#29 - Altitud | Gaston Irigoyen from Pomelo and the $9M seed round

Pomelo is the fintech as a service (FAAS) platform for Latin America, founded by former Mastercard, Mercado Pago and Naranja X executives. The startup took some of its first steps during the Latitud Fellowship program, where Gaston Irigoyen, Hernan Corral and Juan Fantoni joined the second cohort.

Latitud had the privilege of being Pomelo's first check, later introducing the founders to over 25 funds globally. Now, they're raising $9M to build Latin America's fintech infrastructure, in one of the largest seed rounds in the history of LATAM’s tech ecosystem.

"We were looking for local flavor, global access, and lots of hustle", says Gaston – and they got it.

Led by monashees and Index Ventures, the round also includes funds like QED and Scifi, as well as some of the most prominent angels and entrepreneurs in the region – Max Levchin (Paypal & Affirm), Biz Stone (Twitter), Angela Strange (a16z), Harry Stebbings (20VC), Martin Varsavski and the founders of Marqeta, Rappi, Auth0, Kavak, Loft and RecargaPay.

Pomelo allows fintechs and embedded finance players to build digital accounts with compliant onboarding processes, as well as issue prepaid and credit cards throughout Latin America.

In this chat:

• Pomelo's solution to a huge problem
• How they put their team together
• How the seed round played out
• Next steps after the funding
• Their experience at Latitud
• Gaston's unconventional advice for founders

This is the first episode of Altitud, a segment of Latitud Podcast where we talk to the founders of the future high-flying companies in Latin America, hosted by Brian Requarth and Tomas Roggio.

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