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Building a Multi-Sided Fintech from Zero

Co-founded and scaled an Open Finance platform connecting financial data, alternative underwriting, and a marketplace of third-party providers.

Org
MiBolsillo
Role
Co-Founder, CEO & Head of Product
Period
May 2019 – Dec 2023 · Techstars '21
Location
Delaware / Latin America
Access to credit+25%
Acquisition cost1/3 of traditional
Markets5 LATAM countries
OutcomeBreak-even, then acquired

The problem

Most consumers underserved by traditional banks in Latin America aren't invisible to finance — they're invisible to underwriting. MiBolsillo started from that gap: aggregate a user's real financial data, understand their actual behavior, and use it to get them into financial products they'd otherwise be locked out of.

What I built

This wasn't one product area — it was the company. As co-founder, CEO, and Head of Product, I worked across strategy, product, fundraising and partnerships, growth, monetization, and operations, taking MiBolsillo from early discovery through product-market fit, multi-country expansion, and eventually acquisition.

The core product model: financial-data aggregation → insights and personal financial management → segmentation and decisioning → a marketplace connecting users to third-party financial providers, particularly lenders.

Two things made this genuinely multi-sided rather than a single consumer app:

Alternative underwriting. Using financial and behavioral data instead of relying only on traditional credit bureaus, we improved access to credit by roughly 25% while operating at about a third of the acquisition cost of traditional channels.

A financial-services marketplace, connecting users to third-party lenders and other providers rather than MiBolsillo originating every product itself — including some exposure to crypto-related financial products, which later became relevant context for the blockchain work below (see StableFlow).

Why it mattered

Building underwriting and the marketplace side by side was the hard part: underwriting made users eligible for products they'd been excluded from, and the marketplace is what actually got those products in front of them. Neither works alone. We scaled that model across five Latin American markets, went through Techstars in 2021, and reached break-even before the company was acquired.

Open FinanceAlternative UnderwritingMarketplaceGrowthFundraising