He walked into an American bank, got turned away, and decided the problem wasn't him. It was the bank. Comun is his answer - a neobank that speaks Spanish first and asks for a Social Security Number never.
The investor who left the cap table to sit on the other side of it.
Andres Santos sends remittances for a living, and he counts them the way other founders count signups: 3.1 a month, per customer, like clockwork. That number is the whole company in miniature. Comun is not a banking app that happens to have Latino users. It is a Spanish-first checking account, debit card, and money-transfer rail built for the person who has been told - politely, repeatedly - that they don't have the right paperwork to be a customer.
Comun accepts more than 100 different Latin American IDs. It needs no Social Security Number. The support line answers in Spanish, seven days a week, by phone, chat, email, or WhatsApp. None of that is decoration. Each piece exists because Santos and his co-founder hit the wall personally: two Mexicans who came to the US to study and discovered that being qualified on paper and being bankable were not the same thing.
The fix arrived fast. Comun launched its first product in October 2022. By the back half of 2024, monthly revenue had grown roughly fiftyfold and the company was on a path to move more than a billion dollars a year. Investors noticed the unit economics before they noticed the mission.
Santos did not back into fintech. He studied it from the cheap seats first. After an MBA at MIT Sloan, he spent time as an investor at FJ Labs, the New York firm that has written checks into hundreds of marketplaces and consumer startups. He learned what a fast-growing company smells like before he tried to build one. Then, in November 2021, he and Abiel Gutierrez - a former founding engineer at Brex - stopped evaluating other people's pitches and wrote their own.
The numbers Santos likes to repeat are the uncomfortable ones. Latinos, he says, are three times more likely to go unbanked and pay an average of five times higher fees for basic services. Comun's pitch is arithmetic: remove the friction, drop the fees, and a community that the legacy system treats as a risk turns out to be a market.
The ambition runs past the checking account. Santos talks about credit, financial literacy, retirement, and homeownership - the full ladder of upward mobility, not just the first rung. He wants Comun to be the trusted partner that grows up alongside its customers, which is a polite way of saying he is not done.
Latinos are 3x more likely to go unbanked and pay an average of 5x higher fees for basic services.
Most founders space their rounds out. Santos closed a $4.5M seed in December 2023, then a $21.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures barely eight months later. The company's valuation jumped more than 50% over its prior $62M mark. The chart below is the argument the deck didn't need to make.
Backers: Redpoint Ventures, ANIMO Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, FJ Labs, RTP Global, South Park Commons.
No fees for opening, no minimum balance, no membership. Revenue comes from interchange, remittance fees, deposit interest, and instant-transfer fees - and interchange is now less than half of it.
Santos runs the company; Abiel Gutierrez builds it. Gutierrez was a founding engineer at Brex before Comun, which is where he learned how a fintech scales without breaking. Both came from Mexico. Both hit the same wall opening a US bank account - language, paperwork, the quiet assumption that they were a risk. They turned that wall into a product spec.
When he isn't counting remittances, Santos takes road trips with his wife and daughter, poking around the corners of New York. A founder whose company is about moving money home, spending his weekends going nowhere in particular.
"To enable upward mobility for Latinos in the US."
The checking account is the entry point. The plan runs through credit, financial literacy, retirement, and homeownership - the entire ladder, one rung built at a time.