Rooted in the region that shaped us
Same builders, next wave.
Fitz Roy, El Chaltén
Same builders, next wave.
Fitz Roy, El Chaltén
Why we started.
Latin America is a powerhouse in the making, and fintech is one of the engines that can unlock it. AI needs semiconductors and data centers, and we are ready to host them. That alone sets us up to grow fast, economically and socially. It helps that we have always been a region that backs the entrepreneur: governments have changed, currencies have changed, and through all of it the builder has been welcome here. The infrastructure upgrades, the digital banks, the real-time payments and modern rails are already in place. So this is where I choose to spend my time now: building and backing the technologies that let us keep growing, innovating and learning, even when everything around us is changing.
In 2022, after finally achieving with Technisys what had always felt out of reach, the entrepreneurial life was suddenly over. Twenty-five years of constant movement, then a house, a couch, and the question every founder dreads: what now?
At first it felt nice, even deserved. But I'm not the kind of person who can wake up late and play golf all day, a state I've come to call brain stagnation. For people like me, retirement isn't a reward.
So I started angel investing and got back into the community: panels, founder events, the energy of people trying to create change. One of those early bets is now a strong portfolio company. Around that time my son, Mateo, came to me with an idea. The idea, which he insists I had been hammering into him since he was a kid, was that the Technisys playbook could be replicated across Latin America. Decades of operator experience, hard-earned lessons, and an inside understanding of how the region's fintech really works: that is our edge.
I never expected to walk into venture capital. I'm a builder, not a finance guy. So I told him: quit your job, move to Miami, and get to work.
We built PERSEA the way we know best, the entrepreneurial way. Bootstrapped, scrappy, hungry. We crashed the Ferrari more than once, and each time we came back sharper. Structuring an institutional fund around an operator mindset forced us to grow new heads: better partners to founders, better students of risk, better translators between the world of operators and the world of capital.
This is not a family business. It's the same bug, inherited.
— Mateo Pugliese Bassi