Pomelo, a fintech founded by former Mercado Pago, Mastercard, and Naranja X executives, raised $35M – one of the largest Series A rounds in Latin America and just five months after announcing their $10M seed round.
This round was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from monashees, Index Ventures, Insight, QED, SciFi, Greyhound, and Box Group, as well as the founders of Affirm, Checkout, N26, Plaid, and Ramp, among others.
“The financial services infrastructure in Latam is completely obsolete and highly fragmented. Each market has its own regulation and nuances, and legacy providers offer poor technology at expensive prices. Most founders and technical teams are frustrated with the status quo and can’t scale their products fast enough given the lack of regional solutions,” explained Gaston Irigoyen, CEO & Co-Founder of Pomelo.
The founders suffered from this problem firsthand while building Mercado Pago and Naranja X and are now eager to solve it by creating a new, regional payments infrastructure.
Pomelo enables fintechs and other tech companies to embed financial services into their business through its API platform. This allows the company to build compliant onboarding processes, launch virtual accounts that are connected to the local financial systems, and issue debit and credit cards throughout the region.
The fintech also does most of the regulatory heavy lifting on behalf of their customers, allowing them to accelerate their time to market and focus on their value proposition.
“LatAm’s tech scene is booming and some emerging startups are transforming entire industries […] We are now excited to partner with Pomelo given their unique perspective about LatAm, their vision for a new regional fintech infrastructure, and a strong team capable of executing with the highest standards,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global Management.
With this round of funding, Pomelo is launching operations in Brazil and Mexico, in addition to Argentina, where they currently operate.
The company will also continue expanding its team, having already hired over 100 fintech experts in less than six months, and plans to hire an additional 150 employees to accelerate its product roadmap and business development efforts.
