LatamList – Village Capital, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups, announced the twelve fintech startups selected to participate in the Finance Forward Latin America 2020 accelerator. The program is a collaboration between Village Capital, MetLife Foundation, PayPal, and Moody’s to support entrepreneurs building tech-enabled solutions to challenges around financial health.
The selected startups will experience five weeks of training and mentorship focused on improving their business models and making their solutions available to those who need them most in the current economic climate. The top two-pier selected startups will be eligible to receive $50K each in grant funding, and the third to fifth best-ranked will receive $16K also in grant funding from MetLife Foundation.
“The coronavirus pandemic has had devastating financial effects on low-income populations in Latin America. Now more than ever, tech-driven innovation can be at the forefront of helping small businesses stay afloat, families manage their income, and the region embark on what is bound to be a challenging recovery,” said Daniel Cossío, Regional Manager for Village Capital Latin America. “We are excited to support these twelve startups that have innovative solutions to some of the region’s most important challenges in five different countries.”
The final cohort is composed of twelve startups from five different countries including Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. And over 80% of the selected startups have one or more female founders.
Here are the twelve selected startups for the 2020 cohort of Finance Forward Latin America:
- Akredito (Brazil) pays, consolidates, and refinances all debts of a defaulter whose registration at credit bureaus prevents him/her from getting a job, requesting another credit, and more.
- Aplazo (Mexico) allows consumers in Mexico to split e-commerce purchases in equal biweekly installments without needing a credit card and avoiding the debt trap.
- CIGE Mexico (Mexico) offers an AI solution that guarantees entrepreneurs advisory to manage their business, as 80% of the SMEs in Latin America go into bankruptcy within the first two years of operations.
- Creci (Colombia) furthers financial inclusion and social impact goals by providing credit facilities to MSMEs that are furthering at least one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Through a simple and easy-to-use online tool, Creci helps its clients identify and report their impact, with the goal of capturing and profiling impact statistics across its portfolio to better attract capital resources for SMEs furthering social impact.
- Corresponsales Digitales Imix (Colombia) enables small local businesses to become a banking correspondent, by turning the business owners into banking services providers and allowing financial institutions to have a wider reach at a lower cost.
- DRUBER / ZIZU (Argentina) is a card-to-card remittance service for Argentine families that allows them to control the remittances issued in other countries, and to give families the security of an income, using the least amount of cash transactions possible.
- Factcil (Colombia) seeks to provide liquidity with factoring services to all those self-employed or freelancers. Because of the lack of job stability in people’s profiles, it is often difficult to find entities that can give them the needed resources to be financially healthy.
- Finerio (Mexico) helps fintechs, banks, and financial institutions update their services and process their data into useful insights for catalyzing their clients’ financial wellbeing.
- Fundefir (Colombia) gives the unbanked individuals the opportunity to access credits, insurance and other wellbeing services. Its goal is to promote financial services in segments that are used to instruments such as ROSCAs (Rotating Saving and Credit Associations) and to provide a benefit on its digitization.
- Nilus (Argentina) rescues healthy food that would otherwise be thrown away and delivers it to low-income neighbors, at discounted prices.
- Quipu Market (Colombia) is an e-commerce marketplace for informal micro-businesses to buy and sell locally without cash and using a community token system.
- U-Zave (Chile) helps Latin America save for the future (as 56% of them do not do so), through a platform where a percentage of every purchase they make is collected within a mutual fund.
For more information, reach out to Sofía Cándano at Village Capital at [email protected].
Check out Episode 102 of the Crossing Borders podcast to learn more about Daniel Cossío and Village Capital.
