Alejandro Casas and the business he had to leave behind

Before Alejandro Casas built software to help companies account for their money, he ran a business in which an online clothing order could send him out of the house. He would buy the garment and take it to the customer. Ropeo had a website and a programmer at its center, but the delivery still needed somebody’s legs. That distinction would become rather expensive to ignore.

Casas and Santiago Gómez took Ropeo to Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 batch. The company grew. Then they decided to close it. The remaining inventory went to friends, family, and neighbors in a garage sale. For a founder looking toward a software business, there was something fitting about the last transaction requiring the goods to leave the premises.

Today Casas is the co-founder and CEO of Simetrik. Its work concerns financial reconciliation: checking that records from different systems agree, and dealing with the differences when they do not. The route between those two businesses runs through a question that followed him from clothing commerce into enterprise software. How much work does the next customer create?

The code was only the beginning

Casas’s education crossed software engineering and design. He studied at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and undertook computer science studies at RMIT University in Australia. He later completed a master’s in Interactive Apps Design at IED Barcelona. His professional history includes founding Inclava Labs and working as chief technology officer at Mesfix, a Colombian invoice-financing platform.

Those are useful credentials for building a product. They also describe several different ways of looking at one. Engineering asks whether something can work. Design asks whether someone can use it. A business eventually has to ask whether anyone will buy it, keep using it, and pay enough for its continued existence. A founder gets all three examinations, generally without a convenient timetable.

Early in his career, Alex Torrenegra offered Casas an internship at Bunny, a voice-project fulfillment business. Casas wanted to work in marketing. His explanation was succinct: “I realized that building digital products was way more difficult than just building the technology.” For a programmer, requesting work outside programming was a practical admission that the product had a life beyond the code.

In his later conversations about becoming a CEO, Casas returned to that wider education: understanding customers, selling to companies, and deciding where to develop his own capabilities. Technical knowledge gave him a way to speak with engineers. Running the company required him to become intelligible to many other people, too.

A growing business, an awkward model

Casas met Gómez in 2015 through Endeavor. Casas was working at Mesfix, an Endeavor company; Gómez was on the Endeavor Colombia team. Gómez advised and invested in Ropeo before joining the business. Their relationship therefore began with a view of the company from both sides of the founder’s desk.

Ropeo launched in 2016. Clothing commerce brought customers and revenue, but it also brought the obligations of clothing commerce: logistics, inventory, and the physical movement of goods. Endeavor’s account of the business describes its dependence on fleets and warehouses. Those obligations remained even when the customer arrived through an app.

At Y Combinator, the founders could compare their operation with businesses organized around different economics. The comparison mattered. A model that depends on moving things through a city asks for a different organization from a model that sells software repeatedly. Growth in both may look attractive on a chart; underneath, the demands on people and capital can be quite different.

Their decision to leave Ropeo behind was followed by a move toward software as a service. The point was to build around a problem software could address without reproducing the physical burdens of their earlier business. The partnership stayed intact as its destination changed. Casas became Simetrik’s CEO; Gómez became its COO.

The unfinished work after a payment

Simetrik’s history identifies a 2019 project with Rappi as a formative engagement. The delivery platform needed better enterprise reconciliation tools. That need gave Casas and Gómez a problem with immediate operational consequences, inside a company whose transactions were already complicated enough to demand close attention.

Reconciliation is easy to explain in a small example. A sale appears in a merchant’s records. A processor records the payment. A bank records the settlement. Fees, refunds, and timing can make those records differ. The finance team must establish which entries belong together and explain anything left over. A successful payment does not automatically settle every question about it.

In a February 2024 interview, the founders described the market changes that had made the work harder. More fintech products, cards, and wallets meant more complexity for accountants and financial operations teams. Businesses were adding ways to receive and move money. Their internal records had to accommodate the consequences.

Casas’s chosen customer was the person dealing with that accumulation. Simetrik centralized records and automated reconciliation, controls, reporting, and accounting tasks. Its no-code approach let finance teams configure work through software rather than make every change a separate engineering assignment. For someone who had begun as a developer, making software usable by people outside development became a central part of the business.

Learning to sell the next version

In his 2021 discussion of Simetrik, Casas explained that the first implementation used Amazon Web Services and manual SQL commands. Early software often carries considerable work behind the curtain. The next challenge is deciding which of that work can become a repeatable product and which still depends on the people delivering it.

He also discussed using the Rappi engagement to help persuade other companies. A customer with a real operational problem offered a more concrete introduction than a promise about software in general. Corporate buyers still had their own requirements, budgets, and reasons to hesitate. Casas’s account of selling included learning how companies valued the product and what they were willing to pay.

By March 2022, Simetrik was announcing financing and hiring plans for another stage. Its Series A package totaled $24 million, including $20 million in equity and $4 million in debt. FinTech Collective led the equity round. Casas described plans to expand the team across Latin America, including software development, senior sales, and marketing positions.

The range of those jobs is telling. A usable product needs distribution, implementation, and a continuing relationship with its customers. The founder who once requested a marketing internship was now assembling an organization with those responsibilities built into it. The technical problem and the commercial problem had become parts of the same company.

Money for a wider ambition

In December 2023, Casas and Gómez became Endeavor Entrepreneurs. By then Simetrik had customers including Mercado Libre, PayU, Nubank, and Rappi. The founders had met through the network years earlier; they were returning with a business whose customers and operations extended well beyond their first venture.

A $55 million Series B followed in February 2024, led by Goldman Sachs. The company was expanding its product through Simetrik Building Blocks: modular automation for financial teams, combining no-code development and AI. The ambition covered the connected work around reconciliation, including records, controls, and reports.

The people building it were international, too. In February 2024, the company described a remote team of 270 employees, representing roughly 20 nationalities and working from 12 countries. It had signed early customers in India and Singapore. Global ambitions were beginning to show up in the everyday coordination of the organization.

In June 2025, Goldman Sachs led another $30 million investment, taking the Series B to $85 million. Simetrik said the funding would support U.S. expansion and entry into other markets with large transaction volumes and demanding regulatory environments. The business that emerged from a Colombian clothing startup was now serving customers across more than 40 countries.

The founder makes room for other people

After the 2024 round, Casas published reflections that spent considerable time on the people around him. He described a mother who continually built initiatives and a father who read and studied widely as an academic and philosopher. He credited his wife, co-founder, colleagues, family, and friends.

His management concerns were equally human: listening, speaking clearly, having difficult conversations, and developing common language. He connected trust with consistency. The principles were meant to influence how people behaved, beyond their appearance in a company document.

“Treat people like equals, always and everyone.”

Alejandro Casas, 2024 founder reflections

There is a practical relationship between that view and the work Simetrik sells. Reconciliation requires agreement about what a record means. An organization requires agreement about what people mean. In either setting, a misunderstanding can travel surprisingly far before anybody notices. Casas’s emphasis on communication makes sense alongside the product, without turning every conversation into an accounting exercise.

The numbers must survive the agent

In May 2026, Simetrik announced its availability on AWS Marketplace. The listing gave enterprise customers another route to buying the software through existing procurement and billing arrangements. Getting a product into a company includes the unromantic business of making it possible to purchase.

In August, Simetrik introduced Simetrik Agent. The company describes an autonomous system that configures financial-control work, reconciles records, and analyzes exceptions, using a deterministic core when a result needs to be exact and auditable. People can supervise its decisions, and the system can request human involvement.

That combination expresses a constraint particular to the work. Finance teams can benefit from faster configuration and analysis, but an explanation must remain inspectable. An agent’s ability to act adds another reason to preserve a clear record of what it did.

In September, Simetrik announced selection for Mastercard Start Path’s inaugural Agentic Commerce and Services cohort. It reported more than 180 customers across over 50 countries and 2.5 billion records processed daily. These are company-reported measures of the operation Casas now leads.

His journey began with software that could take a clothing order while leaving the delivery to him. Years later, the division of labor is still being revised. Machines can do more of the work. The people responsible for the money still need to understand the result. Casas has built his next chapter around that obligation.