Julián Colombo runs N5 Now, a technology company that sells software and artificial intelligence to the financial industry. His customers are the kind of institutions most founders only dream of pitching: Santander, Mastercard, Itaú. The company works across 18 countries, and in February 2025 it closed a USD 20 million Series A led by Alexia Ventures and Scale-Up Ventures, the venture arm of Endeavor. The money is going toward AI products with names like AIfred, Pep and Singular, all built to help banks do more with the data they already have.
What makes the position interesting is where Colombo is sitting when he says it. He spent 20 years inside a bank. He knows exactly how the machine works, because he helped run it. When he argues that banks waste most of their technology budget keeping old systems alive, it is not an outsider's guess. It is a memory.
From the branch to the boardroom
Colombo trained as an economist and a journalist at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, where as a student he founded a magazine called Ucanomics. The two disciplines never really separated in him. He counts and he tells stories, and both show up in the way he runs a company and talks to a camera.
His banking life began in the late 1990s and quickly became a tour of Latin America and Europe under one roof: Banco Santander. He started in a branch in Buenos Aires and moved through Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Spain, handling product, commercial strategy, personal banking and eventually data. By 2014 he was in Madrid as Global Managing Director of CRM and Business Intelligence, one of the people responsible for how a giant bank understood and reached its customers.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, he also served as a member of Argentina's parliament between 2015 and 2019, a detour that gives him an unusually direct feel for regulation and how rules actually get made.
A company named after a habit
In 2017 he left. The company he started is called N5, and the name is not a clever acronym. At Santander, Colombo had an internal rule he pushed on his teams: deliver in five. Five stood for speed, commitment and efficiency, and it became shorthand for a way of working. When he built his own company, he named it after the habit rather than after himself.
The origin story that N5 likes to tell is almost too neat. Colombo has described starting from a roughly USD 100 investment, with the first client being a bank in Panama. Then there is the number that gets repeated in every profile: in its first 24 hours, N5 secured more than USD 5 million in contracts, based only on a description of a platform that did not yet exist. Banks bought the idea before there was a product to buy.
That gap between promise and product is a theme Colombo keeps returning to. He once used the image of the Great Wall of China as "confidence that the plane will never exist" - a wall makes sense only if you believe no one will ever fly over it. His point is that the safe, defensive posture in banking assumes the future never arrives. He is betting it already has.
The bet on AI, with a catch
Colombo is blunt about where this goes. "In 7 to 10 years, you won't be speaking to a human at a bank anymore," he has said, and he means it as a description, not a provocation. He thinks AI will be more transformative for banking than mobile phones or online access were.
But he attaches conditions that separate him from the hype. He wants AI that is explainable and controllable, not a black box, especially in an industry where regulators ask hard questions. He is skeptical of the chatbot theater that passes for progress, pointing out that many customers get so frustrated they abandon the conversation, which some systems then log as a success. And he argues, against the grain, that the digital banks quietly turning back toward human contact are the ones most likely to actually make money.
Strategic calls - big investments, credit decisions that shape a person's life - should still involve people, in his telling. AI is there to handle the operational weight so humans can command it rather than serve it. That is the line N5 is trying to sell, and so far the market is buying: the company says recurring revenue from its platform products grew 221% in 2024.
What comes next
Microsoft named N5 Startup of the Year in Latin America back in 2021, and Forbes listed it among its promises for 2024. The Series A gives Colombo room to push the AI products harder and move into new markets. For a founder who started with a hundred dollars and a Panama bank, the ambition is now openly global.
He remains, at heart, the economist-journalist from Buenos Aires who founded a magazine in college - someone who likes to find an audience, tell a clear story, and build something that outlasts the telling. The difference is the size of the room. These days the audience includes some of the largest banks in the world, and they are listening.