Behind The Curtain: Why We Selected Mexican Manufacturing Scaleup Prima

How do we find great companies? The process of joining Endeavor takes an average of a year and more than 98% of applicants are rejected. For our local teams, it can take weeks and months of deep research to track down the kinds of companies that can thrive at Endeavor.

But sometimes, luck plays a part. “We share offices with them,” Ana Gabriela Sánchez Rivera, community manager at Endeavor Mexico, remembered about meeting the founders of Prima. “Three entrepreneurs and friends, whom we had met individually many times over the course of a decade, were, in reality, our neighbors!”

Juan Pablo Ramos, Daniel Autrique, and Patricio Servitje had met at Stanford University over ten years earlier while pursuing their MBAs, and stayed close ever since. They’d already co-invested in numerous startups and even founded another company which was ultimately unsuccessful. And it was the business they were in that really caught our eye at Endeavor.

“Not just in Mexico, but across many of our other markets, we tend to see a lot of entrepreneurial ventures in hot industries,” said Jacob VanderZwaag, an associate in Entrepreneur Selection at Endeavor Global. “What really interested me about Prima is that the company started from a different place”.

“They saw a legacy market that wasn’t sexy and wasn’t getting the same attention from entrepreneurs, because it’s complex, because it’s dominated by incumbents and legacy players and processes,” he added. “And Prima saw an opportunity to disrupt.”

That unsexy legacy industry? Manufacturing.

How Prima is Disrupting Mexico’s Manufacturing Landscape

Prima acts as a one-stop shop for its customers’ manufacturing needs. Companies that need manufactured products order them through Prima, which oversees the entire manufacturing process — from pricing through raw-material sourcing through production and quality control all the way through to final delivery. The physical manufacturing itself is done by Prima’s network of 200+ verified partners, all of whom are subcontracted factories owned by small businesses.

And now is a great time to be in Mexican manufacturing. American companies are once more open to manufacturing sourced in Mexico. Geopolitical shifts mean that many companies are not finding it as easy or appealing to embrace Chinese manufacturers. Growing concern over climate change and economic downturns make the close distance between Mexico and the US a boon. And nearshoring — the practice of moving business operations to the same region as their primary consumer base — is on the rise.

Manufacturing accounts for 20% of Mexico’s GDP and employs 25% of its labor force, but significant barriers get in the way of successful uptake from US companies. By overseeing the entire end-to-end process and acting as a single point of contact for their customers, Prima avoids the typical pain points of Mexico’s manufacturing industry, such as slow quotation processes, and unreliable quality.

What does this mean? Jacob VanderZwaag explains, “Prima is operating in a traditional and highly fragmented market which is ripe for disruption. They’re one of the first movers leading the way in the digitization of the market, and they’ve grown really fast since they were founded in 2022, becoming big in a relatively short amount of time. They’ve done the hard part by building out relationships with SME manufacturers already; they’ve laid their foundations, and now they’re poised to scale. We expect that growth trajectory to continue.”

During the selection process, Endeavor’s mentors raised the importance of differentiation and worked with Prima’s founders on their growth strategy. One of Prima’s key strengths, which we spotted early on, is their position as a tech company. Most manufacturing processes in Mexico have traditionally been done manually, from quotes to quality control. But Prima adds a technology layer by digitizing and automating these processes, and as a result, offers a more efficient and reliable product journey for all stakeholders.

Two of our mentors — Juan Alberto Leautaud of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and Kalina Hadzhitodorova of Rappi, a Latin American super app, encouraged Prima to push its tech advantage.

“Prima has the potential to make a significant impact on the global economy by creating jobs, driving innovation, and increasing Mexico’s competitiveness on the global stage,” our office in Mexico noted. “Prima has already positioned itself as a major player in the country’s manufacturing sector and has the potential to contribute to the economic and technological development of the region.”

And now they’re on the cusp of breaking through to a larger, global audience.

We categorize companies that have the potential to join Endeavor into four different types. Prima is a TRANSFORMER.

Transformers are strong, ambitious leaders running profitable companies that power job creation, typically in more traditional industries, though today most are tech-enabled. They have a desire to reach the next level of growth and stay at the forefront of their industry. Effective transformers have a major impact on their communities, hire lots of people, and generate strong earnings; the most successful can go global.

When we’re considering potential transformer companies, we ask them—and our own internal experts—questions like:

1. Can this company add hundreds or thousands of jobs over the next few years?

2. Is the entrepreneur/leadership team aligned around a vision for accelerating growth and innovation?

3. If the company is a family business, does the entrepreneur have equity control and clear decision-making authority?

4. Outside of food franchises or other scalable brick and mortar, is this company tech-enabled?

5. Does it have the innovation/differentiation to stay competitive, or will it get bypassed by newer players?

Juan Pablo, Daniel, and Patricio became Endeavor Entrepreneurs in July 2024. Already, we’re working with them to push Prima to the next level — and they are already asking to help the next generation of entrepreneurs. We call this Endeavor’s Multiplier Effect™, the collective impact entrepreneurs have when they go on to pay their success forward by training, mentoring, and investing in the next generation of founders.

“They see the value not just in mentorship but in all the behind-the-scenes elements that aren’t immediately visible,” Ana added. “And they value that, and want to pass it on.”

Prima’s potential to learn and grow is clear. Moroccan Endeavor Entrepreneur and founder of Chari (an e-commerce and fintech app for traditional retailers in French-Speaking Africa) Ismael Belkhayat sat on Prima’s International Selection Panel, then deliberated with the other seven panelists over Prima’s selection process. He highlighted the fact that Prima’s founders had already tried something that failed: “Which makes you even more likely to succeed!”

Ismael encouraged Prima’s team to look at overseas success. “At first we were concerned about the intermediary model, but observing the same model in India, we realized it’s actually very reliable. Make sure you take the time to travel to India and understand how they have applied it. You can earn time by doing this.”