What the business is
A digital business bank account for startups and small businesses in Colombia, run on a local banking partner and its own tech stack
The bet
Latin American startups will pick a bank account with fast digital onboarding and automated accounting over card, terminal or cash-management products
Starting capital
$6M seed led by Tiger Global with Soma Capital and Y Combinator, plus angels including Monzo founder Tom Blomfield
How it started
Salomon Zarruk and Sebastian Ortiz worked together at Colombian mobile wallet Tpaga and moved to Mexico to launch it there. Zarruk found opening a company bank account there a mess, and with Juan Camilo Poveda and José Tomás Lobo they started Mono in January 2022 inside Y Combinator.
What happened
Mono calls itself the first bankingless bank for startups and small businesses in the region, an autopilot bank that automates accounting services that are highly manual today. It offers accounts with physical and virtual debit cards, wire transfers and payments, with a local banking partner and its own tech stack. Growth was mostly organic: more than 300 customers and $1M in total payment volume by March, and 25 employees.
What has to be true
Founders hit slow, paper-heavy account opening at incumbent banks in both Mexico and Colombia
Competitors approached business accounts through cards, terminals or cash management, not the account itself
Manual accounting work offered a second product layer once accounts existed
What can be applied
The founders turned their own two-month account-opening failure into the product; speed of onboarding was the pitch against incumbents.
Aftermath
As of June 2022 Mono served Colombian startups with 25 staff and about 24 months of runway, with expansion to Mexico, Peru, Chile and Brazil planned but not started.
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