Uruguay's Prometeo raised $13M to treat Latin America as one open-banking market

Open-banking infrastructure connecting banks, fintechs and businesses across Latin America through a single API for payments and data

Latin America's fragmentation could be treated as a single market behind one API — banks and fintechs would rather integrate once than country by country

$13M Series A led by Antler Elevate with PayPal Ventures, Samsung Next, DN Capital, Cometa and Magma Partners; about $6M raised previously

Ximena Aleman, a former journalist covering media and tech, and Rodrigo Tumaián founded Prometeo in Uruguay in 2018 and grew it on lean funding — about $6 million before this round — co-leading the company as co-CEOs while building bank connections country by country.

Instead of the national rollouts typical of open banking, Prometeo treated Latin America's fragmentation as one market behind a single API, turning on some 350 channels across 283 financial institutions in 10 countries, led by Brazil and Mexico. Revenue grew 10x in two years, and banks including Citi, Santander and J.P. Morgan plus local players came on as partners. Strategic investors signaled intent: PayPal had invested heavily in the region (including $750 million into MercadoLibre), and Samsung was its biggest mobile vendor with more than 40% share.

Open banking adoption crawled even in the UK (11% of consumers), so the bigger prize lay in markets without entrenched rails

Latin America's banks are fragmented country by country, and a single regional API removes the integration tax

Cash-heavy, under-banked markets have the most to gain from account-to-account payments and validation

Strategic investors like PayPal and Samsung want an early seat at the region's payment rails

When regulation is local, the platform that abstracts the fragmentation — one API across ten countries — becomes the infrastructure everyone else builds on.

As of January 2024 Prometeo planned to use the funding to bring on more users, add more services and expand to further geographies, with Antler Elevate's Fady Abdel-Nour framing the company as giving banks and financial institutions access to payments and data across the entirety of Latin America.