Company Dossier - Fintech / Trade Finance
Blooms.
Same-day capital for the trucks of fruit crossing the border. Blooms finances the Latin American produce supply chain - so growers get paid before the mangoes ripen.
Same-day capital for the trucks of fruit crossing the border. Blooms finances the Latin American produce supply chain - so growers get paid before the mangoes ripen.
Here is a fact about fruit that almost nobody outside the business thinks about, and that everybody inside the business thinks about constantly: the strawberry crosses the US border in a day, and the payment for it arrives in a month. That gap - not frost, not pests, not yield - is the thing that quietly ruins good growers. You spend real money to plant, pick, pack, and ship a perishable good, and then you wait 30 to 60 days to be made whole, all while the next harvest needs financing too. Blooms is a company built entirely inside that gap.
Blooms - legally Blooms Trade Inc., incorporated in Wilmington, Delaware, and Spanish-speaking at heart - is an AI-driven trade finance platform for Latin American produce exporters selling into the US and Canada. Its Spanish tagline is refreshingly unpretentious: Simplificamos el capital para exportar. We simplify capital for export. The company does the unglamorous, load-bearing work of moving money across a border faster than a bank will, and it has raised $2.6 million to do more of it.
The core trick is cross-border factoring. An exporter in Mexico or Guatemala ships produce to a US buyer and generates an invoice. Instead of waiting for that buyer to pay, the exporter sells the receivable to Blooms, which advances up to 80% of the invoice value within 24 hours and assumes the credit risk on the US side. When the buyer eventually pays, Blooms collects. The exporter, meanwhile, got cash the day after shipment instead of a month later - which, when your product is measured in shelf life, is the whole ballgame.
There is a second, subtler product that matters just as much: pre-export financing. Here Blooms buys future receivables - effectively funding the harvest before the shipment even leaves. And there is a third leg, a global payments platform with a virtual US account and tailored FX, built in partnership with the financial institution Monex, so that a grower being paid in dollars and spending in pesos isn't quietly bled by currency swings. A data tool for cash-flow forecasting is in development. Put together, it is less a loan and more a financial operating system for the farm-to-border corridor.
For too long, Latin American exporters have faced funding barriers that limit growth. This investment validates our vision to provide seamless, intelligent financial solutions that reduce waste, support sustainability, and deliver fresher, more affordable produce to North American consumers.
Blooms compresses a process that traditionally runs on faxes and month-long waits into something that feels like signing up for an app.
A produce exporter registers the company and its trade profile on the Blooms platform.
Enter the financing request with buyer details. Blooms analyzes the US buyer's credit, not just the grower's balance sheet.
Pre-approval within 24 hours, then up to 80% of the invoice advanced - liquidity while the produce is still fresh.
Pre-export financing that funds production and operations before goods ship, by purchasing future receivables to bankroll the harvest in advance.
Up to 80% of invoice value advanced within 24 hours. Blooms buys the US receivable and carries the credit risk stateside.
A virtual US account for cross-border transfers plus currency-hedging tools, developed with partner Monex.
An AI product to digitize cross-border information flow and help exporters forecast liquidity across the trade cycle.
Francisco Mere - "Paco" on his email - is not new to building financial rails for people the mainstream banking system skips. Before Blooms he was associated with Bankaool, described as one of Mexico's first fully licensed fintech banks. The throughline of his career is a pattern worth naming: find a group the incumbents underserve, and build them infrastructure rather than a pitch.
With Blooms, the underserved group is the Latin American produce exporter, and the infrastructure is a financing stack that treats a perishable invoice as an asset worth advancing against today. The macro backdrop is unusually clean for a startup story. The US buys on the order of $100 billion of fresh produce a year and imports a substantial share of it - much of it from Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Peru. Demand for fresh fruits and vegetables keeps climbing. And yet the growers feeding that demand routinely can't get fair, fast capital.
The seed round, announced in May 2025, was led by SP Ventures, an agritech-focused VC, with Angel Ventures, The Yield Lab Latam, Eqwow Ventures, Glocal Managers, and Mercy Corps Ventures joining. That last name is a tell: Mercy Corps Ventures is an impact investor, and Blooms's sustainability angle is not decoration. Fund the exporter properly and less produce spoils waiting on capital - less waste, fresher food, and, the company argues, steadier prices on North American shelves.
SP Ventures partner Ariadne Caballero framed it as plumbing: "Blooms is solving a core bottleneck in Latin America's ag value chain - access to agile, fair financial tools." The pitch to a farmer, notably, is not "we will transform agriculture." It is "we will pay you on time." In an industry that runs on trust and shelf life, doing the obvious thing quickly is the radical part.
Blooms is early. It is a seed-stage company of roughly 45 people, its data tool is still in development, and the hard parts of trade finance - credit risk, fraud, and collecting from buyers across a border - are exactly the parts that look easy in a deck and get difficult at scale. Being PACA-licensed helps: the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act is the US regime that protects produce sellers from buyer default, and operating inside it is table stakes for anyone serious about this market. What Blooms has, at minimum, is a sharply defined wedge and a founder who has built regulated financial businesses before.
Bar lengths are illustrative of round roles, not disclosed allocations. Total round: $2.6M, May 2025.
Led by SP Ventures with Angel Ventures, The Yield Lab Latam, Eqwow Ventures, Glocal Managers, and Mercy Corps Ventures participating.
Blooms outlined plans to broaden its AI trade-finance platform and ship additional digital tools, including a cash-flow-forecasting data product for exporters.
Operating under the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, with a Monex-powered global payments and FX platform live for clients.
Blooms is solving a core bottleneck in Latin America's ag value chain - access to agile, fair financial tools. Their AI-powered approach enhances exporter resilience, improves sustainability, and reduces food waste.
Around the world, there has been an increase in consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Interviews and product walkthroughs from Blooms and its founder.
Blooms is an AI-driven trade finance platform that gives Latin American fresh-produce exporters faster access to working capital, cross-border factoring, and multi-currency payments as they ship fruits and vegetables into the US and Canada. Founded by fintech veteran Francisco Mere, the company purchases exporters' US receivables, absorbs the credit risk stateside, and advances up to 80% of an invoice within 24 hours - smoothing the cash-flow gap that has long strangled growers who sell perishable goods across borders. It raised a $2.6M seed round in May 2025 led by agritech VC SP Ventures.
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