Backed by a16z, Uruguay-based Open Banking firm Datanomik enters Brazil

Brazil’s Open Banking market has a new kid on the block. Uruguayan startup Datanomik has just announced its arrival in the country after raising a $6 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), joined by the funds Canary, Nazca and Latitud.

A pool of angel investors such as Conrado Engel, former CEO at HSBC; Rappi founder Sebastião Mejia; Dinie‘s founder Suzy Ferreira; Pablo Garfinkel, founder of Tokai Ventures, have also participated in the round.

Created in January of this year, Datanomik is a B2B Open Banking platform that supports companies in management and planning tasks by facilitating access to financial information.

The API developed by the startup accesses information directly from banks and other institutions, such as payment service providers and e-commerce platforms. The system standardizes and gathers this information in one place, with real-time updates.

In a press release, the company says that its mission is to help companies such as fellow Uruguayan firm dLocal, US fintech Jeeves (another firm that has just arrived in Brazil) and the Brazil-based Dinie.

All these companies face the same challenge: getting simplified financial information straight from the source is difficult, especially in emerging markets where data is historically dispersed and disorganized.

At the helm of Datanomik are Gonzalo Strauss and Sergio Fogel, co-founder at dLocal. They met at the payments fintech AstroPay, in which Fogel is an investor and where Strauss was head of products.

With the Datanomik’s platform, CFOs can connect all their financial accounts and get a centralized view of financial information to manage their business performance while doing real-time reconciliations, bookkeeping, accounting and other business operations.

“In emerging markets, cash is still the main method of payment, which forces us to use archaic processes to make reconciliations or manage corporate bank account data,” says Strauss in a press statement.

This is a challenge, he says, because each institution has their own systems, none of which are connected to each other, and information is not standardized, making systematic updating difficult in a world where real-time access to data is required.

“Fintechs nowadays have operations in several countries, or even continents”, Strauss adds. “This means dealing with dozens of bank accounts from different banks, resulting in a bottleneck for finance teams, who spend hours manually accessing their accounts to check balances, transfers or analyze their cash flow.”

The opportunity for Datanomik

Business prospects are great not only for payment companies, but for any company that relies on financial data – that makes perfect sense at a time when “embedded finance” has been gathering pace around the world, and Brazil is no exception.