Mendel Secures $35M to Reshape LatAm Corporate Spend
Hey Payments Fanatic!
Mendel, a Mexico-based FinTech working to simplify corporate expenses in Latin America, has just raised $35 million in a Series B round, bringing its total funding to $60 million. This fresh capital will help expand its offerings and support its entry into new markets.
The round was led by Base10 Partners, with new investors PayPal Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst joining existing backers like Infinity Ventures, Industry Ventures, and Hi.vc.
Founded in 2021, Mendel provides an integrated platform that combines expense management, payments, and corporate travel. Unlike many global competitors, it focuses on the complexities of Latin America’s regulatory landscape, tackling tax codes, invoicing requirements, and multi-currency workflows.
Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder Alan Karpovsky shared that more than half of Mendel’s revenue comes from recurring SaaS fees, with additional income from interchange fees and bill pay commissions.
The company has reported a 2.5x year-over-year growth in ARR, with gross margins exceeding 75%. It currently serves around 500 customers, including Mercado Libre, FEMSA, Adecco, and McDonald’s. While not yet profitable, Mendel expects to reach that milestone by late 2025.
With this latest round, the company is gearing up for expansion beyond Mexico and Argentina. Plans are in motion to enter Chile, Colombia, and Peru in 2025, with Brazil set to follow in 2026.
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Cheers,
INSIGHTS
How to drive more conversions with open banking solutions by Ecommpay. This article explores how open banking streamlines payments, reduces cart abandonment, and increase sales by enabling instant, user-friendly transactions. Discover more in the full article—click here
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GOLDEN NUGGET
𝗣𝗮𝘆𝗳𝗮𝗰 is the model behind FinTech’s biggest successes, from Stripe and Square to Shopify, Uber, and more. It's a critical but often misunderstood topic, so let's break it down:
The Payfac model, pivotal to FinTech giants like Stripe and Square, streamlines the traditional, cumbersome process of card payments, transforming how money moves between parties.
It originated as a response to the costly and complex setup of merchant acquirers (MAs) and independent sales organizations (ISOs), which provided card payment services to merchants but often excluded smaller, riskier vendors due to high costs.
Innovations in mobile and cloud computing around 2008, exemplified by companies like Square and Stripe, introduced payment facilitators (payfacs) that aggregated merchants under shared merchant IDs, simplifying the onboarding process and expanding market access.
This evolution spurred the development of Payfac-as-a-Service (PFaaS), enabling platforms like Shopify to offer payment services through partnerships with payfacs, thereby leveraging network effects to enhance the value of payment networks.
This shift underscores the ongoing transformation in financial services, driven by software innovation that lowers barriers to entry, expands services, and fosters a more interconnected market landscape.
I highly recommend reading another masterpiece blog post by Matt Brown called “Payfac in 1,000 words” for a deeper dive into this topic.
The future of Payments, according to Matt:
“The payfac and PFaaS trends exemplify the effect of software on financial services and other industries: it lowers fixed costs and enables new distribution channels, pushing the service closer to the end user in a more integrated, user-friendly, and cost-effective way.
These trends also reiterate how much payments is fundamentally a network effect business. More acceptance = more cardholders = more payment volume = more network value.
The broader trend from ISOs to payfacs to PFaaS is one of networks and MAs delegating control and responsibility in exchange for more merchants, more payment volume, and a more valuable network.”
Source: Matt Brown
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