There is a version of this conversation that stays safe. A JP Morgan executive talks about products, a founder nods, everyone moves on. That is not the conversation Alejandro Manzanares and I had.
Alejandro leads the West Coast for JP Morgan’s Global Passport program, the team built to bank foreign owned startups scaling into the US. Born in Puerto Rico to a Cuban mother and a Spanish father, he came up selling daily deals door to door in Miami before Hurricane María sent him to Washington, DC, then to the Aspen Institute working Latino majority cities from El Paso to Chicago, and eventually to JP Morgan, first running Hispanic and Latino sponsorships, now sitting inside the bank’s most global unit. His path started in Puerto Rico. It went national. Now it is global.
That arc matters more than a résumé line. It is the same arc Coquí Ventures is built around: proximity to the community first, access to capital systems second, and the conviction that those two things are supposed to connect and mostly do not.
What Global Passport actually unlocks
Here is the plain language version, because most founders listening have never heard of this program and would not think to ask their bank about it.
Two and a half years ago, JP Morgan noticed a gap. Series A through D companies were too complex for a retail branch and too early for the traditional multinational corporate banking mandate. So the bank built a small, specialized team of bankers trained in cross border currency, FX, and transfer pricing, essentially a fractional CFO function for founders who are not yet ready for a full corporate banking relationship but have already outgrown Chase retail.
Most of Global Passport’s clients are European. A meaningful share come from Latin America, companies scaling through the region and trying to figure out when, and how, to enter the US market. Alejandro’s job is not banking. It is ecosystem. He connects founders to tax, legal, accounting, and insurance partners, and spends real time advising on the mechanics founders rarely get taught: the flip, the holding company structure, go to market sequencing, when to use the bank’s own buildings for investor and client meetings.
Every sector qualifies except fintech, since anything touching cross border money movement sits under a separate, heavily regulated KYC track. AI, biotech, deep tech, agtech, health tech, all in scope.
The trust question, asked directly
I put it to him plainly: there is a documented, historical distrust between Latino founders and large financial institutions. Where has the bank fallen short, and what is it doing differently now.
He did not deflect. He pointed to sponsorships and activations at community events that have existed for twenty, thirty, even a hundred years and were never funded before. He pointed to JP Morgan’s aggressive Chase retail expansion, much of it concentrated in high Latino majority communities, as evidence the bank understands showing up in person matters as much as showing up in a press release.
Whether that is enough is a fair question to keep asking. But the specificity of the answer, sponsorships that exist, branches that are opening, a DEI function that still exists inside the bank, is worth more than a general commitment to inclusion.
Where the energy actually is
I asked him where the global Latino founder ecosystem is moving that New York and San Francisco investors are underweighting.
Brazil, without hesitation. He described a market getting stronger by the month, with US investors growing more comfortable writing checks into LatAm as company quality improves. The broader signal: international founder offices in the US are declining year over year, even as US VCs increase their investment in international founders. Capital is following talent globally faster than talent is relocating physically.
The harder truth came next. On the fund side, the tier two through tier five managers, the ones actually positioned to find and back this talent, are the ones getting squeezed. Distributions back to LPs are at what he called an all time low. The largest funds can absorb that. The smaller, emerging managers cannot as easily. This is the exact seam Coquí Ventures is built to sit in: not the sandhill road allocators, but the founders and the funds underneath them that the current cycle is making harder to sustain, not easier.
The rule: come early or come late, never in the middle
When I asked what he wants every early stage Latino founder to walk away with, his answer was structural, not motivational.
It has never been easier to build a global company without a US office on day one. Companies like Lovable prove it, a US topco with the team based in Stockholm. But if a founder decides the US market is the target, his rule of thumb is simple: come early or come late, do not come in the middle. He has watched too many founders, including from Puerto Rico, drift into that middle zone, present in the US market without being structurally built for it.
His advice for founders scaling out of LatAm specifically: build the holding company as a real operating entity from the start, not a shell. Billing, invoicing, receivables, actual activity inside the topco, so that when a bank eventually looks at the company, there is something bankable there. This is the same gap that quietly kills deals in due diligence long after the pitch meeting goes well: no cap table discipline, no legal structure, no operating history in the entity that is supposed to raise the money.
And if a founder is building in AI specifically, his framing was blunt. Roughly seventy percent of AI funding deployment right now concentrates within an eight square mile radius of San Francisco. Being physically present there currently carries something close to a thirty percent valuation premium. That is not a nice to have. That is the market pricing proximity.
(Note: these figures were shared by Alejandro in conversation and reflect his professional estimate, not an audited data point; worth independent verification before citing in a deal memo.)
AI inside the bank, today
I asked him to separate hype from practice. Inside JP Morgan, deployment started in the private bank, and large language model use for summarization, notes, and deck creation is now common across the company, in line with what most Fortune 500 institutions are doing. Beyond that, use cases in customer service, risk, and wealth management are advancing, wealth management in particular, though he was careful to note the bank moves thoughtfully rather than aggressively on adoption. The honest answer: less transformation than the headlines suggest, more steady infrastructure work than most people assume.
Why this episode matters for Coquí Ventures
Coquí Ventures exists on a specific bet: that the connective tissue between talented, revenue generating Latino founders and the capital and infrastructure that should reach them is thin, not absent. Alejandro’s story is proof the tissue can be built, one relationship, one program, one branch opening at a time, and proof that even inside a hundred year old institution, someone from Puerto Rico can end up running a global function built explicitly to serve founders who look like the ones we back.
The gap he described on the fund side, tier two through five managers getting squeezed while the market simultaneously gets more comfortable backing international founders, is the exact window Coquí Fund I is built to occupy. Not by competing with JP Morgan. By being the fund that gets a founder ready for that conversation before they ever need it.
Nunca hemos necesitado que alguien nos enseñe a construir. Lo que necesitábamos era que alguien nos abriera la puerta primero. Alejandro está haciendo exactamente eso, desde adentro.
If you are building and thinking about when to cross into the US market, his rule stands: come early, or come late. The middle is where deals go to die in due diligence.
Seguimos 🇵🇷 ,
Angel León, Coquí Ventures
Coquí Notes is the editorial publication of Coquí Ventures, the diaspora platform connecting Boricua founders to community, capital, and the infrastructure that turns ideas into category-defining tech companies.
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