Daniel
Bilbao

When Daniel Bilbao was pitching Uber and Rappi in 2018, his product didn't exist yet. He had a deck, a problem he understood intimately, and a theory: that background checks in Latin America - a process that took up to three weeks, relied on physical paperwork, and varied wildly by country - were a chokepoint for every gig economy, fintech, and HR platform trying to scale across the region. If he could compress that timeline to seconds, he'd have a company.

He was right. Before writing a line of code, Bilbao had customers. Truora's product did not create a new need - it solved one that companies were already paying enormous costs to workaround. That's the shortest version of why the San Francisco-based startup raised a $15M Series A at a $75M valuation in April 2022, led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund, with Kaszek Ventures and Y Combinator among the backers.

Bilbao was born in Cali, Colombia, and studied electronic engineering at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota before earning an MBA at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. After investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York, he moved to Silicon Valley - less to make money than to understand how the machine worked. He co-founded Paladin Cyber (later Upfort, a cybersecurity company) through Y Combinator, giving him his first real look at how the accelerator's network and process shaped early-stage companies. He took note.

Truora was his second swing - and a more deliberate one. He brought in David Cuadrado, Maite Muniz Telleria, and Cesar Pino as co-founders. Muniz Telleria doubled as the company's first salesperson - alongside Bilbao himself. They drove Truora's revenue to $2M ARR before hiring a VP of Sales. That detail matters: Bilbao is the kind of founder who insists on understanding every lever before handing it to someone else.

By 2024, Truora hit $32.1M in annual revenue and reached break-even - a milestone Bilbao wears more proudly than the Series A headline. The company grew 60% year-over-year with 220 employees across operations in Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the United States. In an era when VC-backed startups were burning cash at Olympic pace, Truora was engineering for durability.

The camel metaphor is not accidental. Bilbao has watched the VC cycle reward growth-at-all-costs behavior and then punish companies when capital dried up. His response was to architect Truora like a machine that could survive a drought. Low burn. Cash in the bank. Break-even before the party ended. When the Global Banking and Finance Review handed Truora the "Excellence in Innovation - Digital Security and Identity Solutions South America 2025" award, it wasn't for burning the most money - it was for building something that works.

The WhatsApp layer is the product move that caught most people off guard. Truora didn't just do background checks - it built digital onboarding flows delivered entirely through WhatsApp, turning the continent's most-used messaging app into an enterprise identity interface. When Meta named Truora an official WhatsApp Business Solutions Provider, it formalized what Bilbao had already proven in the market: that for Latin American users, WhatsApp is not an alternative channel. It's the channel.

The Bilbao brothers have become something of a recurring motif in the Latin American startup ecosystem. Andres Bilbao co-founded Rappi, Colombia's first unicorn and the region's most recognizable delivery super-app. Daniel built the infrastructure layer that companies like Rappi need to vet their driver-partners at scale. They now co-invest through B2 Founders, a seed fund targeting fintech, AI, and human capital startups across South and North America.

It is worth noting: Bilbao is not coasting on the family connection. He has been deliberate about establishing Truora's credibility through revenue, not narrative. He told Zendesk: "Valuation is B.S." He means it. The $75M Series A valuation is a line on a cap table - what he talks about in public are burn rates, cash positions, and whether the product actually solves the problem it claims to.

The same pragmatism shows up in how he hires. He drove sales personally to $2M ARR before handing the function to a dedicated VP. He advises founders to do the same - not because it's noble, but because no one understands the product better than the builder, and that understanding is the only reliable foundation for a repeatable sales motion.

Colombia Tech Week, which Bilbao co-founded alongside his brother, journalist Laura Forero, and others, is another expression of this ecosystem-first thinking. The 2025 edition is expected to draw 15,000+ attendees - including 4,000 international - 300+ global investors, and aims to facilitate $50M in investments. It's not a vanity event. It's infrastructure for deal flow.

The US expansion is Bilbao's next significant bet. Truora is developing WhatsApp-based banking solutions specifically for the US Latino community - a segment that is both large and chronically underserved by incumbent financial institutions. The Meta partnership gives Truora a direct channel into the platform where that audience already lives. If the play works, it extends the Truora model from Latin American markets into the US without requiring the company to fight a traditional fintech land war.

At 33, Bilbao called himself a late starter. From the outside, that read as modesty. From the inside, it was a statement of intent: he was not in a rush to exit, not optimizing for valuation, not building for the press release. He was building for the long crossing.