Infrastructure startups continue to attract venture capital around the world, especially payment infrastructure providers. If they also provide services without the need for code, it generates additional value. A startup that is a mix of the two can be found in Bogotá, based in Colombia Symmetrical which raised $20 million in a Series A funding round at a valuation of more than $100 million.
The startup says its infrastructure "offers greater control and transparency" over a company's financial transactions by automating reconciliation through a no-code offering. In other words, says co-founder and COO Santiago Gomez, the company's software automates reconciliation for finance teams that have a large number of transactions and reports. It works by reconciling that financial information with the goal of providing "real-time visibility, traceability, and clean information" to your finances.
“What makes us better than the competition is the fact that it is provided as a service, where the finance teams are separate from the technology teams to set up a big data back-end with a spreadsheet-like interface. Gomez said.
The startup was founded in 2019 after a spin-off from an e-commerce company called Ropeo that spun off from the Y Combinator group in the winter of 2018. It has been growing 20% per month for the past year and expects to end the year with around 10 million in annual recurring revenue, according to co-founder and CEO Alejandro Casas.
"We are investing more than 45% of our revenue and funding in product development," he said.
Symmetrical offers a payment method orchestrator that allows payment service companies to connect directly to different payment methods. This has the potential to save companies months of work and money on investment.
“As the landscape of payment methods becomes increasingly saturated and complex, from the proliferation of BNPL extension, issuers, wallets and loyalty programs to crypto wallets and cash networks, payment orchestrators like Symmetrical They will be key to the movement of money and data records,” said Gómez.
In the last two years since its launch, the startup has reconciled $75 billion of TPV (total portfolio value) per year. Today it has 45 clients in 10 countries and is processing transactions in 25 countries. Clients include several high-growth Latin American entities such as Rappi, Mercado Libre, Bancolombia, Clip, Ualá, DLocal, Nubank, Oxxo and Payu. It also recently landed Chai Payments outside of South Korea as a client.
“The experience of working closely with payment and fintech companies made us realize that there are still many obstacles for companies that use many types of payment methods to meet their growing demand,” said Casas. “We are seeing rapid growth in the payments space globally, with new companies entering the market every day.”
New York-based FinTech Collective led the first round of the Serie A, which also included the participation of Tiger Global and Moore Capital, along with existing backers like Cometa (which led the company's seed round) and Monashees. Several private investors, including but not limited to Addi CEO Santiago Suarez and Jason Pate, Plaid's director of corporate strategy and development, also participated in the round.
Carlos Alonso Torras, director of the FinTech Collective and head of emerging markets at the firm, said his firm was drawn to the team's "focus and tenacity."
“The reconciliation technology already in place by the company effectively complements its vision to build a payment orchestration platform. Symmetrical is in a unique position to build this orchestrator from such a vantage point, while possessing a deep understanding of the operational needs and processes of the major technology players in Latin America,” said Torras. “That is in addition to the actual ability of the no-code solution to automate reconciliation, which addresses a critical pain point within a region that is digitizing at breakneck speed.”
"Symmetrical it has built a base to scale aggressively, beyond Latin America,” he added.
For his part, Cometa said that “Symmetrical is revolutionizing the way super apps, major banks and retailers in Latin America reconcile bank statement transactions and add payments to business ledgers.”
The company will use the capital raised mainly for contracting. A year ago, there were 72 employees and today, it has almost 200, with plans to hire 100 more employees globally. It also plans to use the funds to further develop the orchestrator and expand to EMEA and APAC.
