We are back with Ewa’s Eight.
At EWA Capital, we believe the most interesting ideas don’t come from pitch decks or boardrooms.
They come from the questions that make us pause, reflect, and reveal what truly drives us.
Ewa’s Eight is our micro-interview series designed to do exactly that.
Each edition features eight unconventional questions answered by the people shaping the future of Latin America—founders, investors, operators, and ecosystem builders we’re proud to back.
No jargon. No recycled talking points.
Just honest insights and unexpected stories that highlight the human side of venture capital in one of the world’s most dynamic regions.
This month, we sat down with Valentina Valencia, CEO at Vaas.
We asked her eight questions about how she think, build, and see the future of Latin America.
1. What is a belief you hold about your industry of work that most people think is wrong?
Most people in private credit think the bottleneck is capital. It's not. There's plenty of capital. The real bottleneck is trustable data about assets. Everyone talks about deploying capital faster, tokenization, private credit replacing banks… but if you can't actually verify the assets, documents, ownership, and cash flows in real time, then the whole thing is built on fragile spreadsheets and legal assumptions. Private credit doesn't scale because verification infrastructure doesn't exist yet.
2. What is a shift happening in Latin America that the rest of the world hasn’t noticed yet?
Latin America is quietly becoming one of the most important testing grounds for next-generation capital markets infrastructure. Not because the region is ahead—but because it never built the heavy legacy systems the U.S. did. In many cases we're building capital markets infrastructure almost from scratch: digital trusts, structured credit for fintechs, API-driven servicing, cross-border asset financing. So ironically, places like Mexico or Colombia might leapfrog older systems faster than developed markets.
3. What are the trade-offs you navigate most often in your work - and how do you think about it?
The biggest one is speed vs institutional trust. Startups want speed: "Just close the deal." "Let's move fast." But the institutions we work with—banks, DFIs, funds—operate on trust, documentation, and process. So a lot of my job is figuring out how to move fast without breaking the credibility layer. You can't shortcut trust in capital markets. But you can engineer systems that make trust scalable
4. What is a questions that you wish founder/investors would ask you - but rarely do?
Most people ask: "How big can this market be?" I wish more people asked: "What infrastructure is missing that would unlock the entire market?" Because the biggest opportunities aren't new products. They're missing layers of infrastructure that make the whole ecosystem work better. In private credit, verification and servicing are two of those layers.
5. What have you become more curious about in the last six months?
I've become much more curious about how AI interacts with financial infrastructure. Not just chatbots or copilots, but systems that can actually interpret contracts, verify documents, reconcile cash flows, and monitor assets autonomously. Finance is full of unstructured data, legal rules, and repetitive processes. That's exactly the kind of environment where AI agents could transform operations. So the question I keep thinking about is: what does a capital market look like when verification is automated?
6. What is something that you’ve let go of recently that made you better at what you do?
The idea that the company has to build everything itself. In the early days I thought the way to win was to build the best product internally. Now I think the real advantage comes from building ecosystems and partnerships—with lenders, trustees, banks, and even competitors. Infrastructure companies don't win alone. They win by becoming the layer everyone plugs into.
7. If someone shadowed you for 24 hours, what part of your day would surprised them the most?
Probably how much time I spend thinking about systems instead of deals. People assume running a company in finance is constant negotiation or sales. But a lot of my day is stepping back and asking questions like: What is the underlying structure of this market? Where is the friction? What infrastructure layer is missing? Because if you solve the right structural problem, thousands of deals become easier automatically.
8. What personal habit or practice gives you an advantage?
Curiosity combined with pattern recognition. I spend a lot of time looking at how different systems work—finance, technology, regulation, even history—and trying to see patterns across them. Sometimes the best ideas come from connecting things that normally live in different worlds. A lot of Vaas came from that: seeing capital markets, software infrastructure, and verification as one system instead of three separate industries.
To learn more about Vaas and their work, visit www.getvaas.com.