Corinne Lebrun had no finance experience, no VC connections, and little encouragement when she began thinking about leaving her corporate job to start a venture capital fund in Ecuador. She quit anyway.
Her role at a French cement company had put her in contact with Indigenous communities bearing the environmental costs of cement production but receiving little benefit.
“CSR was more or less a marketing tool to sell the company,” Lebrun recalls. “Do I really want to do this for the rest of my life? Or try to do something more meaningful with my time, knowing that there’s so many things that need to change in Ecuador and in the region?”
Lebrun saw Ecuador’s barren venture capital landscape as a blank slate to build on the country’s strong entrepreneurial spirit.
“We are a country of entrepreneurs because we have to be,” she tells ImpactAlpha. “There are not many formal jobs, so you have to find your own way.”
That ethos applied to her as well. “Everyone told me it was impossible,” she says of her idea to launch one of the country’s first VC funds. “But my reflection was: if I don’t do it, no one is going to do it, because everyone is saying it cannot be done.”
To get up to speed quickly, she enrolled in Stanford’s VC Unlocked program and engaged in the first CLIIQ summit in Quito, hosted by impact entrepreneurship hub IMPAQTO, another newcomer in Ecuador’s early startup scene.
Lebrun launched CREAS to support startups and small businesses working on social and environmental issues in Ecuador. She closed its first fund in 2023, having met her first LP at that CLIIQ summit in 2018. CREAS has backed nearly a dozen companies, including sustainable clothing company Alpamamas, and e-waste recycling company Vertmonde, and exited two.
“It was really my Master’s degree in impact investing,” says Lebrun. “I learned by doing, even though it was a personal and economic sacrifice.”
Planting seeds
CREAS has become part of a bigger impact movement taking shape in Ecuador. IMPAQTO has built out its entrepreneurship support offerings and has launched its own impact fund — which CREAS backed. BuenTrip Ventures has built an early-stage venture investing pipeline, focusing on diverse founders. And Buena Vista Capital and Endeavor Ecuador are connecting promising entrepreneurs with capital and networks.
The five organizations have anchored Ecuador’s early venture ecosystem. The group pooled resources to form ECUACAP, a venture capital association to convene market players, publish annual VC reports, and connect Ecuador’s VC ecosystem to its regional peers.
Since closing CREAS’s fund, Lebrun has joined Chile-based Impacta VC to make investments across Latin America, including Ecuador, and has teamed up with Mexico-based impact organization Promotora Social to work on prospects for cross-regional funds. She’s also a board member of B Corp Ecuador and an investment committee member at IMPAQTO Capital, as she plans a second fund.
The groundwork Lebrun has supported for the past seven years is showing results. Ecuador minted its first unicorn: digital payments company Kushki. Andromeda, an AI-powered customer engagement service for small businesses, became the first Ecuadorian startup to reach the Startup World Cup finals to compete for a $1 million prize in San Francisco.
Ecuador established some unique advantages for entrepreneurs, says Lebrun. Its small market size and its dollar-based economy make it a solid testing ground for new ideas before expanding to larger markets in the region.
Longer-term, she says, what will buoy Ecuadorean social entrepreneurs and impact investing in the region more broadly is an inevitable merging with mainstream investing.
“In the future, all funds and all companies are going to be impact, because there is no other way to do business.”
