When three young entrepreneurs decided to start an online marketplace in Argentina in 1999, their chances seemed slim. Only a select few had access to the internet and money was scarce. “There were no local venture-capital firms, and international ones wouldn’t even look at Latin America,” says Marcos Galperin, one of the founders. In 2001 the trio met an investor in Silicon Valley who looked at their sales and asked if the figures were in “millions or billions”. They were in thousands.

Two decades later, during the pandemic, their online shop, MercadoLibre (“free market”), became the highest-valued company in Latin America, surpassing Petro bras, Brazil’s state oil firm, and Vale, a mining giant. Although it has since fallen behind both, MercadoLibre remains the region’s startup success story, valued at $59bn. It was big before covid-19, but as people stayed at home it got a boost: in some countries new orders more than doubled between 2019 and 2020.

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