Top Decile Podcast: Lorenzo de Leo

Most US venture capital shows up in Latin America at Series A, after the risk is gone and the valuation is set. Lorenzo de Leo built ENYA Ventures to get there first. His pitch is simple: the founders doing the hardest work at the earliest stage are the ones getting left out in the cold, and that's exactly where the returns live. Lorenzo isn't guessing. He's spent 15 years on the builder side of this exact market, and he's now turning that operator's edge into a pre-seed fund. He sat down with the Top Decile Podcast to lay out the full thesis. You can watch the full conversation on YouTube.

From Madrid Math to Miami's Venture Studios

Lorenzo's path is not the usual VC resume. "I'm actually Italian," he says. He was born and raised in Italy, studied mathematics there, then moved to Madrid for his PhD. His first steps into technology and company building came at the technology transfer office of an aerospace startup in Madrid, where his job was to find real-world applications for advanced technologies.

In 2013 he moved to Miami and met his partners at Rokk3r, one of the city's most prominent venture studios. That became his real school. "We built over 40 startups, more or less half of them in the US and half of them in Latin America," he says. Those companies raised more than $80M and produced exits. He spent over 10 years there, using Miami as what he calls the bridge between the two continents. After Rokk3r he went wider, launching an education platform for first-time entrepreneurs in Latin America, then designing accelerator programs for blockchain foundations, banks, and public organizations, including Algorand, Moonbeam, Rayo, and ElizaOS, supporting more than 100 founders who raised over $150M. All of it, in his words, was the same job in different clothing. "I was still working with founders. It's just a different way of impacting founders."

Why He Moved to the Investor's Side

ENYA is the natural next step. "Now I want to jump to the investor's side and take advantage of the connections, the experience, and the deal flow that I have access to, but now from the investor's perspective," Lorenzo says. The drive is personal. Across all those years, he kept watching great teams fail for the wrong reason. "I saw too many good teams that didn't really make it, not because the business was not good, just because they really didn't understand the rules of the game they were playing." His edge is fixing that. He wants to back founders with real assets and real teams, then "make them investable at a global scale, not only in Latin America."

The Thesis: AI-Native Teams at the Diamond Stage

ENYA backs AI-first software founders at pre-seed across Spanish-speaking Latin America, where entry valuations sit far below US comparables. But Lorenzo's read on AI is sharper than the label. He isn't chasing AI as a product feature. "I'm actually looking into AI native teams," he says, meaning teams that build the whole company with AI from the start, not just teams that bolt a model onto a demo. He's agnostic on verticals but sees real pull in fintech, insurtech, and legaltech, sectors where, in Latin America, "there are a lot of processes that are carried on manually" and the right technology can disrupt them outright.

He's also blunt about where the moat actually sits in 2026. When anyone can build a product in an afternoon, the product stops being the edge. "The trick is now not to focus on the product, but to focus on access, to focus on distribution, to focus on data, and that's how you can lock in your customers." The macro case is his real conviction. "Latin America is full of very important problems, deep problems, and now for the first time we have not only the mindset but also the tools and the technologies to face those problems," he says. New technologies, including blockchain and AI, "are finally enabling even small teams that have been typically left out of the big boys party." His conclusion on the region: "if you know where to look and how to get the best out of them, it's definitely a golden opportunity today." He unpacks all of this in detail in the Top Decile Podcast episode, including his framework for spotting truly AI-native teams before they become obvious.

For LPs and Founders

Lorenzo is candid that his LP conversations span three tiers: people who already know his work and skip straight to the vision, curious investors who see the opportunity but are new to venture, and Latin American family offices moving toward the asset class. What ties them together is a read on timing. His archetype LP is "somebody who sees the potential and understands that even better at early stages, that's actually where the diamonds can be found." Early stage is riskier, he grants, but with the right approach and preparation those risks can be mitigated. And the window, he says, is now. "Latin America is about to pop in a good way." For LPs tired of another US fund fighting over the same crowded Series A rounds, ENYA is the entry point one stage earlier, run by an operator who has already built on both sides of the Miami bridge.

Learn more about the fund and request access on Decile Access.

Watch the Full Episode

Lorenzo covers his full origin story, the ENYA thesis, and his playbook for identifying the region's best AI-native founders in the complete Top Decile Podcast conversation. Watch it on YouTube here.

About ENYA Ventures

ENYA Ventures is a pre-seed fund backing AI-first software founders across Spanish-speaking Latin America, where entry valuations sit far below US comparables. Founder and Investment Lead Lorenzo de Leo spent 15 years co-building startups across the US, Europe, and Latin America. At Rokk3r he co-built more than 40 startups that raised over $80M and produced exits, and he designed accelerator programs for Algorand, Moonbeam, Rayo, and ElizaOS supporting more than 100 founders who raised over $150M. ENYA reaches the region's best founders at pre-seed, before US capital catches on.