Mentum, a Latin American-focused Fintech, has raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures.
Other investors include Global Founders Capital, TwentyTwo VC, Soma Capital, Y Combinator, and the co-founders of Plaid and Jeeves.
Mentum made the announcement last month sharing that they are prepping to launch in four markets as they seek to transform financial services in Latam by enabling platforms. Mentum reports their platform is already live in Chile and Colombia.
Mentum is targeting digital banks, super-apps, local banks, insurance companies as well as retailers to incorporate financial services in “just a few lines of code.” The company aims to transform the investing environment for retail investors.
According to a blog post:
“For too long, wealth management in Latin America was only accessible to the top 2% of the population, while the mass market was incentivized to spend and get indebted with multiple credit options. The very few retail investors in Latin America are either exposed to cash equivalents (illiquid Certificate of Deposits or low-yield savings accounts) or bricks (tangible investments like real estate). As an example, in 2018, Brazil’s pension funds portfolios had a staggering 74% allocation in short-term fixed income, while in Chile, real estate represented 55% of the alternative assets of local pension funds. As a reference, in the same year, fixed income and real estate as asset allocations for State and Local Pensions in the US represented 22.5% and 8.4% respectively in its portfolio. In between cash equivalents and bricks, there is a whole spectrum of investment products and services that lack the distribution needed to reach the hundreds of millions of potential retail investors in Latin America.”
Built so far is a legal and tech infrastructure for a fully digital service that does not require a license from a financial institution for its customers to leverage their platform. Mentum adds that they have also partnered with multiple investment institutions that operate locally.
Mentum is just the newest entrant into the movement for Fintech everywhere, empowering other platforms to offer sophisticated services seamlessly to the masses.
