LatamList – Pomelo, an Argentine fintech, announced a $1M seed extension round led by Sequoia, a Silicon Valley-based VC firm. Angel investor Guillaume Pousaz, CEO and founder of Checkout.com, also contributed to the extension round.
Pomelo is a B2B fintech-as-a-service startup that enables fintechs and embedded finance providers to launch virtual accounts and issue prepaid and credit cards via “compliant” onboarding processes.
“All these companies (Nubank, Creditas, MercadoPago) were creative for customers, but they were creative on top of legacy and old infrastructure; that’s highly fragmented in every market. So now we want to work on that and build one unique fintech infrastructure for all Latin America,” said Gastón Irigoyen, co-founder and CEO of Pomelo.
Pomelo raised a $9M seed round in May 2021 from Monashees, Index Ventures, QED, and various other investors. The total seed funding is $10M.
“Pomelo is building a new-age financial services infrastructure that will enable fintech in Latin America,” said Sonya Huang, partner at Sequoia.
The deal is Sequoia’s first new investments in the region since Managing Partner Doug Leone confirmed that the firm will now focus on Latin America, specifically in early stage and IPO investments.
Pomelo will focus on making around 50 new hires in sales, marketing, product management, and engineering in its offices across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.
Read more on LABS.