Scaling and high growth of innovative firms are popular terms these days. Policymakers and practitioners alike favor these types of companies due to their potential for job and wealth creation and their prospects for superior performance. Scaling is not only limited to for-profit organizations but also applies to ventures that strive to make a social impact (Shepherd & Patzelt, 2022). Despite the popularity of the concept of scaling, academic research has only recently taken off (Palmié et al., 2023).

Due to the emerging nature of the topic in academic literature, there are definitional debates about the different terms used, such as scaling, scalability, and scale-ups (Coviello et al., 2024). Whereas scaling relates to the actual process of rapidly expanding the firm's output through internal transformation, scalability embraces the management and alignment of a company's technological/organizational architecture and its business model. Hence, scalability relates to the organization's capability for delivering the process of scaling. Scale-ups, on the other hand, are considered to be firms in a particular phase of organizational development, where they are actively engaged in scaling. Scale-ups usually grow by replicating their already validated business model (Kohler, 2017). Since scale-up is a phase of organizational development, any type of firm might experience scale-up during their development, independent of their age. Therefore scale-ups might refer to new ventures as well as more established companies. The focus in this chapter is on scale-ups, that is, firms in their scale-up phase.

Scale-ups are a rather recent phenomenon in Latin America, spurred by a surge in venture capital, digitalization and digital entrepreneurship, and the creation of important ecosystems for entrepreneurship and innovation in the region (Andonova et al., 2023). Companies such as Nubank, Uala, Mercado Libre, Kavak, Ubits, and Rappi represent ventures that originated in one of Latin America's countries and rapidly scaled across the region. To the best of my knowledge, no research has been conducted on scale-ups in Latin America. Instead, the focus of attention has been on the growth of so-called Multilatinas (i.e., multinational companies from Latin America), Technolatinas (i.e., technology-based businesses from Latin America), and digital entrepreneurship in Latin America (Andonova et al., 2023; Arroteia & Hafeez, 2021; Hermans et al., 2024). Understanding the drivers and factors that enable scaling of these ventures allows us to generate important insights into their growth trajectories.