News & insights
Portfolio announcements, fund updates and what we're seeing in LatAm fintech.
Monserrate, Bogotá
Portfolio announcements, fund updates and what we're seeing in LatAm fintech.
Monserrate, BogotáAgencia Reforma on the launch in Mexico City: an AI built for regulated finance, with humans as commanders of the digital agents.
El Tiempo on the international card that gives back the equivalent of the 4×1000 tax in digital dollars, as Lemon builds its Colombian operation.
A conversational copilot that answers questions 24/7, analyzes portfolios across stocks, crypto and real estate, and teaches as it goes.
PERSEA participated alongside F-Prime and ParaFi as Lemon expands across Argentina and Peru.
Milenio on the fintech whose network can already reach 63% of the city's corner stores.
El Financiero on the fintech already serving 15,000 tienditas across Mexico with instant credit at restock.
Alexia Ventures and Endeavor's Scale-Up Ventures join the round as N5 reaches 18 countries.
Forbes Uruguay on the founder's pre-seed round and his plan to take AI workflow automation for banks to Chile, Argentina and Mexico.
Before we invest, we argue. Five or six investment committees per company, and the questions are always the same: how did we meet them, what do they know that we don't, what would we do if it were ours, and what breaks. The Why? is that conversation, written down after the fact. We just want to share our reasons with you.
We met Chelo at a Peruvian restaurant in Wynwood. It was one of our nights for Endeavor entrepreneurs, at Mantra, and Marcelo Cavazzoli ended up across the table from Germán talking about what comes after Argentina. Lemon hadn't even launched in Peru yet. He was already on Colombia.
Chelo has been building software since he was twelve, and he had this idea before it was fashionable: in a country where the peso loses value by design, crypto isn't a gamble, it's the only savings account most people can get. He built Lemon around that in 2019. When the crypto winter came in 2022 he cut the team hard, kept shipping, and three years later Fidelity's venture arm led his next round. We talk a lot about founders who can take a punch. That night in Wynwood we were sitting with one.
What stayed with us wasn't the numbers. It was that Lemon shows its users, live, that the money is there, in a region where banks have always asked for trust without earning it. Chelo built a company people believe, and then he took it to Peru and a million people believed it there too. That's the founder we wanted to walk the rest of the region with.
Germán saw N5's product for the first time and said, more or less on the spot, "It's Technisys, ten times better." From the man who co-founded Technisys, that is not a compliment you hear often.
Julián Colombo has been inside this problem for twenty years. In 2010 he was on stage at Santander's global technology summit demoing a CRM for banks; in 2017 he started N5 and ran it for five years on almost no outside money, growing it on what it earned. He knows what a bank's Monday morning looks like from the inside, and he built the thing he wished he'd had.
The moment it clicked for us was Paraguay. N5 arrived with no advantage, signed one bank, and within two years most of the country's banks were running on it, each one pulling in the next. We'd lived that story before, market by market, at Technisys. Julián doesn't need an introduction to the banks of Latin America. He needs someone who has already been in every one of those rooms, and that we can be.
Propaga was the first company we ever called first. We heard about it, saw that it landed squarely on our thesis, and picked up the phone before they had come to us. When an investor calls the founder, the roles are reversed from the usual pitch, and we meant it that way.
Michael Seidl and Santiago Creixell are going after something every Mexican knows and no bank has touched: the tiendita on the corner restocks on cash, and cash is exactly what it doesn't have on a Tuesday. There are more than a million of these stores in Mexico and most have never held formal credit, even though they're where the country actually buys its milk. Michael and Santiago decided the credit should show up at the one moment it matters, when the delivery truck is at the door, and that the shopkeeper should never have to visit a branch to get it.
What convinced us was the simplicity of it. Pay the supplier in fifteen days; the supplier is paid today; Propaga stands in the middle. They call it the financial shield of the tiendita, and when we say on our Thesis page that the region's problem is supply, not demand, this is the picture in our heads.
The first thing we ever knew about Diego Cibils was what it's like to work with him. He was at Technisys before he founded Kona, and then we found out what it's like to buy what he builds: Technisys acquired Kona too. So before Neuratek existed, we had two opinions about the founder, both good.
Diego spent fifteen years in the industry, some of them at Bank of America, and his real talent is people: his CTO built at Technisys and Galileo, his commercial lead spent sixteen years at Itaú, and the advisors around them read like a Technisys alumni list because that's what they are. Neuratek didn't land in our portfolio by accident. It grew out of the same network we grew out of.
The problem he picked is one every banker admits to over a drink: half the critical work in a bank is still done by hand, everyone knows AI is the answer, and nobody wants to break the core to get it. Diego's answer turns a week of compliance paperwork into three minutes, inside the bank's own walls. Now he's taking it to Chile and Mexico, and those are doors we know how to open.
This one we didn't find. We started it.
Lucero Vázquez González spent her career inside compliance at Citibanamex, which means she knows what a regulator's request looks like at six on a Friday evening. She didn't come to us with a pitch deck; she came with a process she had lived and a conviction that it could be fixed. We built the company around her, together. We're co-founders, not just investors, and Germán is the COO.
The problem is bigger than it sounds. Mexico's financial institutions answer to the CNBV, Banxico, Condusef and more, thousands of pages of rules that change without warning, and most institutions still keep track of it all in spreadsheets and email. One missed obligation is a fine; a pattern of them is a reputation. Lucero is turning the most regulated, least automated job in the bank into something a team can actually control. Founders to Funders, and in her case, back again.
We met the BullGround founders at 401, the community and accelerator in Miami for Latin American founders expanding into the United States. Germán and Mateo were giving a talk on taking LatAm companies north, which is the road our whole Thesis is built on, and Leonardo Vilchis, Sebastián Arjona and Miguel Pueblita were in the room, already walking it.
They're building for someone we know personally: the Latin American in the United States who invests without help, because nobody ever offered them a fiduciary adviser in their own language. Millions of people, on both sides of the border, managing real wealth with no one on their side of the table. Leo, Sebastián and Miguel decided to be that someone, in Spanish, with a fiduciary duty, and with the discipline of an SEC-registered adviser behind it.
Their word for it is clarity before wealth, and it's the right order. Show someone everything they own in one place, answer their questions at any hour, teach them while you do it, and the rest follows. It's our newest investment and the one with the longest road ahead, which is exactly why it's ours.
Once a month: what we're seeing in Latin American fintech, and news from the builders we back. No noise.
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