2025 Year in Review: Building Thriving Ecosystems Elsewhere

In our 2025 Year in Review, we explore the issue facing entrepreneurship worldwide — talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Outside Silicon Valley and China, the best and brightest founders are building world-class companies to solve global challenges. At Endeavor, we’re working to bring attention and capital back to those underserved hubs, the places we call Elsewhere.

In September 2025, up-and-coming founders from around the world flew to Cambridge, UK, where they would participate in the final step of Endeavor’s rigorous selection process to become an Endeavor Entrepreneur: the International Selection Panel (ISP). A team of mentors asked questions about the founders’ businesses, strategies, ambitions, challenges, and more.

Endeavor ISPs have always been famous for their ability to get to the heart of a matter. Even founders who don’t make it through the process acknowledge the power of the ISP to offer crucial feedback, suggestions, criticism, and advice that will take their business to the next level. ISP panelists are venture capitalists, successful founders, CEOs, business leaders — people like Stefan Weitz, CEO at HumanX, Anna Binder, the former Chief People Officer of Asana, and Martin Escobari, Co-President of General Atlantic.

This has several big ramifications. The founders applying to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs got to meet panelists who understood exactly where they were coming from. They’d tackled similar problems, built world-class companies in similarly underserved markets, and understood intimately the power of finding a great solution Elsewhere. 

The panelists also understood why these founders wanted to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs. Having been through the process themselves, they knew what it took to succeed and the value of Endeavor’s mentorship, support, investment, network, and development opportunities.

Most importantly, the new figure reflects the growing success of Elsewhere markets. The panelists who sit on ISPs are respected experts, such as Ridwan Olalere from LemFi, Pedro Arnt from dLocal, and Martin Migoya from Globant. Now, only a few years after their own selection journey, Endeavor Entrepreneurs are reaching these heights, with the success and wisdom needed to select and lead the next generation of founders.

The Impact Report explores some of the steps we took to continue this mission in 2025, including:

• Selecting 84 companies and 147 entrepreneurs to become part of Endeavor’s network, including Cashea (the Venezuelan-based buy-now, pay-later player, the biggest in Latin America), Rain (the stablecoin platform worth $1.95B, led by two Puerto Rican founders), Maisa (the AI agent platform that raised Spain’s largest seed round in history), and Solidgate (the bootstrapped, fast-growing Ukrainian full-stack payments platform).
  
• Opening our new local office in New Zealand, offering a path to success for local founders to stay in their home country and build. “New Zealand entrepreneurs face constraints from thin capital markets and geographic isolation — scaling beyond Series B remains a challenge,” said Austin Teece, Managing Director of Endeavor New Zealand. “We want to bring global interconnectivity, peer communities, and ties to deep capital markets that can help close that gap.”
  
• Expanding our global footprint with a new Global Hub in the UAE, designed to create a second home for diaspora founders who are building beyond their original markets, as well as connecting exceptional local founders with global mentors, investors, and operators.
  
• Investing $70M in 50 new companies through Endeavor Catalyst, our rules-based fund that invests in Endeavor Entrepreneur-led companies raising equity rounds of $5M+ led by a qualified institutional investor. 
• Collaborating with Elsewhere founders across the world, with Endeavor presence in 100+ companies, and the Endeavor network now reaching 2,100 companies and 3,100+ Endeavor Entrepreneurs.
  

Endeavor Entrepreneurs continue to exceed the wildest expectations traditional narratives have of companies from Elsewhere. In 2025, they generated $88.5B in revenue and created four million jobs. That deserves more than just a refocus of the map — we’re working with a whole new map, where the places innovation is lighting up are Elsewhere.