CORFO Semilla Launches and Expands: What They Ask For and How to Apply

CORFO is the Chilean state-run corporation responsible for administering a significant portion of subsidies for entrepreneurship and innovation. Within its offerings, “Semilla Inicia” and “Semilla Expande” are the two most frequently used contests by early-stage startups, and also the ones that receive the most rejected applications due to technical deficiencies.

What is each fund?

The exact amounts and co-financing percentages vary from call to call; in recent competitions, the published range has reached up to $15 and $25 million pesos, depending on the line and stage. Before starting any application process, the first step is to review the current regulations on corfo.cl, as they are updated several times a year.

Why so many applicants are rejected.

In our experience supporting applications, the most common reason for rejection isn't the business idea itself; it’s a product development plan that fails to withstand a technical question from the evaluator. Organizations like CORFO explicitly request a development milestone schedule, and a technically-minded evaluator quickly identifies when that schedule was created by someone who has never built software.

The three items a serious file requires.

1. Business model. It’s not enough to simply describe the product; you need to demonstrate how it generates revenue and what the associated costs are.
2. Product development plan. Specific technical milestones, with realistic dates and an architecture that someone on the evaluation team can understand without relying on marketing jargon.
3. Projection of fund usage. Each peso of the subsidy must be justified against a specific activity within the plan, not as a generic “development” amount.

Where does technical support enter?

The reason many founders seek assistance with this application isn’t about the writing itself, but rather about ensuring technical consistency. A Support for CORFO Semilla Created by a team that also builds software, this approach offers a distinct advantage: the proposed development plan is the same one that will be implemented if the project is awarded by the fund, not an optimistic version designed to persuade a panel.

A realistic schedule, not an optimistic one.

A common mistake is to copy schedules from other successful projects without adjusting them to reflect the actual size of the available team. If a plan states that something will be built in three months, tested with users, and launched commercially with a team of just one part-time person, any experienced technical evaluator will flag it as unrealistic. It’s preferable to have a more conservative schedule and achieve it, rather than an ambitious one that falls apart in the first evaluation.

What happens after a property is awarded/assigned?

Winning the grant is just the beginning, not the end. It’s necessary to sign the agreement, execute the project according to the agreed-upon schedule, and submit expenses in accordance with what has been approved. Many projects awarded by Semilla Inicia, which don’t have their own technical team, often end up subcontracting development to ensure they meet the schedule; resolving this beforehand prevents this kind of rush.

How to choose between “Start” and “Expand”

The question that resolves the uncertainty isn’t “which pays more,” but “what do I need to demonstrate today.” If you’re still unsure whether the market wants what you’re building, Semilla Inicia is the right tool: it’s designed to finance that stage of uncertainty, before there’s a business with sales. If you already have customers paying and the bottleneck is capacity, equipment, or infrastructure to handle more demand, Semilla Expande is a better fit, because its evaluation requires evidence that the model is already working.

Proposing a project for the wrong funding stage is a common mistake: an evaluator for “Expande” will request traction metrics that a project in the “Initiate” stage simply doesn’t have yet, and the initial proposal becomes significantly weaker as a result.

Documents that are good to have prepared before starting.

Although each call for proposals outlines its own specific requirements in the guidelines, there’s a core element that’s consistently repeated: identification of the partners or applicant, the company’s legal history if it’s already established, a description of the team and their roles, and a detailed breakdown of the project budget. Having these items organized before starting to write the development plan saves days of back-and-forth, as a significant portion of the time spent preparing a dossier is dedicated to gathering documents, not on developing the strategy.

Before applying

If you don’t yet have an MVP built and evaluating Semilla Inicia, it might be beneficial to go through it first. validation sessionA business plan supported by actual interviews with potential clients carries more weight with an evaluator than one based solely on assumptions. If you already have traction and are targeting Semilla Expande, the focus shifts to demonstrating with data that the business is functioning and that the fund is intended to scale it, not to determine if it makes sense. In either of these cases, the documentation presented is as strong as the technical plan behind it, and that’s not something that’s cobbled together at the last minute before the application deadline.