We finally got Juan Fantoni on La Frontera after a serendipitous connection – Tom first reached out to Juan, a fellow Kellogg MBA alum, via a cold email while searching for internships (Pomelo doesn’t do internships, FYI, but Juan did agree to appear on the podcast as our FIRST EVER confirmed interview — which happened a year later).

Juan is the Argentine co-founder and CCO of Pomelo, and his story has a bit of everything: spotting a massive fintech infrastructure problem, leaping from corporate life to startup execution, racing across Latin America’s markets, and raising one of the region’s largest Series B rounds during a tough funding environment.

If you’re building or investing in Latin America, this episode is packed with lessons on identifying opportunities, building in regulated industries, and scaling a fintech startup from 0 to 1 (and well beyond). FOUNDERS — this interview is pure, golden insight provided by one of the premier founders in the region; please enjoy, and apply the lessons learned, responsibly.

🚀 Founded: 2021 (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
📈 Stage: Series B
💰 Total Funding Raised: Over $100M
🤝 Investors: Kaszek, Monashees, Index Ventures, Insight Partners, QED Investors, Section 32, TQ Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst
🎯 Mission: Driving financial innovation for those who dare to challenge the status quo.

Pomelo is the modern infrastructure layer for fintechs and banks in Latin America. Its modular, API-first, cloud-native platform enables the issuance, processing, and management of credit, debit, and prepaid cards across the region. With a single integration, clients can launch compliant financial products in multiple countries, leveraging Pomelo’s regional licenses with Mastercard and Visa to accelerate go-to-market – all without losing control or customization.

Like many great startups, Pomelo began with a glaring problem that the founders knew all too well. Juan’s “aha moment” struck during his time at Mastercard, where he worked with non-traditional issuers (early fintech players). He saw innovative fintechs trying to launch cutting-edge products, but they were all stymied by the same thing: ancient card-processing technology that hadn’t changed in decades.

Juan recalls how legacy systems were holding Latin America’s fintech boom back. This pain point was massive – and Juan sensed an opportunity to build a better way.

So, in the thick of the pandemic lockdowns, he put his ideas into a pitch deck. With decades of collective experience in payments and tech (Juan had been Director of Fintech at Mastercard, co-founder Gastón former CEO of Argentine neobank Naranja X, and Hernán a veteran of MercadoPago), the trio had the credibility to get investors’ attention quickly.

In early 2021 they quit their jobs and officially founded Pomelo to build Latin America’s next-gen fintech-as-a-service platform. They didn’t even have a product yet – just a clear vision and a strong founding team – but that was enough to secure a $9M seed round on basically a PowerPoint. In fact, Juan knew he was onto something when early conversations yielded instant validation:

That vote of confidence (plus some initial checks from savvy VCs) gave Pomelo the green light to start building.

Instead of rushing to code in a vacuum, Pomelo lined up a design partner for their MVP. Juan recounts how their very first client – Argentina’s crypto-enabled wallet Belo – signed on before they’d written a line of code. Developing the product alongside an eager early user was key. It meant immediate feedback, real-world testing, and proof to future clients (and investors) that Pomelo could deliver. This approach paid off: after about 9 months of building, Pomelo launched with Belo and proved that even a small team in Argentina could stand up a modern card issuing & processing platform in record time.

From day one, Pomelo’s value prop was clear and bold – a fintech backbone for LatAm that would let any fintech or bank issue cards and manage payments faster and better than the old incumbents.

Pomelo might have been born in Argentina🇦🇷, but its ambitions were unapologetically regional from the start. In practice, that meant architecting the product for multi-country support, and pitching a vision to investors of a pan-regional platform rather than an Argentina-only business.

This strategy wasn’t just hype for VCs – it was a necessity. Argentina provided an ideal launchpad (with its deep pool of fintech talent and early adopter clients), but Juan knew that to build a truly big company, they’d need to expand to the biggest markets in LatAm, Brazil🇧🇷 and Mexico🇲🇽.

Growing only in Argentina (or only in, say, Colombia🇨🇴 or Chile🇨🇱) wouldn’t cut it long-term. The team had internalized a mantra that many Argentine founders hold: think regional from day zero. This mentality resonated with investors, too. Juan recalls that some VCs specifically pointed out how Argentine entrepreneurs tend to “think about a regional or global company from scratch…that mindset is something they want to hear”, and it gave Pomelo an edge when fundraising.

So what did “regional from day one” look like in practice? For Pomelo, it meant that right after proving the concept in Argentina, they sprinted toward other markets. They kept a close eye on opportunities beyond their borders (more on that in the Scaling section 🌐) and made sure their story was always about solving problems across Latin America. Even their seed pitch deck framed Pomelo as a LatAm solution, not an Argentine niche play – which helped them raise a much larger seed round than they initially aimed for.

The result: within months of founding, Pomelo was already preparing launches in multiple countries, setting the stage to become a true regional player.