Fintech companies and other entities have moved the needle for consumer payments in Latin America, particularly during the global pandemic, prompting consumers to be more comfortable with digital payments.
Chile-based Xepelin aims to do the same with business-to-business payments via a SaaS payments infrastructure that includes financial information in real time, embedded financial services and data models, all to be a company’s “digital CFO” of sorts.
The company raised $230 million in an equity and debt Series A round last year, led by Kaszek, and since then expanded into Mexico, growing its client roster over five times to 15,000, growing Mexico revenue by 60 times and launching its new Xepelin Payments product 90 days ago that enables users to organize and automate payments to suppliers, with and without financing.
Since being co-founded in 2019 by Nicolás de Camino and Sebastian Kreis, Xepelin also grew its employee headcount to over 400.
“This is a huge market, but no one is really focused on pure business-to-business,” de Camino told TechCrunch. “Businesses of means have access to bank funds, but around 95% of small and medium businesses are unattended. We believe there is $5 trillion in trapped cash that needs to be unlocked, and we have a forum to address that.”
Now the company is doubling down in both Chile and Mexico, while also eyeing new countries for expansion and will hire additional employees and launch new products. Support for all of this comes from a new $111 million Series B round of funding — all equity this time — led by Avenir and Kaszek. Xepelin is touting the round as “the largest Series B investment round in the history of Chile and one of the largest in Latin America.”
While this round is a doubling down for Kazsek, Avenir is a new investor joining the cap table. Kreis told TechCrunch that Avenir, having other investments in emerging marketings, was looking for “the next B2B payments platform winning in LatAm” and will help Xepelin get to the next level.
Also participating in the round were PayPal Ventures, Wellington, DST Global Partners, Battery Ventures, MSA Novo, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, Picus, Amarena, Gunderson, Carlos Garcia, Cathay-Seaya Latam and Gilgamesh.
“We can still grow a lot in Chile and Mexico, so it is more like when is the best time to go to other LatAm countries,” Kreis added. “We also want to win Mexico.”
