Why Latitud invested in Payana, solving payments pains for businesses in LatAm

This is part of our "why we invested in" series of posts – a glimpse into what we look for when writing the first check for top emerging founders across Latin America. As investors and journey partners, we hope this series will inform and inspire other early startup creators in the region.

Before investing in a suite of products, it’s important to rush and delight customers by solving an initial, highly pressing pain — and using that as your control point.

You might remember here how Nubank kicked it all off with credit cards. But if you need proof that the same thing can happen in B2B Fintech, look no further than Payana.

Matias Umaschi, Bruno Cortinovis, and Benito De Ruschi are helping small and medium businesses across Latin America with their financial management and invoicing – starting with account receivables and payables (AR/AP).

And surprise surprise… We've had our eyes on this space since we started investing, baaack in 2021 👀.

After seeing some special things about Payana, we decided to double down and write them a pre-seed check, as their first investor. Fast-forward to today: Payana has acquired the startup Higo in Mexico through an M&A transaction, and currently supports 1,000+ companies across both Colombia and Mexico. Here are the gems we found then and now to believe that Payana will be the leading payment-solving solution for SMBs across Hispanic LatAm. 💎

TL;DR: investment overview

💵 The market: although SMBs represent 90%+ of companies and account for 60%+ of total employment in LatAm, lack of productivity is one of the reasons behind them only representing 25% of LatAm's GDP.

💻 The startup: Manually processing payments, chasing customer invoices, and reconciling accounts can be time-consuming and error-prone. Payana provides an all-in-one solution for handling these pain points through software as a service. By giving more control and visibility to payments and automating related tasks, SMBs can make better decisions and focus on growing their businesses.

💰 The round: Latitud led Payana's Pre-Seed round. The startup just announced the closure of its Seed round. What stood out to us the most was its founding team, early traction, and known playbook.

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Past: Masters by Experience

Matias Umaschi, Bruno Cortinovis, and Benito De Ruschi, alongside Tomas Mindlin, showed two factors that instilled confidence in our investment decision:

📚 Knowledge of the LatAm payments landscape;
📊 Experience in building and operating payment products.

Matias has an MBA from MIT and worked with payment products at Mercado Pago – a.k.a. one of the two best fintech schools in Latin America 🧠. Now, Mati brings his industry network and payment solutions expertise to Payana.

Bruno, as a co-founder of the former digital wallet TAP (then Tapi),  brings to this spin-off a proven track record in creating innovative financial products.

To complete Payana's founding dream team, after working with commercial innovation at Despegar, Benito joined TAP/Tapi as head of business solutions and led a +10pp conversion boost to the onboarding process. He adds his commercial knack to Payana.

‍Present: Early traction with a known playbook

From his time at Mercado Pago, Matias understood that the keys to this business were:

🔑 Focusing on providing an amazing software product for SMBs;
🔑 Staying very lean as a team before even trying to get into other verticals, such as lending (as many other companies in the space tried to do with not much success).

Ebanx estimates that rising markets in LatAm, Africa, and Apac will make up for 40% of the total value of B2B payments made online worldwide by 2027 – and yet, an estimated 70% of B2B transactions are still pretty much manual and lack more seamless flows.

Starting with account receivables and payables features, Payana presented traction even before we led its Pre-Seed round. And that is mainly due to the pros seen by its users. Companies:

🏃 Make payments 4x faster,
✅ Reduce their payment mistakes by 95%, and
⏰ Save 75% of the time they used to spend with payment reconciliations after adopting Payana.

The paytech integrates seamlessly with existing companies' software, making it easy for businesses to adopt the solution and start seeing these benefits immediately.

How Payana works

Invoice registration
Connect: accounting software + government's tax agency →
Complete: help Payana fill out the last 20% of invoice data →
Approve: invoice registration complete.

Payment to suppliers
Prepare: import invoices with missing payments →
Pay: multiple bank payments in one platform →
Notify: send confirmation to suppliers via email or phone →
Conciliate: automatic payment reconciliation with Payana.

Payslip payments
Prepare: import salaries info from any software →
Pay: multiple bank payments in one platform →
Notify: send confirmation to employees via email or phone.

Customer collections
Prepare: import invoices with missing payments →
Automate: Payana identifies and follows up with missing payments →
Receive: customer can pay through multiple payment methods →
Conciliate: automatic payment reconciliation with Payana.

Payana now serves 1,000+ companies in Colombia and Mexico – a testament to product demand and solution effectiveness. Their customers are in various segments, from consulting firms to restaurants and to construction companies and real estate agencies..

For almost four years, we've seen both international benchmarks thriving and regional players trying to build in the AR/AP space yet facing challenges. In the search for a team with the potential to apply a playbook to win the Hispanic markets, we found Payana.

We feel confident in its potential to become the LatAm evolution of Bill.com – the California-based software for financial operations with a current market cap of $6B+ on NYSE.

Future: Why we’re excited

What sets Payana apart from its competitors is its unique combination of deep knowledge and experience in the payments industry, a lean, easy-to-use platform with proven benefits, and its focus on the specific needs of SMBs in Hispanic Latin America.

As Payana continues to expand its reach and enhance its platform, we believe it will play a pivotal role in driving the growth and success of businesses in the region – and as a consequence, of the whole Latin American economy. 💪

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A quick word about Latitud

Latitud is your partner from -1 to 0… and zero to 1.

With our invite-only community, we gather super promising and early-stage founders across Latin America so they can work on their -1 to 0 (ideation). And as the leading pre-seed venture capital firm in Latin America, we become partners to top entrepreneurs inside and outside our fellowship so they can go from 0 to 1 (early product and traction).

Besides receiving their first institutional check, founders in our portfolio 1. become a part of our community of top founders and mentors, 2. get transformative guidance, especially in fundraising, and 3. form tight connections with downstream venture capital funds.

Latitud is led by Tomas Roggio and Brian Requarth. Through Fund I and II, we've already invested in 70+ amazing startups led by amazing founders (check them out).

Our bet in Payana is another proof of our commitment to backing early-stage startups transforming industries and bringing positive impact to LatAm.

Sounds like you? Then we'd love to have a chat! Pitch your startup here.