Is Globant South America’s Next IPO?

There tend to be two types of emerging market tech success stories that get ink, venture capital and revenues from the U.S. The first is the so-called “copycat,” most prevalent amid Chinese Internet companies. The other type are the IT outsourcing firms that multinationals hire to handle anything from annoyingly menial to overly-complex techy projects. These companies built much of India’s tech sector. I found an example of each last week in Argentina. Earlier this week, I wrote about MercadoLibre —one of the only Nasdaq traded companies to come out of Latin America and clearly a company that took the copycat route. Conveniently just upstairs from MercadoLibre is Globant, an Argentine company taking the outsourcing route. Globant has cobbled together a $50 million a year (and growing) business that’s something like a mix between edgy-but-small Ideo and big-and-boring Infosys. It’s hard to get excited about an IT outsourcing firm. But Globant is worth watching for six reasons.