Belvo secures $43m in Series A funding round

Open finance platform Belvo has raised $43 million in a Series A funding round, in which new and existing investors participated, as it seeks to scale product development and double headcount by the end of the year.

New investors in the round included Future Positive, the investment vehicle of Fred Blackford and Biz Stone, as well as Kibo Ventures and FJLabs, while Belvo said it had also brought onboard business angels Sebastián Mejía, co-founder and president of Rappi, and Harsh Sinha, CTO of Wise, formerly Transferwise.

Among the existing investors that participated in the round were Kaszek, MAYA Capital, Venture Friends, and David Vélez, founder and CEO of Nubank. In June 2020, the start-up raised $10 million from Kaszek Ventures and Founders Fund.

According to data from Crunchbase, it is the largest ever Series A funding round for a fintech company recorded to date in Latin America.

Mexico City-based Belvo intends to use the newly-raised funds to scale product development efforts to meet increasing market demand and support customer growth, as well as to expand its offering of data enrichment solutions across markets and launch its bank-to-bank payment initiation offering in Mexico and Brazil.

By the end of the year, the company said it expects to have doubled its existing financial data providers’ connection coverage to reach more than 80 integrations, as it expands its open finance platform to new countries in Latin America.

Some of the proceeds from the fundraising will also be used to boost employees across functions and locations.

With 70 employees currently, Belvo has said it aims to double headcount by the end of the year, hiring more than 50 engineers in Mexico and Brazil in the next few months.

Nicolás Szekasy, co-founder and managing partner of Kaszek, said: “Demand for financial services in Latin America is growing at an exponential rate and Belvo is developing the infrastructure that will enable both the larger institutions and the emerging generation of younger players to successfully deploy their solutions.”

Belvo was founded in 2019 by Pablo Viguera and Oriol Tintoré and operates in Mexico, Brazil and Colombia.