In a story brought to our attention by LAVCA, Salesforce Ventures has made its first ever investment in a Latin American startup, leading a US$3.5M seed round in RunaHR. RunaHR is a Mexican payroll automation platform that participated in the Y Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley this year. The platform helps small businesses in Latin America cut their payroll process in half by staying up to date on all essential documents and reports.
After launching just five months ago, RunaHR has been experiencing rapid growth in Mexico. They closed their most recent seed round in April, bringing together an impressive group of backers including the Y Combinator, Salesforce Ventures, the founder of Gmail, the CTO of Dropbox, and several executives of Latin America’s biggest startups including Rappi, Nubank, Cabify, and WeWork Latin America.
According to Runa’s CEO Courney McColgan (former CMO of Cabify), there are 17.5 million small and medium businesses in Latin America, and 4.5 million are in Mexico. The market is wide open for software solutions for the problems that small businesses face.
Runa launched as part of the Y Combinator in January 2018, where they consistently grew by 150% weekly. They are now growing around 50% per month. This investment by Salesforce Ventures marks part of a growing trend of US investors taking an interest in innovative Latin American startups.
Read more in the original press release on LAVCA.