Sandra Sainz

Sandra Sainz is a finance and impact-investing veteran with roughly 25+ years of experience across development finance, private equity, and early-stage venture capital. She spent about 14 years at the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the World Bank's private-sector arm) as a Senior Investment Officer, where she led investment activity in the health and education sectors for Mexico and Central America. Earlier in her career she did credit analysis at J.P. Morgan and at S&P Global. She joined the San Francisco–based SV Latam Fund as Managing Partner in 2015 (through roughly 2017), a VC fund focused on innovation companies with a scientific or technological base bridging Silicon Valley and Latin America.

Frustrated that the most promising early-stage companies were too small for the IFC's institutional check sizes, Sainz founded Cantera Capital, an impact-oriented venture fund backing tech-based startups in health, education, and food. She later served as Director of Investments for Promotora Social México, a pioneer impact investor in Mexico. Today she is Managing Director of Private Investments at Sonen Capital, where she sources companies and funds addressing environmental and social challenges and connects the firm with growing, technology-driven Latin American companies.

Sainz is Mexican-trained and academically rooted at ITAM: she earned a Licenciatura en Contaduría Pública / Finanzas from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (1996) and an Especialización en Finanzas there (1997). She later completed an Executive MBA at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business (2005). She was named one of the "Top Women Leaders of Miami for 2024" by Women We Admire.

Note: the current SV Latam Capital team page now lists Consuelo Valverde as Founder & Managing Partner; Sainz's Managing Partner tenure at SV Latam appears to have been ~2015–2017, and her primary active roles today are at Sonen Capital and Cantera Capital.

• Backs early-stage, innovation-driven companies with a scientific/technological ("deep tech") foundation — in her own words, *"empresas que tengan soluciones de 'deep tech' aplicada a los sectores"* (companies with deep-tech solutions applied to the target sectors).
• Core sectors: healthcare, education, and food/agribusiness, plus broader climate/environment and social-impact themes.
• Impact lens: prioritizes companies that are "good for people and the planet" and that solve difficult, important problems — economic opportunity, climate/environment, and health & well-being.
• Stage/check: deliberately targets ventures too early or small for large institutional funds (below the IFC-scale ~$5M threshold) — i.e., seed / early stage.
• Geographic conviction: strong belief in the Latin American (especially Mexican) opportunity, paired with a deep-tech bridge to Israel, noting the scarcity of Latin American players in Israeli expansion plans.
• Identified constraint she watches for: limited exit paths in Mexico due to inactive public markets and thin later-stage private capital to acquire graduating VC companies.