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Cross-border funds platform dLocal is likely one of the most notable Latin American startups in latest historical past — the corporate grew to become Uruguay’s first unicorn in 2020 and went public on the Nasdaq in 2021. dLocal’s founders had first launched AstroPay, one other digital funds platform that now has over 5 million customers.
Now, dLocal and AstroPay co-founder Sergio Fogel has teamed up with AstroPay’s former head of product, Gonzalo Strauss, to launch one other fintech out of Montevideo, Uruguay, known as Datanomik. Datanomik’s purpose is to attach monetary establishments throughout LatAm by way of its B2B open finance API, which gathers an organization’s banking info on one platform, Strauss instructed TechCrunch.
Strauss dreamed up the concept for Datanomik as an answer to a few of the ache factors he had confronted working at AstroPay processing funds in rising markets.
Money remains to be the first cost technique of alternative in rising markets, which posed challenges to fintech corporations like AstroPay in reconciling their funds to grasp their checking account balances and money movement, in keeping with Strauss.
Completely different banks all have their very own reporting interfaces and platforms that prospects can entry, and plenty of don’t give prospects APIs to have the ability to entry their very own knowledge. When banks do present APIs to prospects, they usually come in numerous codecs, from PDFs to CSVs, in order an organization with a number of financial institution accounts, it’s a tedious course of to log into every totally different account and collect info in an effort to acquire a consolidated view of the corporate’s monetary place, he added.
“There was no simple method of interacting with our financial institution accounts. Mainly what we have been doing was manually getting into our personal financial institution [information] each 5 to 10 minutes to get all of transactions, to get our balances, to get all of our totally different financial institution accounts and reconcile the funds, get help and reconciliation, and extra … I made a decision this was not a scalable resolution,” Strauss mentioned.
The open banking system appeared promising to Strauss as a possible resolution that might assist corporations like AstroPay automate their processes and obtain extra streamlined banking info. Open banking seeks to bypass conventional monetary rails by permitting banks to offer builders entry to their knowledge by way of APIs. The expertise has taken off with startups like TrueLayer within the U.Okay., the place regulators have been early to greenlight open banking options, and Plaid within the U.S.
However when Strauss looked for an answer in LatAm that might match the wants of companies within the area, he got here up empty — so he determined to construct it himself. His work began out as an inside undertaking inside AstroPay, however after growing the concept, Strauss approached Fogel, his supervisor on the time, and pitched him on launching the undertaking as a standalone firm.
Fogel was impressed by Strauss’s pitch and ended up gauging curiosity from a few of his investor contacts, together with fintech-focused associate Angela Unusual at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Strauss’s enterprise didn’t have an official identify but — all he had was the product itself and the pitch he had delivered to Fogel — however that was sufficient to pique the curiosity of Unusual and her staff.
Quick ahead three months to at this time, and Datanomik, Strauss’s enterprise, introduced it has raised a $6 million seed spherical led by a16z. LatAm-focused enterprise corporations Canary, Nazca, and Latitud additionally participated within the spherical alongside outstanding angel buyers from different tech startups and banks.
The financing marks the a16z’s first funding in Uruguay, and one in every of its greatest seed rounds in Latin America.
Datanomik has 5 prospects at this time, although Strauss didn’t identify particular ones. The corporate says its purpose is to assist corporations like dLocal or company expense administration platform Jeeves, which depend on analyzing corporations’ financial institution statements to do enterprise.
Though it’s headquartered in Uruguay, Strauss mentioned Datanomik’s principal goal market is Brazil, each due to its bigger inhabitants measurement and since the nation’s central financial institution and regulators are of their ultimate section of adopting an open banking framework. He added that Datanomik additionally has its sights set on Mexico and Colombia, that are each within the technique of adopting an open banking system as properly, although they’re in earlier levels than Brazil. Ultimately, Strauss hopes to broaden the product throughout the LatAm area to companies in Uruguay, Peru, Argentina and different international locations that face comparable challenges.
“If in case you have an organization that has subsidiaries in, let’s say, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, and the CFO needs to know, how a lot cash do I’ve in my financial institution accounts, by way of Datanomik it is possible for you to to, by way of one API, get a unified image of all of those accounts,” Strauss mentioned.
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