Prometeo raises $13M for Open Banking with PayPal, Samsung

Prometeo, aiming to facilitate Open Banking throughout Latin America, recently announced it had secured $13M in funding to expand its business.

• Founding and Funding: Prometeo, founded in 2018 by Ximena Aleman, has grown on relatively lean funding. Before this round, it had raised about $6M.

• Background: Prometeo tackles Latin America’s extensive fragmentation as a single market using a single API. The startup currently partners with 283 financial institutions across 10 countries. Brazil and Mexico, the region's biggest fintech markets, constitute its largest markets.

• Product Offering: Popular services include account-to-account payments, account validation, and cash management for businesses. The startup plans to expand its user base, add more services, and reach more regions.

• Investor Line Up: Prometeo’s backers in this funding round include PayPal Ventures and Samsung Next, revealing a keen interest in promoting Open Banking as a path to growing their businesses in the region. Despite not working with Prometeo currently, their investment denotes an interest in exploring potential partnerships in a sector that could see considerable growth in the future.

The progress made by Prometeo, coupled with interest from prominent banking players in the region, such as Citi, Santander, and J.P. Morgan, has captured investors' attention. As Fady Abdel-Nour, a partner at Antler Elevate, put it, "Prometeo, with its simple single API, provides banks and financial institutions access to payments and data throughout the entirety of Latin America."