Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Twitter reportedly cuts its parental leave, Camilla is crowned Queen, and CEOs talk Latin American growth at Web Summit Rio. Have a productive Monday.
- Growth market. Last week, the Lisbon-based tech conference Web Summit hosted its first Latin America spinoff in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I had the pleasure of spending the week in Rio alongside some of the most exciting Latin American founders and entrepreneurs and leaders of global companies seeking to expand in the region.
Onstage, I interviewed Amrapali Gan, the CEO of OnlyFans, the subscription-based platform for content creators best known as a home for adult content. You may remember Gan from my Fortune profile of her, which published in January. The former CMO and chief communications officer became OnlyFans' CEO at the end of 2021 and has spent the year and a half since trying to "clear up misconceptions" about the platform.
We covered much of that territory, which you can read about here. But it was also fascinating to learn more about OnlyFans' growth in Latin America. Gan pointed out that Latin America has a strong "fandom culture"—from support for soccer teams to the famous "come to Brazil" comments on celebrities' Instagram posts—that has helped OnlyFans secure a foothold in the region. She declined to share how much of the company's 2021 near-$1 billion in revenue or what percentage of its 220 million users or 3 million creators are based there. But she views Latin America as a "growth region" for the platform that sees itself as a way for creators to connect more directly with fans than they can on YouTube or Instagram.
Separately, I interviewed a group of Brazil-based founders and investors behind women's health companies. Stephanie von Staa Toledo is the founder of Oya Care, a women's health platform for fertility and OB/GYN care in Brazil. One major challenge of building her business—and pitching to investors—is that much of the data around women's health and the category's investment potential is based on the U.S. and Western Europe.
That data mismatch can be consequential. For example, Brazil is a younger country than the U.S. or most of Western Europe; the median age is 33, compared to 38 in the U.S. For anyone building a women's health business in Brazil, that means the most salient problems to address are access to contraception, sexual health, and, increasingly, fertility, rather than aging or menopause.
Von Staa Toledo was joined by Roberta Sotomaior, the cofounder of Bloom Care, a health tech platform for women and families; Izabel Gallera, a partner at the early-stage VC firm Canary; and Fabiana Barruffini, a partner at IKJ Capital. Altogether, their insights—and Gan's—taught us more about what it takes to build a business in Latin America today.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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