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WILL THEY FIND YOU?
What Established Caribbean Businesses Are Missing About the Founders Ready to Work With Them


By Jeffrey Faustin


LINKAGE Q2 (2026) - IMPACT
At this year’s Tech Hub Islands Summit, I asked a room of senior executives a simple question: when the Caribbean’s most promising founders look for established businesses to work with, will they find yours?
Across the region, a new generation of founders is building tools that could help established businesses serve customers better and respond more effectively to change. The opportunity already exists. The more important question is whether businesses have made themselves easy to find and easy to work with when the right founder comes looking.
Many established businesses still think of themselves primarily as buyers of innovation, waiting for new technology to mature before deciding whether it deserves their attention. That framing is becoming outdated. Founders are not only building products to sell to large companies. They are also looking for partners that can solve their business problems.
The businesses that benefit most will not necessarily be the biggest names in the room. They will be the ones founders recognise as capable of turning a promising conversation into a practical partnership.
Innovation is moving faster and coming from different places
Innovation has always helped established businesses stay ahead. What has changed is the speed at which it can achieve this and where it is likely to come from.
For almost every business, whether it thinks of itself as a technology company or not, innovation increasingly involves technology adoption. AI is accelerating that shift. Founders can now prototype and test tools in days or weeks that would once have required larger teams and longer development cycles.
Few established businesses will consistently replicate that pace internally. Much of the innovation that shapes growth over the next five years may come from outside traditional corporate research and development, from founders already building solutions around problems that established organisations understand well.
This does not mean internal teams, consultancies and enterprise software providers no longer have a role. Founders offer a different route. They often want to build alongside a business rather than simply sell to it, testing ideas quickly, adapting them around real operating conditions and developing the product through direct feedback.
Early partnerships can provide insight into new ways of solving familiar problems. Businesses that learn how to work with founders can improve their own performance while gaining a clearer view of where their industry is heading.
The Caribbean’s own numbers tell the story
A November 2025 study commissioned by IDB Lab found that the Caribbean accounts for less than 1% of total venture-capital deal volume across Latin America and the Caribbean. The study described the region’s venture ecosystem as nascent or emerging, with limited investment and fragmented support.
That is not a reflection of a shortage of talent or ambition. Founders are emerging across the region, and digital tools make it possible to build and serve customers across borders from an earlier stage. AI is reducing the time and cost required to test ideas. Regional and diaspora networks are creating new routes to expertise, customers and capital.
The gap between founder capability and the institutional support around it will not remain static. Through my work investing in early-stage Caribbean B2B technology companies, I see founders building with greater speed.
Established businesses have a window to position themselves early. The companies being built and backed today will be looking for enterprise partners within years, not decades.
Founders need more than funding
The same IDB Lab study offers an important clue about what founders want. Among those surveyed, 72.5% identified strategic partnerships as an area where they needed support, while 70% identified support with market expansion.
That should attract the attention of every established business in the region. Founders are not simply looking for cheques. They need organisations that can help them understand an industry, test a proposition, access customers and build credibility. An established business can provide all of these things, sometimes through a relatively small pilot or commercial partnership.
This is not simply about supporting the regional start-up ecosystem. It is a commercial growth strategy. The right founder relationship can give a company earlier access to solutions and market intelligence that improve its own performance.
Trinidad and Tobago’s established businesses are particularly well positioned to play this role. They hold deep expertise across varied sectors. They also have relationships and operating experience that can help a young company move from a promising idea to a credible regional business.
What readiness actually looks like
Being findable is not the same as being visible. A website, LinkedIn page and well-known brand do not, on their own, tell a founder that a business is genuinely open to working with them.
Readiness starts with a clear, named point of contact rather than routing every approach through a generic inbox. It means having someone with enough authority to recognise a credible opportunity and move it forward.
It also means creating a route for small, limited pilots. A useful test is whether a credible founder can identify the right person in your organisation, secure an initial discussion, agree a focused pilot and navigate your procurement process without the process taking longer than the technology itself took to build.
Readiness does not mean abandoning governance, cybersecurity, due diligence or procurement discipline. Those safeguards are essential, particularly in regulated or operationally sensitive sectors. It means applying them proportionately, so that a credible two-person company is not automatically excluded by processes designed for multinational suppliers.
Leadership is equally important. Someone senior must be willing to give an early-stage company a genuine hearing and assess the idea on its merits. At board level, partnerships with founders should be understood as a route to growth and learning, not simply as a side project for an innovation team.
The strongest partnerships often begin before a founder’s proposition is fully mature. Early enterprise partners help define the problem, test the solution and shape a product around the realities of their market. In return, they gain access that later customers rarely receive.
The question worth sitting with
None of this requires every business to establish a venture fund or create a large innovation department. It requires a change in posture, from seeing the organisation only as a buyer waiting to be pitched to, to making it a place where credible founders would genuinely want to build.
Businesses that make that shift now will have greater choice among the Caribbean companies being built and funded. They will also have more opportunity to shape solutions around their own markets and learn before their competitors do.
Businesses that wait may still be able to buy the technology later. What they may lose is the chance to influence it, build the relationship early and create an advantage while the opportunity is still taking shape.
So the question is not whether this wave of innovation is coming. It is already here. The question is whether, when the right founders start looking for the right partner, they will find you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Faustin is Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Jenson Ventures, a London-baseLondon-based venture capital firm, and Co-Founder of Caribbean Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing the next generation of technology companies across the Caribbean region. With over twelve years of experience in venture capital and early-stage investing, he leads the full investment process from deal sourcing and due diligence through to structuring, negotiation, and portfolio support. He has directed more than 150 early-stage investments across artificial intelligence, fintech, digital platforms, and sustainable technology, and supported twelve exits. Jeffrey has built and designed funds and portfolios tailored to specific business and fund outcomes, and sits on the boards of more than 25 portfolio companies, where he advises founders on growth strategy and governance. He holds an MBA from London Business School and an MSc in Engineering.