The polite answer was no. Antonia San Martín Sola and her co-founders had tried to place their company’s spare cash with a Chilean fintech. Inflation was rising, their runway was shrinking, and leaving the money idle felt careless. The fintech declined them for a remarkably revealing reason: it was not accepting business clients. A modern financial service had decided that onboarding a company was more trouble than the account was worth.
Many people would have moved the money elsewhere and complained over lunch. This team inspected the refusal. Business information across Latin America was scattered, verification was slow, and compliance often required a small procession of documents, lawyers and manual checks. The inconvenience was not an edge case. It was a market admitting, with admirable honesty, that its machinery did not work.
They began on the problem the following day. That turn produced Plutto, now a Y Combinator-backed platform for due diligence, compliance and third-party risk. Its public product has grown well beyond the original idea of fetching business data. It organizes requests, checks official sources, reviews documents, flags conflicts of interest, monitors risk and keeps an audit trail. The unglamorous paperwork became infrastructure.
“Business information is all over the place in LatAm.”Plutto’s Y Combinator launch
Before the software, a trip changed the weather
San Martín Sola did not begin as a software founder. She studied commercial engineering at the Universidad de Chile, then entered the corporate world she had long imagined for herself. She spent roughly a year at Nike Chile and more than two years at CCU, working around marketing, products, pricing and distribution. It was useful training in a place startup mythology sometimes neglects: the ordinary customer.
In 2018 she won Chile’s Young Lions competition and travelled to Cannes Lions. There she encountered people from technology companies including Waze, Facebook and Instagram. The trip made her corporate path feel suddenly dated. Technology firms were integrating systems, making things and accumulating the ability to change how work happened. She felt she was missing the more consequential room.
Her response was characteristically concrete. She resigned and decided to treat entrepreneurship as a self-funded MBA. Instead of moving abroad for a conventional degree, she would spend her savings building a company and learning technology by proximity. She expected six months. Reality, which has never respected a founder’s spreadsheet, arranged a longer course.
A lost transaction can reveal a whole category of cost that incumbents have learned to tolerate.
An idea can expire without invalidating the people who learned to build it together.
Customers do not merely need more data. They need a defensible decision and a record of how it was made.
A dwindling runway forced the Plutto team to stop admiring options and choose a problem.
The first company met the wrong decade
Her initial idea became Milla Travel, a platform for companies to organize corporate trips. She hired the software firm Platanus to build an early product and met engineer Ignacio Márquez there. He joined as CTO after she had spent close to a year as a solo founder. Milla won customers and entered the first Platanus Ventures batch. Then Chile’s social unrest disrupted travel, followed by the pandemic, which treated a corporate-travel startup with the tenderness of a falling piano.
Milla closed, but something worth keeping had survived. San Martín Sola and Márquez knew they worked well together. They connected with engineers Felipe Domínguez and Sebastián Margozzini, who were preparing to leave Platanus, and formed a team around another idea: subscription-payment software. It earned them a place in Platanus Ventures again and $100,000 in funding. The idea failed.
This is the less photogenic part of persistence. They did not march from insight to triumph. They researched each day, interviewed founders, watched their remaining capital lose value and set a March deadline. If no convincing idea emerged, they would find jobs. The rejected fintech account arrived inside that pressure. A conversation with Fintual co-founder Agustín Feuerhake sharpened the opportunity from investing cash for businesses to verifying businesses themselves. Within weeks, there was an MVP. Operations began on March 1, 2022.
A company profile is not yet a decision
The first Plutto gathered information from multiple sources and returned it through a dashboard or API. Given a registration number, it could assemble a company profile, collect private documents through a branded form and help a customer review them. Early materials claimed a business could otherwise wait as long as three months to open a bank account, with manual onboarding costing up to $100 per customer. The product compressed some validations to minutes.
But the team learned that aggregation solved only the first half. A mound of organized facts is still a mound. Many Latin American businesses lacked specialized data-science or risk teams able to turn raw information into models. Customers fell back on the same few data points, regardless of how much Plutto supplied. San Martín Sola described it vividly: they were delivering a thicket of information.
So Plutto climbed a layer. The aim became helping commercial, legal, procurement and compliance teams construct decision rules, generate alerts, monitor counterparties and preserve evidence without first assembling an internal laboratory. Today its site presents an end-to-end flow covering purchase requests, third-party evaluation, conflict-of-interest checks and supplier performance. The intellectual move is from finding facts to making careful action possible.
These are company-reported figures, but the direction matters more than the decoration. Plutto began by helping financial services verify business customers. It now describes a broader supply-chain risk and compliance platform used across industries including retail, energy, mining, construction and manufacturing. A problem discovered at a fintech’s door had travelled into the procurement office.
The one-metre room
By mid-2022, Plutto had six clients and more than 300 validations. The team applied to Y Combinator on the final day. Weeks passed. When the interview invitation finally arrived, San Martín Sola had already accepted an invitation from Fintual CEO Pedro Pineda to attend a dinner in Mexico City with founders and investors. The dinner and interview landed on the same date.
She travelled and found a meeting room in Fintual’s crowded office. It measured roughly one metre by one metre and was designed for brief calls. She spent the day there, then joined the YC interview remotely and apart from her co-founders. The questions ignored their rehearsed script. Asked how much capital they expected to raise at Demo Day, she said $500,000, perhaps $1 million with luck and hard work. It was a direct answer in a comically small room.
Plutto entered the Summer 2022 batch. The company accepted a reported $500,000 round after receiving more interest than it wanted to take, preserving ownership rather than treating excess demand as a trophy. The episode contains a useful picture of San Martín Sola’s style: organized enough to prepare, adaptable enough to abandon the preparation, ambitious without becoming foggy.
“Soy afortunada de haber estado en los dos mundos y ahora estoy en un punto intermedio donde sí puedo aportar.”Antonia San Martín Sola on corporate life and technology
A practical optimist with a desk
Her working habits are pleasingly free of mysticism. She has described beginning around 7:30, walking her adopted dog and generally heading into the office. She supports in-person work and sits at her desk to organize the next few hours so she does not drift. She likes animals, learning, sushi and, thanks to someone named Paula, ramen. The recommended book attached to her Fundadores interview was How to Win Friends and Influence People.
The small details fit the larger career. San Martín Sola is not a programmer playing at commerce. She is a commercially trained operator who learned enough about technology to see where it can remove delay, then found technical partners and stayed close to customer behavior. Her corporate years gave her fluency in pricing, distribution and how products reach people. The startups supplied harsher lessons about timing, runway and the difference between a feature and a company.
She has spoken about the low penetration of software in Latin America and her concern that Chile could miss opportunities created by shifting supply chains. She expects artificial intelligence to reward businesses that use it to improve products, move earlier and reduce risk. Plutto’s own product now uses AI to synthesize findings and review documents, but its real promise is more sober: make a decision faster, keep it traceable and continue watching after the contract is signed.
San Martín Sola has also said she can imagine creating two or three more startups. That aspiration feels less like serial-founder costume than the conclusion of her chosen education. She left a career she understood to learn a field she did not. One company closed. Another idea failed. A third emerged from a rejection. The lesson was never that failure is secretly success. Failure remained expensive and unpleasant. Its value depended on whether the team could carry forward sharper judgment.
Plutto’s story is ultimately about making hidden friction legible. The fintech that refused the account was behaving rationally inside a broken process. San Martín Sola’s team saw that the rational refusal was itself the clue. Four years later, the company sells the missing machinery: gather the evidence, evaluate the third party, record the reason, watch for change. Bureaucracy rarely produces an elegant invitation. Sometimes it simply says no and waits to see who keeps asking why.