Narayan AmmachchiOpen banking platform Belvo has raised US$10 million, as it gets ready to capitalize on the growing demand for digital payment services in Latin America.
The fintech says it will use the proceeds to open an office in Sao Paulo and triple the size of its workforce in the region.
Barely a year old, Belvo’s main product is a banking API platform that can access and interpret end-user financial data, which is crucial information for companies trying to build financial products.
Reports say many Latin American online payment service providers are using its technology to connect bank accounts to their mobile apps.
Analysts say Belvo looks similar to San Francisco-based Plaid, which became so popular that the US financial giant Visa acquired it in January this year for $5.3 billion.
There is no doubt Belvo is hoping to become a pan-LatAm financial API platform. Latin American digital payment market is still a long way away from getting saturated because more than 60% of its residents don’t have a bank account.
With the coronavirus pandemic reducing the human-to-human interaction, the future for digital payment services looks brighter than ever before.
This is the second funding round for the startup that was founded only a year ago. It could raise barely US$3 million in its first round. Earlier backers include MAYA Capital, Venture Friends, Latinia, David Vélez (Founder and CEO of Nubank), Unpopular VC and STARTegy.
Belvo was in fact founded in Barcelona, but today most of its employees are based in Mexico City. “We’re now live in Mexico and Colombia but we are planning on being live in as many as 6 countries very soon,” stated the company’s co-founder Pablo Viguera in a blogpost.
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