We finally got Marinella Piñate on La Frontera after Cyrus and her first discussed it back in the Q4 2024 – and it was worth the wait. Marinella is the Venezuelan-born co-founder and CEO of Zumma, and her story has a bit of everything: a globe-trotting background (60+ countries traveled solo!), an all-female founding team in fintech, and a pivot that turned a personal finance app into an AI-powered “CFO” assistant for businesses in LatAm. If you’re building or investing in Latin America, this episode offers a masterclass in finding opportunity, adapting when things don’t go as planned, and leveraging community to build something impactful.

🚀 Founded: 2023 in Mexico City (by three female co-founders)
📈 Stage: Seed (Techstars ’23 alum)
💰 Total Funding Raised: $500k
🤝 Investors: Outside VC, Techstars, MIT, GG Capital and angels.
🎯 Mission: Zumma’s mission is to create a future where every business runs on an intelligent financial operating system — powered by AI to simplify, automate, and optimize financial workflows.  

Zumma is building the financial operating system for companies in Latin America by creating AI agents and the infrastructure to automate financial workflows — starting with expense management and invoice automation. Each year, companies lose over 20% of revenue to inefficiencies and missed tax deductions caused by manual processes. Zumma helps them reclaim that time and money, powering finance teams across the region. With over 400 customers, Zumma supports companies like Latin America's largest restaurant group and provides invoicing infrastructure for leading corporate card providers. 

Marinella’s entrepreneurial spark was lit by a passport and a backpack. In her early 20s, she traveled solo for six months, visiting dozens of countries. Experiencing life in places where “things don’t work” (think power outages in her native Venezuela or monsoon floods in Thailand) opened her eyes to problems that most people in the U.S. never even see. She realized that big opportunities often hide in plain sight in emerging markets, because what might be a minor inconvenience in a developed country can be a life-changing improvement elsewhere.

Marinella references the memoir Shoe Dog (about Nike’s early days) and how travel inspired Phil Knight’s big idea. She felt the same: seeing the world showed her where she could make a difference. If you want to be an entrepreneur but don’t have an idea, she suggests you get out, talk to people, and observe how things work around you.

After growing up in Florida and following a pretty traditional path (engineering degree, good job on Wall Street), Marinella felt that something was missing. “It was always like: find a good job, work 9 to 5, have work-life balance,” she recalls. But a conventional career wasn’t fulfilling her; she craved a deeper purpose. That’s when she pinpointed her meaning: using her skills to make people’s lives better financially, especially in LatAm.

Marinella firmly believes entrepreneurship requires meaning, a guiding mission that sustains you when the going gets tough. Nowhere is this truer than in Latin America: “You’re not gonna work 9 to 5, you’re not gonna have a big salary or health insurance… especially in a place like LatAm, you have to find meaning because the journey is harder.” For her, that meaning is empowering others through financial education and tools. When asked directly “What is your meaning?”, she answered: “For me it’s giving a little grain of salt to the world, how can I make someone’s life better through the work that I do? As long as I’m seeing that, I think that’s enough for me.”

This point on finding your “meaning”, your purpose, your mission is pertinent advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. Building a company from scratch is not easy. You’ll hear “no” more times that you can count, you’ll have to push through tough times when you want to take a break but can’t step away from the company, you’ll have to interface with customers (some of which may not be happy), and you’ll have a hand in hiring (and firing) employees. None of that is easy and it’ll take a higher purpose to keep you motivated and dedicated to building and growing what you started.

Building a startup is exhilarating and exhausting. Marinella doesn’t shy away from discussing the toll entrepreneurship can take on mental health. As a founder, she felt the pressure to always be “on” and project confidence. “You have to be out there pretending everything is going great,” she says — even to your own team — “because if I’m not, they’ll lose faith in the business and in me.” But behind the scenes, she admits, “I’m an honest person… you ask how I am, I’ll tell you all the problems I have with Zumma.”

Early on, her co-founders gave her some tough love: “Nella, you cannot tell all your problems to everyone you meet.” Marinella laughs about it now, but it was a lesson in balancing transparency with leadership. She learned to confide in a close support network – other founders, friends, or even a therapist – rather than bottling it up or dumping it on her team. The key is having people who’ll listen without judgment, so you can vent, process, and reset.

She’s also a big believer in taking breaks before you hit a wall. As a driven founder, stepping away felt counterintuitive at first, but she learned it’s necessary: “When I’m working 24/7, I get so into the weeds that I can’t see the bigger picture. I’ve had moments where I felt stuck, not knowing where the company was going. It took me taking two days off to clear my mind, come back, and say, okay, this is what we need to do.” Now she encourages her team to do the same:

Marinella’s advice? Prioritize your mental health like any other asset. Take that day off, go for that walk, talk to someone you trust — it’s not a luxury, it’s part of the job. A clear, refreshed mind will make you a better founder in the long run.

Our advice? Find an investor that understands what it’s like to be a founder and understands the toll building takes on your mental health. Preferably, they are a “friendvestor” (shoutout to Ethan at Outside VC).

If there’s one thing Latin American founders have in spades, it’s resilience. Marinella jokes that in LatAm, entrepreneurs become experts at “making wine out of water.” Unreliable infrastructure, economic volatility, political instability – you name it, LatAm folks have lived through it. Rather than breaking their spirit, these challenges forge a special kind of startup toughness.

“I think we [LatAm founders] are more resilient, which is a trait all founders need to have,” Nella says. Having grown up in Venezuela, she’s no stranger to volatility – the power might go out, the currency might crash, basic services might fail, and you just have to find a way. That upbringing instills a scrappiness and adaptability that serve founders well: when things go wrong (as they inevitably do in startups), LatAm entrepreneurs don’t panic, they improvise.

She gives a vivid example: one of Zumma’s engineers, originally from Venezuela, is now in Spain. On a Monday, the entire country of Venezuela lost electricity. His reaction? No big deal. “I’m used to it,” he told the team – and kept right on working, unfazed by a nationwide blackout, because he’s seen worse. As Marinella puts it, “It was not his first rodeo.” This kind of grit and hustle is a common thread among founders from the region.

On the subject of resilience, Venezuela deserves a special mention. Marinella hails from Caracas, and while Zumma operates from Mexico and beyond, she keeps a close eye on the tech ecosystem in Venezuela. Her take? “If LatAm is hard, Venezuela is harder.” Yet she speaks with admiration and hope about the startups rising from her home country.

Marinella has immense respect for the founders actually building in Venezuela right now. The deck is stacked against them – economic crisis, unstable infrastructure, limited funding – and yet, opportunity abounds precisely because so much is broken. “Opportunities are endless,” she says, pointing out that it’s like going back in time: so many basic services and products are missing, which presents a blank canvas for innovators.

She gave us some examples, including a friend that’s creating a digital ticketing system for the old-school “busetas” (minibuses) that people rely on for transportation – something that doesn’t exist yet in Venezuela. Other startups like Cashea (fintech) and Yummy (delivery) are doing extremely well, partly because giants like Rappi or Uber have stayed out of the Venezuelan market. In essence, local players have near-monopolies and room to run, since international competitors are wary of the risks.

Of course, the flip side is the challenges are huge. Everything is harder, from getting paid to reliable internet, and that’s why Marinella stresses: you need truly resilient founders there. Despite the hardship, she notes that the ecosystem is “thriving” more than one might expect. There’s a burgeoning entrepreneurship hub in Caracas, and when she visited a year ago, even she was surprised by the momentum. It’s a testament to Venezuelans’ spirit: “This is our situation; we need to make the most of it and build companies anyway.” And interestingly, many of those companies aren’t just viable in Venezuela, they’re building products that could expand throughout LatAm.

What makes someone a great startup operator or co-founder? Marinella has a favorite (if slightly unorthodox) expression for the #1 trait she looks for. In Venezuelan they say, “me pica el culo.” The literal translation? “My butt itches.” 😂 It’s slang for someone who can’t sit still – they always have to be moving, doing something, making progress. In other words, hustlers.

Whether she’s hiring an early employee or sizing up a potential co-founder, Marinella is basically asking: Does this person have that itch? Are they naturally proactive and restless to achieve something, or are they content to coast? In her experience, the best startup people share this restless energy — they’re self-starters who won’t wait to be told what to do. They’ll find problems and solve them. They get antsy when things aren’t advancing.

In Zumma’s case, Marinella feels lucky to have co-founders (Fernanda and Daniela) who definitely have that trait. All three are very different personality-wise, but they share that core hunger to build something meaningful. It creates a team chemistry where everyone is pushing forward, and no one needs to be dragged along.

One of the biggest decisions in Zumma’s journey was a pivot that, in hindsight, saved the company. Originally, Zumma launched in early 2023 as a B2C personal finance app – an AI-powered financial coach to help young Latin Americans (especially women) save and invest. The app, featuring their friendly virtual assistant “Zummi,” gained solid traction. In fact, Marinella and team amassed over 100,000 downloads, and users loved it. They were so fond of their consumer product that they even made a little Zummi teddy bear mascot. By mid-2023, things looked pretty good on the surface.

But then came a surprise: they noticed a significant chunk of users were repurposing the app for business finances – tracking expenses, asking for help with invoices, etc. Latin American entrepreneurs were basically hacking the personal finance app to manage their company money. This was a lightbulb moment. Marinella and her co-founders started digging in and realized there was a much larger pain point here: small businesses drowning in manual financial admin (especially invoicing, more on that in a second). Virtually no one was addressing it in an easy, modern way.

Still, the idea of pivoting was daunting. They had poured their hearts into the B2C product. “We were all in love with our B2C product and solution,” Marinella admits. They even had that plush Zummi – you don’t make a teddy bear of your product’s mascot unless you’re really attached. “The first thing they tell you is don’t fall in love with the solution, fall in love with the problem,” she says. “But when you’re a founder, it’s very hard not to fall in love with the solution.”

Ultimately, data (and the team’s gut) won out. In late 2023 they decided to pivot to B2B – transforming Zumma into a finance operations platform for SMEs (small and mid-sized enterprises). They didn’t completely kill the B2C app (it still exists, just not actively developed), but they shifted all focus to the new direction. It wasn’t easy emotionally, but it was absolutely the right move. Marinella puts it bluntly: “We decided to focus on this new route… It ended up being the best decision because otherwise we would’ve died probably.”

So what is this new product exactly? In short, Zumma became a “WhatsApp CFO” for businesses. They observed that in LatAm, every company (even one-person freelancers) has to generate facturas (electronic invoices) for expenses to claim tax deductions. It’s an incredibly tedious process in countries like Mexico: you buy something for your business, then you must go to the vendor’s website (or phone them) to request an official invoice, which you later give to your accountant. One or two invoices is fine – but if you have 100 expenses a month, this becomes a nightmare, often eating 20+ hours monthly. Many people just give up, losing money by not claiming half their expenses.

Zumma set out to automate this. Marinella describes how they built a solution where a user can simply snap a photo of a receipt and send it to “Zummi” on WhatsApp. The AI backend fetches the official factura and returns it to you (and your finance team dashboard) within minutes, no human effort required. It’s like magic for anyone who’s suffered through the old way. They focused on WhatsApp as the interface because, in LatAm, that’s where business gets done – everyone already uses it, so no one has to learn a new tool. “We realized in LatAm, people don’t want to get rid of their current tools and processes,” Marinella explains. “It’s harder to tell them to change, than to integrate.” By integrating with WhatsApp, Zumma meets users where they are, lowering friction to almost zero.

To validate this new B2B idea, the Zumma team did something smart: they tested manually before writing code. Marinella said that early on, they were literally doing the invoice process by hand behind the scenes for a small set of pilot customers. This was to make sure people would actually pay for the service. “If the pain is big enough, people will pay for it,” she figured – and she was right. Those early customers were willing to pay, and that was the green light to invest in building the full AI automation.

Today, Zumma’s B2B product is gaining traction. They’ve reported strong growth on the invoicing feature and extremely low churn, validating that this pivot hit a nerve in the market. Moreover, the pivot showcased the team’s adaptability – a crucial trait for any startup. Marinella stayed transparent with stakeholders throughout (more on that in a bit), which helped maintain support during the strategic shift. In sum, pivoting away from their beloved first product was tough love, but it’s led Zumma to a far more scalable opportunity (and likely saved the company). A great reminder that in startups, falling in love with the problem, not the product, is key – and being willing to change course can make all the difference.

How did Marinella and her team realize a pivot was needed in the first place? And how did they decide what exactly to build next? The answer lies in disciplined customer discovery. Marinella shared some of her playbook on validating ideas and understanding customer pain points, and it’s pure gold for early-stage founders.

First off, she’s a fan of the book The Mom Test, which teaches founders how to ask unbiased questions (your mom will lie to not hurt your feelings – so will potential customers, unless you ask the right way). Zumma’s team initially fell into a common trap: asking people if they would use a hypothetical product. “When we were doing the first iteration (B2C), a lot of the questions we were asking were, ‘If we build this, will you use it?’,” Marinella admits. Not surprisingly, most people said yes – but that didn’t mean much. Of course someone will tell a friendly entrepreneur “sure, sounds cool,” but that doesn’t predict actual behavior.

With the pivot, they flipped the script. They focused on open-ended questions about the problem, not the solution. Instead of “would you use X,” they asked things like, “What’s your process for handling expenses and invoices? What’s frustrating about it? How much time do you spend? What happens if you don’t do it?” This gave them unfiltered insight into how painful the problem really was (turns out, very painful) and what workaround solutions businesses were currently hacking together.

Crucially, they didn’t take people’s word at face value. Marinella’s rule: Don’t believe what customers say; believe what they do. Someone might say “Yes, I’d pay $X for that,” but will they actually open their wallet? To find out, Zumma tested the value prop in the real world. They manually provided the service (fetching invoices) to a pilot group and asked those businesses to pay a small fee. When businesses actually paid for a scrappy manual service, that was strong evidence of real demand. If they had balked, it would mean the pain wasn’t severe enough or the pricing was off.

Marinella loves that Henry Ford analogy (people would’ve asked for faster horses instead of imagining a car). It underscores that customers are experts in their problems, not the solutions. By deeply understanding the invoice pain point, the Zumma team could envision an automated solution that customers themselves might not have articulated initially.

Finally, once you think you have a solution, test willingness to pay early and empirically. Marinella emphasized the question “How much would you pay for this?” as a gauge – but even better, as she demonstrated, is to actually charge (even a little) and see if the credit card goes through. Actions speak louder than words in customer discovery.

For founders reading, Marinella’s approach is a textbook example of lean validation:

These steps helped Zumma confidently pivot in a new direction, essentially de-risking the move. It’s a great reminder that no amount of genius product vision replaces actually listening to your users and watching their behavior. Good things happen when you build with and for your customers, not in a vacuum.

Zummi, Zumma’s virtual assistant, lives in WhatsApp – helping users track spending and send invoices in a simple chat interface.

One of the smartest design choices Zumma made was to meet users where they already are. In Latin America, that place is WhatsApp – the ubiquitous messaging app used for everything from chatting with friends to coordinating business. “We realized early on that to build a sticky product, we didn’t want to replace the tools people were already using,” Marinella explains. “People in LatAm don’t want to get rid of their current tools and processes. It’s harder to tell ’em to change than to integrate.” So instead of requiring users to learn a new app from scratch, Zumma leveraged WhatsApp as its interface.

Practically speaking, this means a user can manage their finances as if they were chatting with a friend. Have a business expense? Snap a photo of the receipt with your phone and send it to Zummi on WhatsApp. Within minutes, Zummi processes it and replies with a properly formatted factura (digital invoice) for that expense . Need to know your cash flow? Just ask Zummi via voice note or text, and it will fetch the summary. In the background, Zumma’s system logs all the data in a dashboard that a company’s finance team can access for reports, reimbursement tracking, etc., but many small business owners can accomplish everything through simple WhatsApp messages. By automating these tedious workflows, Zumma is saving users serious time and money – an average of 20+ hours a month previously lost to chasing invoices, and thousands of dollars in tax deductions that would have been missed . And because it’s all done in a familiar chat format, customers don’t feel like they’re adopting some complicated “enterprise software”; it feels as easy as texting, because it is texting. Marinella notes that they had experimented with WhatsApp in their early B2C days and saw strong engagement, so it was a no-brainer to carry that over to the SME solution . In a region where trust in new apps can be low, using a platform people already trust (and have always-open on their phones) has been key to Zumma’s growth.

The choice to build on WhatsApp also illustrates something deeper about product-market fit in LatAm. Entrepreneurs in the region have learned that success often requires adapting to local user behavior, rather than importing Silicon Valley playbooks verbatim. As Marinella puts it, WhatsApp was simply “the way” to get people to actually use the service – removing friction and lowering the barrier to trying a new financial tool . That cultural insight (integrate, don’t overhaul) is paying off: since pivoting, Zumma’s invoice product has been growing double-digits month over month with almost no churn, validating that they’ve hit a nerve. And Zumma isn’t stopping at invoices; by embedding more AI into the chat assistant, they aim to automate a whole suite of financial ops tasks for businesses. It’s fintech built in WhatsApp, and it feels like a very LatAm kind of innovation.

Marinella believes feedback is a gift — and she lives it by sending frequent, candid updates to investors, mentors, and even friends. These monthly emails share Zumma’s wins, challenges, and specific asks, turning her network into an active “village” of supporters.

This openness paid off during Zumma’s pivot from B2C to B2B: instead of surprising investors, Marinella kept them looped in the whole way, turning potential skeptics into cheerleaders. Over time, her updates transformed stakeholders from passive observers into engaged allies, often leading to unexpected intros and advice. It’s a reminder that transparency isn’t just good ethics — it’s a growth strategy.

While many insist a startup must have a technical co-founder, Marinella proves otherwise. Zumma began with three non-coders, yet still built an advanced AI fintech product by hiring “founding engineers” who acted like co-founders in commitment and vision.

Their approach? Deep product understanding, clear vision, and attracting passionate engineers hungry to build. By empowering these early hires with ownership and trust, they filled the tech gap without an official CTO.

And check out Zumma as they continue to enable financial management for SMBs in Latin America.

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