Drew Crawford

Drew Crawford is the founder and Managing Partner of Austral Continental, a cross-border capital advisory firm connecting U.S. institutional investors with industrial and agricultural opportunities in Southern Brazil and MATOPIBA.

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

The Austral Continental thesis is structural. Brazil holds the physical base that will shape the next twenty years of global capital formation: the largest arable-land frontier in the Western Hemisphere, an electrical grid more than eighty-five percent renewable, and critical-mineral endowments the U.S. industrial-policy reboot cannot substitute around. What has been missing is the capital-deployment infrastructure connecting that base to institutional allocators in a form they can underwrite. Austral Continental was built to supply it.

Before founding the firm, Drew spent twelve years traveling Brazil end to end (from the Amazon to the industrial ports of the south, from MATOPIBA to the mineral belt of Minas Gerais, and everywhere in between), building the operating relationships and on-ground context the advisory practice now deploys. He is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish.

His writing on U.S. 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.