monashees and Index Ventures led a USD9m seed round for Pomelo, an Argentine payments infrastructure platform that will enable fintechs to fast-track the launch of prepaid and credit cards, with participation from QED Investors, SciFi, Latitud, Future Positive, 20VC, Addition, FJ Labs, and a16z, and angels from Marqeta, Rappi, Auth0, Kavak, Loft and RecargaPay. CEO Gaston Irigoyen is a third-time founder with two prior exits, and is former CEO of Argentine fintech Naranja X. This is the second known investment from Index Ventures in the region after leading a USD19m Series A in Mexican digital health insurer Sofia in 2020. 

(TechCrunch) – Pomelo, a startup building a fintech-as-a-service platform for Latin America, has raised $9 million in a seed round of funding.

The Buenos Aires-based startup’s new infrastructure aims to allow fintechs and embedded finance players to launch virtual accounts and issue prepaid and credit cards via “compliant” onboarding processes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital payments all over the world, and Latin America is no exception. While the majority of transactions are still done in cash, there are still over a billion cards in the region.

Cards have an estimated payments volume of $900 billion per year, and yet 95% of these transactions are being processed by local incumbents, asserts Pomelo. This is a problem the company’s founders experienced firsthand in previous roles, and are eager to solve by creating a new payments infrastructure.

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