Juan Fantoni – Co-Founder & CCO, Pomelo
Podcast Notes, Episode 13 – From Argentina to Mexico: Pomelo's Playbook for Scaling Across LatAm
La Frontera 🌵 Podcast, Episode 13 - From Argentina to Mexico: Pomelo’s Playbook for Scaling Across LatAm
Juan Fantoni
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.
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Episode 13 Summary
From Mastercard to Fintech Founder: How Juan’s career in payments (ex-Mastercard) opened his eyes to Latin America’s outdated card infrastructure, inspiring the founding of Pomelo in 2021.
Regional from Day One: Why Pomelo started in Argentina but with a Latin American vision from the get-go.
Building in a Regulated Space: The playbook for innovating in heavily regulated industries – from securing licenses to navigating country-by-country regulatory nuances without slowing down.
Hypergrowth Across LatAm: Pomelo’s blueprint for rapid multi-country expansion – leveraging networks to hire local talent and seizing strategic opportunities.
Fundraising Through Boom and Bust: Lessons from raising a $9M seed (2021’s frothy times), a $35M Series A, and a rare Series B in 2023 – how Pomelo approached fundraising in different market cycles and why they raised more than they initially planned.
Valuation, Dilution & the Long Game: Candid thoughts on managing dilution and valuation expectations – Juan explains why focusing on building a big business often requires willingness to dilute.
Advice from the Trenches: Hard-won insights for founders – from the value of domain expertise to the importance of choosing supportive VCs and maintaining sanity while building in the tumultuous fintech space.
In Today's Newsletter
🍊Pomelo: Modern Fintech Infrastructure for LatAm
🚀 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.
🚀 Building Fintech Infrastructure from 0 to 1
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.
“No matter how innovative you were, if the underlying infrastructure is built on 50-year-old technology, it’s very hard to innovate.”
Juan Fantoni
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:
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“One of the fintech CEOs I shared the idea with told me, ‘If you build this, I’ll be a client.’”
Juan Fantoni
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.
Source: bloomberglinea.com
🌎 Regional Vision from Day One
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🇲🇽.
“Especially if you want to build something big in Latin America, you need to touch Brazil and Mexico – one or both, ideally. That’s a must if you want to build a VC-backed company.”
Juan Fantoni
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.
⚙️ How to Build in Regulated Industries
Fintech infra is not for the faint of heart – and when your product involves moving money and issuing cards, the regulatory complexities multiply. Juan stresses that from the outset, Pomelo treated regulation as a first-class priority, not an afterthought or necessary evil.
“Our industry is very regulation-heavy, so we always started with a regulatory scan of each country. We invested heavily in a great legal and compliance team. Every time we went to a market, we knew exactly how to operate under the local regulations.”
Juan Fantoni
In practice, Pomelo hired seasoned lawyers and ex-bank compliance experts who could navigate the intricacies of financial licenses, central bank rules, and data privacy laws across different countries. Before writing code or signing clients in a new market, they’d map out what licenses were required, what partnerships (with banks or networks) they’d need, and how long approvals might take.
This upfront investment in compliance proved to be a strategic advantage. It allowed Pomelo to move faster than competitors who might be hobbled by regulatory surprises. For example, when expanding to Mexico, the team discovered the regulator there had effectively banned certain Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) models. Because Pomelo’s team did their homework, they adjusted their approach to ensure they could still operate within the rules – essentially finding a workaround that satisfied regulators while delivering for clients. Every country in LatAm has its own maze of financial rules, and Pomelo’s view is that you must respect those differences rather than assume one-size-fits-all.
“Each country has a different regulatory framework and product offering… You have to know what you need a license for, and what you can do without a license.”
Juan Fantoni
Despite the heavy lifting on the legal side, Juan’s philosophy is that being in a regulated industry shouldn’t mean moving at a snail’s pace. Fintech startups can still innovate quickly – if they are smart about sequencing and partnerships. One tactic Pomelo used was leveraging existing licensed institutions when possible: for instance, partnering with sponsor banks or using Pomelo’s own entities in certain countries to help clients launch faster under Pomelo’s regulatory umbrella. This “license piggybacking” model is part of Pomelo’s secret sauce, enabling a young startup to offer services across multiple countries legitimately and rapidly, whereas a client trying to do it alone would spend years getting approvals.
The takeaway for founders in any regulated space: embrace the rules, bring in the experts, and turn compliance into a competitive edge.
🌐 Scaling Across Latin America: Speed, Strategy, and Hiring
With a solid core product and a big chunk of seed capital in hand, Pomelo pressed the gas pedal on expansion, launching in six countries in just a few years! Juan candidly shares that their Series Seed was far larger than expected (they raised $9M when they initially thought maybe $2M), and they deliberately used that war chest to blitz into new markets.
“Our initial seed round was five times bigger than what we expected… so we decided to use this to make our regional plans go faster… Probably if we had more limited resources, we’d have started with one country first. But when you have a big amount of capital, you’re able to move very fast.”
Juan Fantoni
And move fast they did.
Pomelo’s expansion playbook combined careful groundwork with bold opportunism. Step 1 was always ensuring the regulatory path was clear (as mentioned in the previous section). Step 2: hire an A+ local team in the target country. Here, the founders leaned on people they knew and trusted.
“When you see the first hire of each country, it was probably someone that has worked with us before – at Mastercard with us or at MercadoPago with us.”
Juan Fantoni
By recruiting former colleagues and friends from their fintech networks, Pomelo instantly had on-the-ground leaders who not only understood the local market but also were culturally aligned with Pomelo’s mission. This approach de-risked a lot of the typical challenges of opening a new country office. Instead of unknown hires, they had extension-of-family hires running Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, etc., who could hit the ground running and attract other talent.
Even with planning, luck and timing play a role.
Juan shares a pivotal story from early 2022:
Just a couple months after launch, Pomelo saw an opportunity in Mexico that was too good to pass up. Two local players were attempting something similar to Pomelo; one was a bank, the other a tech startup. The tech startup’s attempt hit a wall when regulators denied their license, leaving a bunch of Mexican fintechs suddenly in need of a card issuance partner. Pomelo pounced. Juan and Hernán literally got on a plane to Mexico City to seize the moment. They quickly secured a major client deal and hired a country manager (a former colleague from MercadoPago) to build out the team there. Within a short time, Mexico became Pomelo’s #1 market.
As Juan puts it, “There were a lot of regional players that, when we told them we could solve the region for them, we were a no-brainer.” In other words, offering a one-stop solution across LatAm is incredibly appealing to customers who operate regionally themselves. “One plus one was more than two in this case,” Juan says of multi-country expansion. “We saw a lot of value in expanding very fast into new markets.”
Of course, scaling at this pace wasn’t easy. Each country meant new complexities – different languages, cultures, banking partners, and competitors. Brazil, Juan notes, was especially challenging, with a fintech scene ~5 years ahead of other countries and very high product expectations. But the team believed that if Pomelo could succeed in a tough market like Brazil, it would set them up to win everywhere. So they charged into Brazil with the same speed, knowing it was a long-term play.
Today, Pomelo’s regional footprint (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and counting) is one of its biggest advantages. The company built a regional infrastructure moat that would be hard for any newcomer to replicate quickly.
The lesson for founders eyeing multi-country expansion: move swiftly when strategic opportunities arise, but underpin your expansion with trusted people and a clear value prop for being regional. If you do it right, each new country adds momentum (and revenue!) to your startup’s flywheel.
💸 Fundraising Across Cycles: Seed, Series A, and a Rare Series B
Raising capital is part art, part science – and Pomelo’s journey offers a crash course in how to do it across wildly different market climates. Their Seed round in 2021 was timed perfectly: liquidity in venture was at an all-time high, and global investors were eager to back LatAm fintech stories (especially ones with a team of seasoned execs). Juan and team took advantage of that. They raised $9 million seed – an unusually large seed for Latin America – essentially on the strength of the idea and the founding team’s reputation. Importantly, they pitched Pomelo as a Latin America play, not just an Argentina play, which helped unlock big checks. The result was one of the region’s largest seed rounds at that time, including a host of local and international investors.
That seed round gave Pomelo runway to aggressively build and expand, and as we saw, they didn’t sit still. By the time they went out for Series A, they had real traction and a compelling story of multi-country operations. They ended up raising $35 million in Series A (co-led by Index Ventures and Tiger Global), and a $15M extension in 2022 at a time just before the venture market flipped from boom to bust. In Juan’s words, they closed the A “a couple months before the market shut down.” Suddenly, by mid-2022, capital became scarce as tech stocks crashed and VC sentiment cooled worldwide. Pomelo had been fortunate to load up the bank account right before this downturn.
When 2023 came around, many expected Pomelo would hunker down and stretch their Series A cash. Surprisingly, they did the opposite – they raised Series B in late 2023 for ~$40M (led by Kaszek Ventures with participation from existing investors like QED and Insight Partners). Why raise in the middle of a venture slowdown? Juan’s perspective here is instructive. The company could have survived without new funding, but they had big plans and didn’t want to lose momentum.
Source: endeavor.org
The team believed that “good companies will always be able to raise”, regardless of macro conditions. They focused on building a strong business – and indeed, by 2023 Pomelo had solid revenues, healthy margins, and a marquee client list – which gave investors confidence even in a tighter market. Kaszek leading the Series B (one of the only big LatAm fintech Series B rounds that year) was a vote of confidence that Pomelo could be the regional winner in its category.
Juan also shares a thoughtful take on how they approached the amounts to raise in each round. Pomelo knew from day one that infrastructure fintech is capital intensive – you need significant resources to build the tech, acquire licenses, and expand geographically. They sat down early and tried to project how much funding they’d need at minimum to reach certain milestones. The seed number was far above that minimum (since the money was available, they took it), and the same happened with Series A. They grabbed what they could when the getting was good, aware that “easy money” might not last. By Series B, they calibrated to raise roughly what would sustain 2–3 years of runway.
Juan’s takeaway for founders: raise when you can (on favorable terms), not just when you absolutely need to, because markets can turn quickly. But also have a clear plan for the capital. Pomelo wasn’t hoarding cash for vanity – they had a roadmap for how to deploy it in product and expansion, and they communicated that plan to investors.
📉 Thoughts on Dilution, Valuation, and Raising What You Need
Money in the bank is great, but it comes at a cost: dilution. Many founders fret over giving up equity – especially in the era of mega-rounds and soaring (sometimes unrealistic) valuations. Juan’s stance on this is refreshingly pragmatic. Having raised three rounds in three years, Pomelo’s founders certainly saw their ownership percentage go down along the way. Are they worried? Not really. “We knew it would be a capital-intensive company from the beginning, so we knew we’d have to raise a lot. Dilution was not our main worry,” Juan says matter-of-factly. Their north star was building a massively impactful company, even if that meant owning a smaller slice of a much bigger pie.
“You have to be comfortable with dilution if you want to IPO or be a big, successful company… You have to decide what kind of company you want to be – are you aiming to get acquired, or to IPO, etc.? If you’re swinging for the fences, dilution comes with the territory.”
Juan Fantoni
That’s not to say Pomelo was careless about terms. In fact, Juan notes that their early rounds were very founder-friendly (2021’s frothy market meant high valuations, lower dilution). By Series B in 2023, terms normalized a bit – the round was still great, but not as sky-high as the 2021-22 era might have offered. In the end, though, it balanced out. The important thing was selecting investors who support the founders. Juan highlights that good VCs will ensure you’re not left over-diluted in the long run.
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Good investors will help you re-capitalize in the next round if you get diluted a lot in a certain round. Good investors will just give you capital and let you work.”
Juan Fantoni
Another aspect Juan touches on is valuations and expectations. Chasing the highest valuation can be a trap – if the number gets too far ahead of fundamentals, it can backfire later. Pomelo seems to have raised at fair (even generous) valuations, but always with an eye on being able to grow into those valuations. The focus was on raising what they needed to hit the next milestones, not simply to boast a unicorn status overnight. Juan observes that in the current climate (post-2022), many startups are actually raising less money or at flatter valuations because they prefer not to carry the pressure of an inflated price tag. In his view, that’s fine – a “down round” stigma is less relevant than building a sustainable company.
Again, it comes back to what kind of company you want: Pomelo’s choice was to grab capital when available and use it to build a market-leading business, not to optimize for the prettiest cap table. And with $100M+ raised and a real business in motion, it’s hard to argue with the results.
🧠 Wrap-Up: Lessons for Founders from the Trenches
Four years in, Pomelo is not just a fast-growing company; it’s a repository of hard-earned wisdom on startups, especially in Latin America. We wrapped up the conversation with Juan reflecting on some broader lessons and mindset tips for fellow founders and operators:
Domain Expertise is Incredibly Valuable: Fintech infrastructure isn’t something you can hack together in a weekend. Juan attributes a lot of Pomelo’s success to the deep industry knowledge that he and his co-founders accumulated in their previous careers. In a space handling people’s money, you can’t afford to “move fast and break things” the way you might in a pure software startup. “You can’t do testing when you’re managing people’s money. You need to have a strong thesis and build towards it – if you’re wrong, it’s an expensive test,” Juan says, noting that fintech founders tend to skew older for a reason. They simply have had more time to learn the nuances of the value chain. So his advice to aspiring fintech entrepreneurs (or any complex industry) is to do your homework: work in the industry, talk to experts, maybe even partner with an industry insider, because the learning curve is steep and the stakes are high.
Leverage Your Network (Give Before You Take): Juan’s journey underscores the power of community and network in building a startup. Pomelo’s early hires and clients came largely through relationships. Juan himself is known in Buenos Aires for helping out up-and-coming founders, making introductions, and sharing advice. That goodwill often circles back. For instance, Pomelo’s first client, Belo, was run by a founder friend willing to take a bet on them. Their country managers were former colleagues eager to join a project led by people they trust. The LatAm startup ecosystem might seem large, but it’s actually a tight-knit community – reputations matter. Juan’s approach is to pay it forward: he’s active in fintech events, he mentors younger founders, and even when Pomelo hires, they often look for referrals from trusted contacts. The lesson: build your network before you desperately need it. It can become your moat.
Choose Investors, Not Just Money: We’ve touched on this, but it bears repeating as advice. Pomelo was deliberate in picking investors who bring more than cash – whether it’s credibility, strategic guidance, or simply a supportive philosophy. Juan gives a shout-out to how minimal their VC interference has been. “Our experience with VCs has been very positive; they’ve had minimal interference… they let us run our company and make our decisions,” he says, adding that the good ones open doors when asked: making intros to potential clients, helping with partnerships (Pomelo’s investors have connected them with other portfolio companies that became customers), and even recruiting. His rule of thumb: “Good VCs will just give you capital and let you work.” So, for founders raising money, remember that each investor you bring on is a long-term partner. Optimize for those who trust your team and are aligned with your vision, not those trying to drive their own agenda.
Keep Learning and Stay Humble: Despite his impressive resume, Juan radiates humility and a willingness to learn. One of the funniest nuggets he dropped was about his stint in consulting early in his career. “I don’t wish a consulting career on anyone, but I recommend it to everyone,” he jokes. The grind of consulting taught him discipline, analytical thinking, and how to handle tough clients – skills that proved useful in startup life, even if the consulting lifestyle wasn’t for him long-term. The broader point is that no experience is wasted if you draw lessons from it. Juan encourages young folks to gather diverse experiences and not be afraid of some hard yards early on (even if it’s in a big corporation or consulting firm), as long as you carry those lessons forward.
Mental Resilience and Mission: Finally, building a startup is a rollercoaster anywhere, but perhaps even more so in Latin America where macroeconomic swings and regulatory surprises can whiplash even the best-laid plans. Juan’s advice here is implicit in Pomelo’s story: be mission-driven and resilient. The team’s passion for “driving financial innovation for those daring to challenge the status quo” (Pomelo’s mission) isn’t just a poster on the wall – it’s what kept them going through insane hours, myriad challenges, and the occasional setback. Having co-founders you trust (so you’re not alone in the fight) and celebrating small wins along the way help maintain sanity. The trenches are tough, but that’s where true builders are forged. And judging by Pomelo’s trajectory, Juan Fantoni has come out of those trenches with wisdom to spare and a fintech platform that’s only just getting started. 🚀
📢 Listen to the full episode here.
Follow Juan, because why wouldn’t you?
And check out Pomelo as they continue to build fintech infrastructure Latin America.
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