Corporate accelerators in LATAM and the Caribbean are missing P&L

By Jonathan Joel Mentor | @jonathanjmentor

Too many are funded as corporate-responsibility programs when they should be governed as patient-capital portfolios designed to create strategic, operational and financial returns.

Ask a company where its accelerator budget sits and you can often predict what the program will produce. If it sits under corporate responsibility, the expected results will probably be founders supported, jobs encouraged, industries strengthened, positive press and general ecosystem growth.

There is nothing wrong with that. Corporate responsibility can legitimately support entrepreneurship. A company may decide that helping young founders, underserved communities or an emerging industry is part of its social mandate.

But that is not the same as building a corporate accelerator. The confusion begins when a program funded without an expectation of economic return is presented as part of the company’s innovation strategy.

A budget is not neutral. It tells the program what it is allowed to become. When accelerators are treated as sponsorships, they tend to produce sponsorship outcomes. When they are treated as investments in future corporate capability, the design changes entirely.

That distinction matters in a region already investing too little in innovation. Latin America devoted approximately 0.56% of its GDP to research and development in 2022. Brazil was the only country in the region investing more than 1%. We do not have enough innovation capital to spend it without an economic thesis.

P&L does not mean immediate profit

A corporate accelerator should have a P&L logic.

That does not mean every startup must produce revenue during a twelve-week program. Nor does it mean the company should abandon a project because it cannot show a quarterly return. Innovation requires patient capital.

The first accelerator cycle may produce promising pilots but no scalable company. A second may improve the corporation’s selection criteria, internal governance and ability to work with founders. After several cycles, the company may finally possess something much more valuable: a portfolio of technologies, commercial relationships, intellectual property and equity positions connected to its long-term strategy.

One cycle can discover startups. Several disciplined cycles can build corporate assets.

The P&L question is therefore not, “Did this cohort make money immediately?” It is: “What economic value is this portfolio being designed to create?”

That value may come from lower operating costs, new revenue, proprietary technology, licensing, exportable intellectual property, equity appreciation, acquisition opportunities or the solution to an internal problem that has resisted conventional procurement.

The corporate objective must come first

Many accelerator programs begin with a call for startups and then search for internal problems those startups might solve.

The sequence should be reversed. The corporation should begin with a known objective.

A retailer planning aggressive expansion may need better inventory visibility, logistics, site selection or customer intelligence. A bank may need new methods for evaluating customers who remain invisible to traditional risk models. A tourism group may need solutions for workforce mobility, energy efficiency or destination management.

Those objectives should inform the accelerator thesis. Only then should the corporation determine what it is prepared to invest, which business units will own the pilots and what rights it needs if a solution succeeds.

The missing capability is rarely startup recruitment. There are already enough founders willing to apply.

The missing capability is the architecture connecting corporate strategy, patient capital, pilot governance, intellectual-property rights, external financing and a decision to scale.

What the return could look like

The following instrument demonstrates how a modest, multi-cycle accelerator could create several forms of value simultaneously.

Successment’s Corporate Accelerator Return Map

For illustrative purposes only.

The model assumes that two of 15 pilots become meaningful internal deployments. That is not an unreasonable conversion scenario: BMW reports that more than 220 startups completed joint projects through its Startup Garage and 30 eventually became established suppliers or service providers—approximately 14%.

The illustrative 3% ownership at exit is also below the 5% common-equity position currently taken by Techstars before its additional convertible investment is considered. The point is not that every US$1.05 million accelerator will generate exactly US$2.1 million.

The point is that a corporation can model the return before launching the program. Management can decide how much value must come from internal deployment, how much may come from portfolio ownership and what additional upside it expects from intellectual property, licensing or acquisition. That is considerably more useful than counting applications.

Grupo Bimbo offers a regional example

This is not only a European or Silicon Valley model.

Grupo Bimbo established Bimbo Ventures to collaborate, invest and learn from startups connected to products, food technology, supply chains and commercial operations. In the first edition of its Eleva accelerator, the company received more than 2,000 applications and selected nine ventures. It invested in four and acquired the formula, patent and rights to a product developed by another participant.

That is already a more sophisticated return structure than “supporting entrepreneurship.”

The same platform now identifies concrete examples of corporate value: products co-developed under Grupo Bimbo brands, new food formulations and an artificial-intelligence platform that improved supplier-document processing. The lesson is not that every Caribbean corporation should imitate Grupo Bimbo’s budget or scale.

It is that one accelerator can produce several outcomes: equity investments, acquired intellectual property, new products and internal operating improvements. That portfolio only becomes possible when the program begins with corporate priorities rather than a generic invitation to innovate.

Large programs prove that the value can compound

BMW may seem remote from the balance sheets of many Latin American and Caribbean companies, but its scale is less important than its conversion discipline. It did not measure success only by the 4,700 startups it evaluated. It tracked which companies completed projects and which eventually entered the BMW supplier network.

Telefónica’s Wayra offers a financial example closer to the region. Telefónica reported in 2025 that Wayra had invested more than €245 million and worked with over 400 startups that generated more than €1.06 billion in revenue for the corporation. Revenue is not profit, so that figure should not be presented as a direct return multiple. But it demonstrates that corporate acceleration can be connected to commercially measurable value.

The accelerator does not have to choose between solving internal problems and holding equity. Depending on the thesis, it can operate as a venture client, investor, venture builder or a combination of the three. What matters is that the structure is deliberate.

The corporation may not have to carry every risk alone

A properly constructed accelerator may also attract capital beyond the corporation’s own balance sheet.

Multilateral institutions, development agencies and specialized funds frequently seek vehicles connected to financial inclusion, climate resilience, digital transformation, export development and productivity.

The Inter-American Development Bank Group’s Multilateral Investment Fund, for example, approved a US$5 million equity investment and US$750,000 in technical cooperation to help NXTP Labs expand its Latin American accelerator model. The structure was expected to support between 200 and 250 startups.

Not every corporate program will qualify for multilateral support. But a corporation with a credible thesis, governance structure, measurement system and portfolio strategy has a stronger basis for pursuing grants, guarantees, technical assistance or blended-finance mechanisms that reduce early-stage risk.

A demo day cannot attract serious capital by itself. An investment architecture can.

The accelerator is not the product

The hidden failure in many corporate accelerator programs is not the quality of the founders. It is that nobody inside the corporation owns the program as an investment system.

Corporate responsibility owns the visibility. Innovation manages the cohort. Operations receives the pilot. Procurement controls the contract. Legal negotiates the intellectual property. Finance eventually asks where the return is. Every department touches the accelerator, but no one owns the full economic outcome.

That is the institutional gap. A serious corporate accelerator requires a visible sequence:

Corporate objective → investment thesis → patient capital → portfolio → paid validation → commercial and IP rights → scale or exit

That is not a communications plan. It is a corporate operating model.

Latin America and the Caribbean do not need more accelerator launches whose value disappears after demo day. The region needs corporations capable of turning their strategic problems into investable theses—and those theses into portfolios whose value compounds over time.

A corporate accelerator can strengthen an industry, support founders and create public value. But if it is also expected to innovate the company funding it, then it cannot live on goodwill alone. It needs patient capital, institutional ownership and a P&L.

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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