The Peruvian-founded, YC-backed brokerage letting Latin Americans buy U.S. stocks, ETFs and crypto - commission-free, no minimum, open in five minutes.
Here is a fact that ought to bother somebody at a big bank: for years, the main thing keeping Latin Americans out of the U.S. stock market was not a shortage of money. It was a shortage of doors. High commissions and thick paperwork did the gatekeeping. Hapi's founders noticed the door was locked, not the room empty - and built a key.
The mechanics are deliberately unglamorous. You download an app. You answer some questions. Roughly five minutes later you own, say, five dollars of Apple - a fraction of a share, because fractional shares are the trick that turns "I can't afford one Amazon share" into "I own a slice of Amazon." No commission on the trade. No minimum balance staring you down. Stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrencies sit in the same account, which is a mildly radical thing to say out loud in a regulated industry that usually keeps those worlds apart.
None of this is complicated to describe, which is exactly the point, and also exactly why it was hard to build. The easy part of a fintech is imagining it. The brutal part is shipping it: custody, currency conversion, compliance across a dozen jurisdictions, and enough reliability that a first-time investor in Ecuador taps "buy" and it simply works. Hapi's edge was never a flashy feature. It was doing the boring plumbing well enough that the flashy part - owning a piece of the U.S. market from a phone in a country the incumbents ignored - felt ordinary.
The demand, it turns out, was there the whole time. Hapi went from about 10,000 users in 2022 to a reported 500,000-plus clients across roughly 20 countries, with assets under management around $40 million as of its 2023 raise. Peru, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela make up about 80% of the base. Every gatekept market is, quietly, a bet that demand is small. Hapi took the other side of that bet, and the scoreboard is arguing in its favor.
"We hope to maintain the growth that we've had since October of 2020."
Own Apple, Amazon, Tesla or a broad ETF from anywhere in LATAM - commission-free, with no minimum balance to clear first.
A pricey stock is no longer a wall. Buy $5 of it. Fractional shares mean your budget, not the share price, sets the terms.
Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies live in the same app as your securities - one portfolio, one login.
Built-in financial education aimed at first-time investors, so the first trade isn't also the last confusing one.
The idea found Dusko Kelez while he was traveling Latin America as COO of scooter startup Grin - he kept meeting people who wanted to invest but couldn't get in. He brought two co-founders along to unlock it.
Hapi launches, aiming to democratize U.S. market access for Latin American investors.
Joins Y Combinator's W21 batch (YC partner Aaron Epstein).
Raises a $1.6M seed round from Utec Ventures, Unpopular Ventures, Softeq Ventures and Mural Capital to expand crypto and grow users. ~$40M in assets under management.
Publicly announces the raise; targets 300k users by end of 2023 and ~500k by mid-2024.