Now more than 150 years later, BBVA has pooled together a $100 million fund to invest in startups that are developing technology for the financial services industry.

BBVA Ventures is an initiative to help this international banking conglomerate tap into the innovation happening in Silicon Valley. The team is establishing ties with entrepreneurs, startups, incubator and accelerator programs, and investors, and it will make strategic investments in both startups and other funds.

“Investing in startup companies committed to new business models enables BBVA to learn and anticipate the emerging challenges facing the financial services sector,” said executive director Jay Reinemann in a statement. “What’s more, entrepreneurs and co-investors can leverage BBVA’s extensive experience, brand, and global distribution network in the financial sector to accelerate their growth. This is an exchange of knowledge that significantly enhances the capabilities of the bank and the potential financial returns for our co-investors, while at the same time providing the entrepreneurs who lead the innovation processes access to BBVA’s valuable strategic resources.”

The goal is to improve internal awareness of new technologies and the opportunities therein. BBVA Ventures made its first investment in early 2012 in 500 Startups, a well-known incubator program led by Dave McClure. 500 Startups has made a number of investments in financial startups, including Simple, inDinero, PeerTransfer, and WePay. Ribbit Capital, which just yesterday announced a new $100 million investment fund for financial services startups, also received BBVA Ventures money, as did SaveUp is a startup that partners with financial institutions to apply gaming techniques to encourage savings, debt reduction and financial education.

BBVA is short for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA. The multinational Spanish banking group is the largest financial institution in Mexico and has franchises in South America and the “Sunbelt” region of the United States. Read the press release.

Both North and South of the border, students struggle with math and science education, and startups are swooping in with technology that can help them learn.

Tareasplus, an online education portal for the Spanish-speaking world, has raised $1.8 million. The company offers thousands of video lessons on math and science subjects for kindergarten all the way through early college.

Its library contains instruction on basic math, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, statistics, and more. The calculus section alone has 300 videos, each dedicated to a particular concept or lesson. The tutorials generally last between 9 and 12 minutes and are designed to supplement the learning students do in the classroom.

“Right now, more than half of students in Latin America do not develop the minimum skills needed to function in mathematics,” said founder and CEO Hernan Jaramillo. “One key reason these skills are falling behind in Latin America is due to resources. 88% of primary schools in Latin America don’t have science labs, and 40% have no libraries. The students and teachers are bright and hard workers, but many just lack the resources to make the grade.”

The content is produced and developed in Spanish by a network of subject specialists. The site averages 36,000 visitors a day from all over the world, though most users are in Colombia, Mexico, and Chile. The founders were both born in Medellin, Colombia, and have advanced math and science degrees, as well as experience in entrepreneurship.

“Roberto Cuartas and I met while we were studying engineering in college,” Jaramillo said. “We were both tutoring kids to pay our way through school. From our tutoring, we discovered that if we were simply able to “unrestrict” the time it took our students to learn a specific lesson, we could get them to master it. This, paired with the massive distribution capabilities of YouTube, allowed us to produce and replicate our individual tutoring efforts with the highest possible scale.”

Despite targeting the Latin American market, Tareasplus is based in San Francisco to be at the center of the technology (and venture capital) community. The company has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from Academic Partnerships, an organization that helps public universities extend their reach through technology. It will use the investment to expand the platform.