Datanomik spun out of AstroPay with a $6M a16z-led seed for LatAm open finance

A B2B open finance API that pulls a company's bank account data from many LatAm banks onto one platform

Latin American businesses will pay for one B2B open finance API that unifies their bank data, as regulators in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia open up banking

$6M seed led by Andreessen Horowitz with Canary, Nazca and Latitud and angels

Gonzalo Strauss, AstroPay's former head of product, found that cash-heavy emerging markets made payment reconciliation hard and that banks had separate portals and inconsistent APIs, PDFs and CSVs. Finding no open banking tool for LatAm, he built one internally at AstroPay, then pitched his manager Sergio Fogel on launching it as a company.

Fogel, a dLocal and AstroPay co-founder, sounded out investors including Angela Strange at a16z. With only a product and a pitch, no company name yet, that was enough to interest a16z. Three months later Datanomik announced the $6M seed, with a16z's first Uruguay investment and one of its larger LatAm seeds.

Cash-based payment markets made reconciliation across bank accounts manual and slow

Bank portals and APIs varied in format, so no consolidated view was available

Regulators in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia were adopting open banking frameworks

A problem an operator had solved internally, with an insider co-founder who could call investors, was enough to raise a seed on the product and pitch alone.

As of March 31, 2022 Datanomik had five customers and planned to focus on Brazil, with Mexico, Colombia and other LatAm countries later.