Belvo bets LatAm open-finance rules turn it into the region's Plaid; they did

Open-finance API platform ('Plaid of Latin America'): connects apps to users' bank, payroll, tax and employment data for underwriting and onboarding, and powers account-to-account payments (Pix Automático, direct debit) as a Central Bank-regulated PISP in Brazil.

That LatAm regulators — Brazil's Open Finance and Pix Automático, Mexico's banking rules — would force banks to open data and rails, making Belvo the default API layer.

US$10M seed (Founders Fund, Kaszek, May 2020), US$43M Series A (Future Positive, Kibo, FJ Labs, June 2021 — the largest LatAm fintech Series A at the time per Crunchbase), US$15M round (Quona Capital, April 2025).

Founded in May 2019 in Mexico by Pablo Viguera (ex-COO of payments app Verse, former Revolut general manager) and Oriol Tintoré (former NASA aerospace engineer and Capella Space founder), Belvo was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. The founders saw that Latin America's underbanked majority was still financially active, and bet that open-banking regulation would turn bank data and payment rails into a new infrastructure layer — the Plaid model, at a moment when Visa had just agreed to buy Plaid for US$5.3 billion.

Belvo raised a US$10M seed from Founders Fund and Kaszek in May 2020, then a US$43M Series A in June 2021 — which it says, citing Crunchbase, was the largest Series A ever raised by a Latin American fintech. The regulatory opening arrived on schedule: Brazil's Central Bank began Open Finance in February 2021 and had the first four phases live by April 2024 (61.9 million active consents and 102 billion API calls in 2024), and on June 16, 2025 it launched Pix Automático, one-time-consent recurring bank-to-bank payments, with Belvo in the official pilot as a regulated Payment Initiation Service Provider. By April 2025 Belvo served 150+ customers including BBVA, Banamex, Bradesco, Santander, Mercado Libre and Creditas, with 50M+ users connected and about 2 million monthly account-to-account payment transactions (over US$500M annualized TPV).

Live and scaling: Belvo remains independent, moving from data APIs into Pix Automático, biometric Pix and Mexico direct debit as the regulations it bet on came into force; the wager has become standard infrastructure rather than a regulatory gamble.

LatAm's underbanked majority was still financially active, so the constraint was infrastructure, not demand: bank data and payment rails had to be opened.

The 'Plaid of Latin America' framing made the model legible to investors, with Visa's US$5.3B Plaid deal as the reference point.

Betting on mandated Open Finance phases meant every regulatory deadline converted into product scope: data, then payments, then Pix Automático.

Being in the official Pix Automático pilot as a regulated PISP turned compliance from a cost into a competitive moat.

Bet on the regulation you can see coming: an API layer beneath mandated data-sharing and payment rails wins regardless of which bank or fintech ends up on top.

As of Sept 2026 Belvo remains independent and scaling: it monetizes both data (banking, fiscal, employment) and payments (Pix Automático, biometric Pix, Mexico direct debit) across Brazil and Mexico, with 150+ customers including BBVA, Bradesco, Santander and Mercado Libre and, as of April 2025, 50M+ connected users and ~2 million monthly account-to-account transactions. Mexico's open-banking framework is still under construction and Colombia has only drafted mandatory rules, so Belvo's next phase depends on regulators outside Brazil going live — the same bet, repeated market by market.