ANII's Innovative Entrepreneurship Support Programme

ANII (Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación) is Uruguay's national innovation agency, created in 2006 as a non-state public body headquartered in Montevideo. Alongside research funding and postgraduate scholarships, it runs entrepreneurship instruments including grants of up to UYU 160,000 (about US$5,100) to validate early business ideas and up to UYU 800,000 (about US$25,000) to cover up to 80% of the cost of innovative products or services for startups.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study by Bukstein, Hernández and Usher, published in the Journal of Technology Management & Innovation, found that firms receiving ANII entrepreneurship support leveraged an additional 195% in private investment on top of the public grant — meaning supported firms invested nearly twice ANII's contribution from their own resources, evidence the funding crowds in rather than substitutes for private capital.

An earlier 2013 evaluation of ANII's entrepreneurship subsidies found that, among companies still operating three years after receiving support, every dollar ANII invested returned twelve dollars in revenue. That cost-benefit ratio, however, applies only to the subset of firms that survived — neither study reports the overall three-year survival rate itself, leaving an important gap in the public evidence base.

Operating nationally from Montevideo, ANII is regularly referenced by regional bodies such as Uruguay XXI and the Inter-American Development Bank as part of Uruguay's positioning as an emerging Latin American startup hub, giving its entrepreneurship instruments a longer and more rigorously evaluated track record than most comparable national schemes in the region.

Read the full analysis: https://anii.org.uy/