He spent a career inside central banks and development banks. Now he is outside, getting Latin America's growers paid in days instead of months.
That lag - the weeks between a truck crossing the border and a payment landing in a farmer's account - is the problem Francisco Mere wakes up to solve. His company, Blooms, buys the receivable, assumes the credit risk, and wires working capital back in days. The fruit moves. The money moves faster.
Blooms is a financial-technology company built for one specific customer: the Latin American producer who grows fruit and vegetables for North American tables and is perpetually starved of cash. Mere calls it being "grower-centric," and he means it as a discipline, not a slogan. The product line is narrow on purpose - cross-border factoring, pre-export financing, multi-currency payments, and a layer of AI that reads a grower's cash-flow patterns and forecasts what comes next.
The arithmetic behind it is large. American households spend roughly $100 billion a year on fresh produce, much of it imported from Latin America. Yet the farmers feeding that demand sit on the wrong side of a financing gap measured in the billions. Banks find them hard to underwrite. Blooms uses U.S. produce-trade regulation - the PACA framework - as a credit backbone, turning American rules into Latin American liquidity.
"For too long, Latin American exporters have faced funding barriers that limit growth," Mere says. In May 2025 a group of investors agreed with him, putting $2.6 million into a seed round led by the agritech specialist SP Ventures. "One of the things we're very happy about," he noted at the time, "is having been able to get convictions from these investors to invest in these uncertain times."
We are obsessed with giving produce growers the financial and technological tools to navigate the complexities of global trade - and the freedom to trade.- Francisco Mere, on what Blooms is for
Blooms purchases an exporter's receivables outright and assumes the credit risk - non-recourse, cross-border. It also extends pre-export financing so growers can fund a harvest before it ships.
A global payments platform built with Monex gives exporters a virtual U.S. account, letting them collect through importing-country banking rails and settle currency without the usual friction.
By digitizing the information that crosses borders alongside the produce, Blooms helps growers read their own cash-flow patterns and forecast accordingly - the part Mere is still building.
Fresh produce is one of the few categories where global appetite keeps climbing. "Around the world, there has been an increase in consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables," Mere observes - and Latin America does much of the growing. The catch is structural: produce is perishable, payment terms are long, and the smallholders who supply the supermarkets carry the cost of the wait.
Blooms is a bet that the missing ingredient is not more demand but better plumbing - capital that arrives at the speed the crop spoils. The seed round drew an unusually agriculture-literate cap table: SP Ventures leading, with Angel Ventures, The Yield Lab Latam, Eqwow Ventures, Glocal Managers, and Mercy Corps Ventures alongside.
Figures below are approximate market context drawn from Blooms' own public statements.
When Mere ran Bankaool, he handed HR an instruction that would make a recruiter flinch: for product, innovation, and marketing roles, prior banking experience was a disqualifier.
"If you came from a bank, you couldn't work at Bankaool," he put it. The logic was simple and ruthless - he wanted people who would build for customers, not for the org chart they had just left. He paired it with a second house rule: everyone in the company had to learn to use Twitter and Facebook, because the customers already lived there.
It was a tell. Mere borrows from technology companies the way other bankers borrow from precedent - rapid testing, feedback loops, ship-and-learn. He studied law at Mexico's storied Escuela Libre de Derecho, took a master's in international affairs and public policy at Columbia, and later passed through Singularity University in Silicon Valley. The combination - jurist, policymaker, technologist - explains a founder who is equally comfortable reading a PACA statute and an AI risk model.
A rare lawyer-policy-tech trifecta: a degree from the Escuela Libre de Derecho, a master's from Columbia, and a certificate from Singularity University.
Before fintech he advised the Government of Colombia for the IMF and ran an energy and natural-resources desk at Societe Generale.
Blooms leans on the U.S. PACA framework - American produce-trade law - as the credit backbone for Latin American growers.
He once ran FIRA, the very kind of agricultural development bank Blooms now competes to outpace - this time with software.