In Latin America, payments are loud even when they fail. Cards decline in crowded stores. Launch timelines stretch into fiscal years. Infrastructure hides behind polished apps, and when it breaks,...
In Latin America, payments are loud even when they fail. Cards decline in crowded stores. Launch timelines stretch into fiscal years. Infrastructure hides behind polished apps, and when it breaks, everyone feels it. Pomelo was built by people who got tired of pretending that was normal. Founded in 2021 in Buenos Aires, Pomelo came from three operators who had already paid the tuition. Gastón Irigoyen, Hernán Corral, and Juan Fantoni had lived inside the pipes at Naranja X, Mercado Pago, Mastercard, and Google Argentina. They knew exactly where the friction lived because it slowed them down personally.
That frustration turned into a clean thesis. Latin America moves close to $900B a year on cards, and ninety-five percent of it still runs through legacy processors that were never designed for regional scale. So Pomelo went API first, cloud-native, and regional by default. One integration, six countries. Virtual cards in seven days. Physical cards in about two months. Not ambition. Execution. By December 2021, they processed their first payment. No ceremony. Just proof.
Pomelo just closed a $55M Series C, co-led by Kaszek and Insight Partners, with Index Ventures, Monashees, Adams Street Partners, S32, Endeavor Catalyst, and TQ Ventures returning. Total capital now sits at $160M. The round lands as Pomelo processes billions in payment volume annually, supports 150+ customers, runs infrastructure capable of 55M transactions a day, and maintains 99.995% uptime across Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Peru.
Gastón Irigoyen is still running point as CEO. Hernán Corral, CPO, keeps product honest after twelve years building card and account rails at Mercado Pago. Juan Fantoni, CCO, knows exactly how issuing deals get signed because he signed them at Mastercard. This is not theoretical leadership. It is muscle memory. Banks like BBVA and Santander are already live. So are Rappi, Western Union, Binance, Bitso, Nomad, and PicPay. When incumbents and insurgents buy from the same platform, that platform becomes infrastructure.
The new capital pushes Pomelo beyond cards. Stablecoin denominated credit cards using USDC. Tokenization. AI-driven chargeback management. Real-time cross-border payment systems designed for automated commerce. This is Pomelo doing what its name suggests, stripping the bitterness out of payments so companies can actually taste scale.