Drew Crawford

Drew Crawford is the founder and Managing Partner of Austral Continental, a cross-border capital advisory connecting global institutional capital to Brazilian hard assets across three sectors: agribusiness, critical minerals, and export infrastructure.

He operates from Brazil. The location is deliberate. A firm underwriting Brazilian physical assets on behalf of foreign allocators should operate inside Brazil, on the ground it writes about.

The Austral Continental thesis begins with a currency test that 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 ever sees it. Selecting for dollar-formed revenue removes that cost instead of paying it, and that single filter explains most of what the firm takes and most of what it declines.

The gap it points at is structural. Brazil sold roughly US$149 billion more farm goods to the world last year than it bought back, the widest margin of any country. It holds the second largest rare earth and graphite reserves on earth, behind only China, with one producing rare earth mine to show for it. Close to 88% of its electricity comes from water, wind, sun and sugarcane. Yet the producer who grows the crop earns in dollars and borrows in reais, the mines that would feed the battery industry are still waiting on money, and grain sits in trucks because storage and rail never scaled to the size of the harvest. Each of those is a financing problem wearing a logistics costume, and Austral Continental was built to work them.

Before founding the firm, Drew spent twelve years traveling Brazil end to end, 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. Diligence is performed rather than relayed, in Portuguese, on both sides of the table.

He is the author of The Man Who Brought the Future, a narrative history of Barão de Mauá, the industrialist who built Brazil's first railway, first shipyard and first investment bank before losing nearly all of it. The book is about capital arriving in Brazil ahead of the institutions needed to hold it, which is a version of the same problem the firm works on now.

His writing on global and Brazilian capital flows is organized around five pillars. His Brazilian investment thesis was read by more than one million investors worldwide in 2026 and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal (U.S.), Exame (Brazil), and El Economista (Argentina). He writes continuously in English on X and in Brazilian Portuguese on LinkedIn.

Drew is a Corporate member of the Brazil-U.S. Business Council (BrazilCham) and a member of Amcham Santa Catarina.