Cardda wants to fix the boring middle of how Latam companies move money

The story of Cardda begins not with a bank, but with a bulldozer. Before it was a fintech, the company was Rentz - a marketplace for renting heavy machinery, built by two Chilean civil engineers named Cristóbal Grinbergs and Sebastián Hernández. Running that business, they ran into a problem that had nothing to do with excavators and everything to do with plastic: their corporate card limit was too low to operate. The tool that was supposed to help them spend was the thing holding them back.

That frustration became the pivot. In 2020, the two engineers stopped renting machines and started building the card company they wished they'd had. They called it Cardda. By the winter of 2022 they were sitting in Y Combinator's W22 batch, presenting to Demo Day as one of 35 international fintechs, and pitching a deceptively plain idea: give Latin American businesses the simplest possible way to pay.

01 / What it doesThe whole finance stack on one screen

Ask most people to picture a fintech and they'll imagine a slick consumer app. Cardda is the opposite: it lives inside the finance department. The platform pulls four jobs that normally sprawl across banks, spreadsheets and email into a single dashboard - corporate cards, transfers, reimbursements and accounts payable. A CFO logs in and sees, in real time, where every peso is going, broken down by team, project or person.

02 / The problemPaying is easy. Reconciling is the nightmare

The pain Cardda targets is unglamorous and universal. In Chile, a finance team's month often looks like this: log into the tax authority's site, find the invoices, copy the details, log into the bank, type them in again, run the transfer, then match everything back to a budget. It is hours of copy-paste, and every step is a chance to fumble a number.

Cardda's answer is to remove the steps. Its integration with the SII - Chile's Servicio de Impuestos Internos - syncs invoices directly into an inbox, so the documents show up where the payment happens. Its ERP connectors (SAP, Oracle, Defontana, Nubox) let that data flow back into accounting without a re-key. The card, the transfer and the invoice all end up in the same place.

03 / The customersUniversities, pension funds and startups

Cardda's customer list reads less like a fintech's early adopters and more like a cross-section of the Chilean economy. Construction firms, retailers, marketing agencies and tech startups sit alongside heavyweight institutions. Among the named clients: the pension manager AFP Uno, the Universidad de Chile, ticketing company Punto Ticket and Kaufmann.

A pension fund and a public university trusting a young startup with their spending says something about the size of the copy-paste problem.

04 / The differenceBuilt for local rails, not imported ones

Plenty of companies issue virtual cards. TechCrunch said as much when Cardda launched, noting it would "have to work hard to differentiate itself." The differentiation turned out to be a philosophy: in Latin America, cards are not the center of gravity - local bank transfers are. Cardda built its API and its whole product around that reality instead of importing the US card-first playbook.

Capability	Card-first fintechs	Cardda
Instant virtual cards	Yes	Yes
Mass local wire transfers via API	Limited	Core feature
SII tax-invoice sync	No	Native
ERP connectors (SAP, Oracle, Nubox)	Partial	Built in
Reimbursements over WhatsApp	Rare	Yes

Reading the table: the card is table stakes. Cardda's edge is everything wrapped around it - the transfers, the tax integration, the local workflows.

05 / The marketWhere Cardda sits

Global spend-management is a crowded, well-funded category - Ramp and Brex in the US, Clara, Jeeves and Tribal across Latam. Cardda's bet is that a platform built natively for Chile's tax system and payment rails beats a global product bolted on afterward. The company positions itself in the deep, unglamorous plumbing of business finance, where switching costs are high and the workflows are specific to each country.

06 / The modelSoftware plus payments

Cardda makes money the way modern fintechs tend to: a B2B SaaS platform sitting on top of payment economics. Companies pay for the software that gives them control, and the transactions moving across cards and transfers add a second layer. It is a small team - around a dozen people - operating out of Avenida Suecia in Providencia, a Santiago neighborhood thick with startups. The reported funding is modest by Silicon Valley standards, a seed round backed by Y Combinator, Platanus Ventures and Start-Up Chile. The strategy is not to outspend, but to out-integrate.

07 / The timelineFrom Rentz to real traction

There's a tidy symmetry to it. Cardda exists because its founders, running a completely different business, hit a wall trying to spend their own money. They didn't set out to disrupt finance. They just wanted a card that worked - and then kept building until the card was the least interesting part.