The most revealing machine in Carlos Tejeda's career may be a public telephone that refused to remain merely a telephone. In the late 1990s, Tejeda and his brother Rafael adapted conventional payphones into vending machines for calls, airtime top-ups and other electronic services. They put them where daily life already happened: inside the small neighborhood stores scattered across Mexico and Latin America.
The device was practical, a little ungainly and quietly ambitious. It treated the corner shop as more than a place to buy milk or a soft drink. The shop was a node. It knew the neighborhood, handled cash, stayed open late and served people larger institutions overlooked. Tejeda would spend the next three decades returning to that insight, even as everything attached to it changed.
Today he is co-founder and CEO of Pideaky, a Monterrey fintech from Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch. Its current pitch centers on AI collection agents that remind, collect and negotiate bills for Latin American small businesses. The vocabulary is thoroughly modern. The customer is wonderfully familiar.
Payphones in corner shops
Neighborhood internet access
Lending and collections
Before the phone rang
The brothers' first formal company did not make phones. It made arcade machines. The market turned difficult, so they looked elsewhere. In 1997, they found an opening in public telephony and began building for it. That early pivot established a pattern: stay alert to what customers are beginning to need, then be willing to make the machinery strange enough to deliver it.
Manufacturing demanded its own improvisation. Small runs of electronic boards could not readily be assembled in Mexico, so the brothers worked with a Taiwanese manufacturer as a kind of remote design laboratory. Boards and plastic molds came from abroad; final assembly happened in Mexico. During the economic turbulence of the 1990s, they searched outside the domestic market too. In 2004, they won a tender to supply mobile public telephony in Guatemala and Nicaragua.
R&C Telecomunicaciones ultimately sold more than 100,000 payphones to corner shops and large carriers across Mexico, Chile, Peru, Argentina and Central America. These were not decorative relics waiting for smartphones to arrive. They were working infrastructure for customers with needs the mainstream market had left untended.
A boyfriend, a message, a market
Technology forecasts usually arrive dressed as graphs. Tejeda's arrived as a message to his daughter from her boyfriend. The household still lived in a landline world, where a parent could plausibly know who was calling. This message went around him. Young people had found the internet, and Tejeda could feel the old communication order becoming faintly ridiculous.
“I remember the day my daughter received a message from her boyfriend, bypassing me!”Carlos Tejeda, recalling the spark for his internet business
He did not respond by abandoning the physical network he already understood. He reconsidered what it could carry. The corner shops that hosted phones could also anchor wireless access. ORCA Wireless was built from scratch and eventually served more than 250,000 people in northern Mexico. An old distribution network had learned a new trick.
That family anecdote is funny because it catches strategic change at human scale. Tejeda did not need a thesis about generational media consumption. He needed to notice that a young person had solved a communication problem without asking permission from the technology adults still considered normal.
Starting again, seasoned
Pideaky began in 2021 with point-of-sale software for Mexican corner shops. By then Tejeda had spent more than twenty years working with Latin American small businesses, first through hardware and then connectivity. Entering Y Combinator did not make him a novice. It gave an experienced operator a compressed setting in which to question his newest answer.
The point-of-sale system generated financial records and helped merchants run their businesses. But conversations with those customers exposed a deeper constraint: access to working capital. A shop needs inventory to produce revenue; thin or absent financial files make conventional loans difficult; weak access to capital keeps the shelf, and therefore the business, smaller than it might be.
Pideaky moved toward inventory-based lending. The company built computer-vision tools that translate photos and video of stock into credit and risk signals. Its YC profile reports more than 14,000 loans disbursed and more than 6,000 corner shops served. It also developed automated collection and reconciliation tools, which opened another customer group: the suppliers selling goods to those shops.
The progression is less a collection of pivots than a deepening diagnosis. The cash register shows the business. Inventory constrains the business. Collections keep the business breathing. Each layer brings Pideaky closer to the flow of money, and closer to the unglamorous tasks that determine whether a merchant can open tomorrow with stocked shelves.
It also reveals the difference between digitization as a slogan and digitization as daily work. A shopkeeper does not wake up longing for a dashboard. The useful promise is a better answer to a plain question: can I buy enough stock, sell it, collect what I am owed and understand what happened? Pideaky's expanding product map follows that sequence. The software earns its place by reducing the distance between effort and cash.
The durable part
Founders are often praised for falling in love with a problem. Tejeda's record suggests something more specific: stay close enough to a customer to watch the problem change costumes. A corner-shop owner might once have needed a profitable public phone, then internet access for nearby households, then digital records, stock financing and help collecting receivables. The merchant was not standing still, even when outsiders described the store as traditional.
The co-founders matter here. Rafael Tejeda, Carlos's brother and longtime business partner, spans the story from R&C to Pideaky. Oscar Rydberg, Pideaky's technical co-founder, brought experience across payment systems, hardware, firmware and the ORCA network. The team links commercial memory with technical range. Their shared advantage is not simply that they know software. They know what existed before the software, and why merchants tolerated it.
There is another sort of continuity in the partnership itself. Rafael appears beside Carlos in the earliest published account of R&C and again among Pideaky's founders. Rydberg's own technical biography runs through ORCA systems before Pideaky. This is less the familiar startup scene of strangers meeting over a pitch than a relay team carrying operational knowledge forward. Old working relationships can accumulate their own kind of infrastructure: shorthand, memory and a shared tolerance for the unlovely details.
“Our vision is to become the all-in-one platform for offline LatAm SMBs to manage their cash-flow and accelerate their business.”Carlos Tejeda
That aspiration is broad, but the route has remained concrete. The company's public language has lately moved toward AI collection agents. These agents chase invoices, issue reminders, negotiate and reconcile payments. Artificial intelligence enters not as spectacle, but as the patient clerk a small supplier rarely has time to hire.
In October 2025, Tejeda joined a Venture Café Monterrey event called Startup Scaries, where founders discussed the episodes entrepreneurs often hide: failed fundraising, regulatory trouble, cybersecurity crises and other nights when the plan becomes a cautionary tale. His appearance fit the public posture of a founder who has described himself as open to coffee chats. After enough reinventions, failure is less a stain than field data.
What the shop remembers
There is a temptation to tell Tejeda's story as a march from crude hardware toward clever software. That would flatter the present and miss the point. The payphone was clever. So was using a Taiwanese factory to solve a Mexican small-batch problem. So was seeing a wireless network inside a set of neighborhood stores before smartphones made connectivity feel weightless.
The durable skill has been commercial observation: notice the ignored customer, understand the infrastructure already within reach, and change the product before the market makes the old one absurd. The 100,000 payphones were eventually overtaken by new behavior. Their distribution map, customer knowledge and lessons did not evaporate. They became raw material.
Pideaky is still an active, small company, and its ambition remains larger than its footprint. That is useful context, not a blemish. Tejeda's career has never depended on pretending the next wave has already arrived. He has worked in the awkward interval when one system is fading, another is expensive, and the neighborhood merchant still needs to close the till tonight.
A corner shop can look modest from the pavement. From inside Carlos Tejeda's career, it is a communications hub, an internet node, a financial dataset and a small enterprise with cash moving through every shelf. The shop keeps changing. He keeps showing up with another machine.