Austral Continental Contact
Austral
Continental
Cross-border capital advisory.
Global capital for Brazilian hard assets.
Capital para o que o Brasil produz
Practice
We advise on and participate in transactions that connect global capital with Brazilian producers, miners, and the infrastructure that moves what they make.
Austral Continental is a principal-led merchant advisory practice working three sectors: agribusiness, critical minerals, and export infrastructure. Mid-market transactions, a few at a time, with our own capital committed alongside our investors where the deal merits it.
One test comes before all others. The asset has to earn in dollars, whether by international price, by contract, or by export receivable. A hedge on real-denominated returns costs roughly eight points a year and eats the return before an investor sees it. Selecting for dollar-formed revenue removes that cost instead of paying it, and that filter explains most of what we take and most of what we decline.
Our work is built on bilateral trust: fluency in both languages, both cultures of capital, and both sides of the table.
Disciplines
Capital Advisory
Connecting Brazilian mid-market companies with global institutional capital: equity, credit, and structured solutions.
Co-Investment
Selective principal participation alongside institutional partners in transactions where our conviction and relationships add value.
Deal Origination
Proprietary sourcing through direct relationships with Brazilian producers, operators and industrial families, against a written filter and a documented collateral standard.
Strategic Intelligence
Ground-level insight on cross-border capital dynamics, regulatory environment, and sector-specific operating conditions.
Mandate
Three sectors, one corridor.
Everything we take sits on the path of goods leaving Brazil, and everything on that path earns in dollars. The same soybean is financed as a crop, hauled on the infrastructure, and loaded beside mineral concentrate at the same terminal. One relationship works three times.
US$149B
Agribusiness
Brazil's farm trade surplus last year, the widest margin of any country. Our mandate runs the full chain rather than the farm gate: production credit, storage, planted forestry, and the crushers, gins and mills that turn a crop into a product before it leaves.
2nd
Critical Minerals
Second largest rare earth and graphite reserves on earth, behind only China, with one producing rare earth mine to show for it. Reserves are geology and mines are finance, and Brazil has never been short on geology.
Export Infrastructure
Brazil stores only about two thirds of the grain it grows, so trucks become silos and producers sell at harvest when the price is worst. Storage, transshipment, rail to the northern arc, and port capacity are where that gap closes.
Corridor
Brazil earns in dollars and borrows in reais. That gap is the business.
Soy, coffee, cotton, sugar, beef and iron ore all price in dollars on exchanges in Chicago and London. The producer who grows them borrows locally in reais, mostly at market rates, since the Treasury subsidizes only a fraction of the credit the government announces. The same split runs through the mines and the rails.
Nobody built the bridge between the two. Every gap in this corridor is a financing problem wearing a logistics costume.
1st
Net food exporter
on earth
88%
Of electricity from
renewable sources
1st
Wood pulp exporter
on earth
Why Brazil is the greatest asymmetric
bet on earth.
Supply chains are fracturing. Energy chokepoints are contested. Critical mineral bans are multiplying. Our investment thesis sets out the structural advantages that make Brazil irreplaceable, and why the repricing is accelerating.
Read the Investment Thesis
Contact
Serious inquiries
are welcome.
[email protected]
Brazil
Florianópolis · Curitiba · São Paulo
Coverage
Americas · Europe · Gulf
Principal
Drew Crawford, Managing Partner, Austral Continental
Managing Partner
Drew Crawford
Drew Crawford is the founder and Managing Partner of Austral Continental. He has spent twelve years on the ground in Brazil, across sixteen states, fifty cities and hundreds of companies, from the Amazon to the industrial ports of the south, from MATOPIBA to the mineral belt of Minas Gerais.
He operates from Brazil, is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish, and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal (U.S.), Exame (Brazil), and El Economista (Argentina). He is the author of The Man Who Brought the Future, a narrative history of Barão de Mauá.
Read full biography →
Keynote
Brazil Week, Harvard Club of New York
May 2026. Before an audience of U.S. institutional allocators, Brazilian executives, and the governors of Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais.
Disclosures
Securities are offered through Finalis Securities LLC Member FINRA / SIPC. Austral Continental is not a registered broker-dealer, and Finalis Securities LLC and Austral Continental are separate, unaffiliated entities.
australcontinental.com (the "Austral Continental Website") is a website operated by Austral Continental Consultoria Empresarial Ltda, a privately held Brazilian sociedade limitada unipessoal (CNPJ 66.505.730/0001-52). Austral Continental provides financial and strategic consulting services, mergers and acquisitions services, fairness opinions, and related advisory work.
Disclaimer: This website is for informational purposes only, is not an offer, solicitation, recommendation, or commitment for any transaction or to buy or sell any security or other financial product, and is not intended as investment advice or as a confirmation of any transaction. Products and services on this website may not be available for residents of certain jurisdictions. Please consult with a Finalis Securities' registered representative regarding the product or service in question for further information. Investments involve risk and are not guaranteed to appreciate. Any market price, indicative value, estimate, view, opinion, data, or other information herein is not warranted as to completeness or accuracy, is subject to change without notice, and Austral Continental along with Finalis Securities LLC accepts no liability for its use or to update it or keep it current.