To build the technological infrastructure that enables the provision of financial services in an agile and fast way. This is the objective with which Belvo was born in Barcelona in 2019, with its sights set, however, on the other side of the Atlantic. Since its launch, the company has developed an open finance platform that allows companies and administrations in Latin America to connect with their users' financial data, as well as to make secure payments between accounts.
"Belvo does not provide financial services; it helps companies to provide them," clarifies Uri Tintoré, co-founder of Belvo alongside Pablo Viguera. With 85 employees and based in Barcelona, Belvo does this by offering access to financial and labor information and processing payments, focused on Mexico and Brazil. The startup, although it declines to detail its turnover, is positioned as one of the possible future Catalan unicorns.
Belvo's origin comes from another payment platform, and explains why two Barcelonians opted for the Latin American market. Viguera and Tintoré met working together at Verse, founded in 2015 in Barcelona. The company closed in 2023, but before that, it considered expanding into Latin America, an option that Viguera and Tintoré were precisely tasked with studying. Although they confirmed that trying to bring the platform to the Latin American market was not a good option, they detected other opportunities: there was no open finance infrastructure that would allow new businesses to connect to networks to access their clients' information and move money easily.
"There we saw an opportunity, and we confirmed that it had also been detected from within the ecosystem itself," Tintoré now recalls. During this process, they came across an investor who was looking for a team to develop this infrastructure, and both decided to embark on this project.
Thus, they set out to generate this Latin American infrastructure from Barcelona, "with all the difficulties that entails," as Tintoré explains. These difficulties became anecdotes, such as the fact that they could not open a bank account and had to have people from the investment group do it for them. From this point, Belvo "expanded very quickly" to countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, where it began by connecting with banking data and then expanded to financial and labor data.
After this rapid expansion, the startup decided to resize and prioritize, because "trying to cover too much is difficult." Following a process of reflection and evaluation on which Belvo solutions worked best, they decided to focus on Mexico and Brazil, on products focused on labor and tax information in Mexico, and also on banking data in Brazil, extracting them from organizations such as the Mexican Social Security and its tax system.
In addition to the data vertical, Belvo also focuses on payments. And it is that in Latin America there are other instant payment options, but they do not allow recurring payments. Now, in addition, from the startup they are creating models for estimating and predicting income through their "brutal amount of data," and they are expanding into AI, with the aim that their clients can use this data quickly and agilely.
Since its launch, Belvo has raised close to 55 million euros distributed in three rounds —a pre-seed of about eight million euros in 2020, another of 35 in 2021, and another of 12 million recently closed— and has reached millions of users: "This year we will close with more than 50 million users who have gone through Belvo's flows to obtain some financial service."
In addition, the startup processes close to two million account-to-account payment transactions monthly, which translates into a total annual payment volume exceeding 420 million euros —500 million dollars—, explains Tintoré, and they don't stop there: "And the goal is to double the current payment volume."