Back in 2018, Santiago Gomez and Alejandro Casas were just two young and hopeful founders, fresh into YC. However, with a team of 25 working on an e-commerce business, they struggled to find funding.
"There's no founder-product fit", the investors would say. After a while, it clicked that their passion was elsewhere.
They were challenged by a mentor to kill the startup and start building something, just the two of them, that really lit a fire under their feet. Oh yeah, and they should also be generating revenue in 6 months.
Santiago reached out to his network and signed a 3-month contract with Rappi to map out problems within the company that they could solve through software. After an intense quarter, they came up with a platform to conciliate all the financial transactions ran through the super app, and an easy and reliable way for any company to manage their financial data.
Simetrik was born, with Rappi's founders investing 2 million dollars in its pre-seed round. The product naturally evolved and now has customers in over 35 countries. Santiago and Alejandro also got a lot more funding – including a $20M Series A in 2022 and a $55M Series B announced just a few days ago.
In this chat, we talk about:
- How Simetrik's culture contributed to its success
- The tricky balance between technical excellence and rapid growth
- And the challenges in fundraising that they didn't see coming
Building good sh*t in Latin America?
