We first got to know Uri Tintore, founder of Belvo, while he was still the CEO of Verse a Spanish peer-to-peer payments app that was later acquired by Square. Our Spanish portfolio CEO Iñaki Berenguer, founder of CoverWallet which he sold to AON insurance, had been an angel investor and suggested we meet the team.
It’s not often that you meet a charismatic rocket scientist, but Uri had previously co-founded Capella Space, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imaging startup that’s raised tens of millions of dollars, while still at Stanford GSB. I still recall our first conversation I took while on holiday in Bologna, Italy, pacing around a piazza. When he told us post-Verse that he’d be building the Plaid of Latin America alongside Pablo Viguera, former head of Revolut Spain, we jumped on board alongside our friends at MAYA Capital in Brazil, Venture Friends in Greece, and Capitoria in Berlin.
Uri and Pablo subsequently took their idea from Barcelona to Y-Combinator where they closed an additional $10 million from Kaszek Ventures and Founders Fund, arguably the top VC fund in South and North America respectively. Today they’re building out open banking extensibility and application programming interfaces (API) across Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, flanked by angel investors who’ve founded businesses like Rappi and NuBank. After the Visa acquisition of Plaid for $5.3 billion in the US in January 2020, we think the opportunity in Latin America is ripe, and this is the top one-percent team to build out both infrastructure and brand.
What we love about Belvo isn’t just their technical prowess, it’s also the way with which they deliver technology with brand and authenticity. Entrepreneurship requires both art and science, two cultures, and we believe Uri and Pablo engage both.