digital Nomad Summit that force these conversations into the open—the pattern is impossible to unsee. The opportunity is huge. So is the leakage.

If you’re an institution, investor or policymaker who doesn’t want the next HEVA-sized opportunity to be headquartered elsewhere, the homework isn’t mysterious:

Start by reading the diagnostics founders are handing you in real time.  Then read the technical ones—the risk-modeling work, the export-of-services theses, the frameworks for how the Dominican Republic can compete for global talent, data and capital, not just tourists.

Because at this point, the story writes itself:

This country does not have a talent problem.
It has an incentive, infrastructure and imagination problem.

The only real question left is this:

How many more startups are we prepared to export before we admit the system is performing exactly as designed—and decide, finally, to redesign it?

Jonathan Joel Mentor is the CEO of Successment and architect of the Digital Nomad Summit™, scaling startups and challenging institutions to evolve. UN World Summit Award Nominee  & ADOEXPO National Excellence in Exportation Award Winner  www.jonathanjmentor.co | digitalnomadsummit.co