Runs Mundi, a New York fintech that pays a Michoacan avocado exporter today for the container the Kroger buyer will settle in October.
Trade finance, as a category, exists because someone in Guadalajara ships a container, and someone in Chicago pays for it ninety days later, and someone in the middle has to eat the gap. Martin Pustilnick's company, Mundi, is that someone in the middle - specifically for small and mid-sized Mexican exporters who used to eat the gap themselves. Mundi wires the exporter the money today, keeps a discount, and waits for Chicago to settle. This is a very old business. Mundi's contribution is that it runs the underwriting in a few clicks instead of a few weeks.
Pustilnick founded Mundi in January 2020 with Paulina Aguilar Vela and launched the platform that July, which is roughly the worst possible calendar quarter to launch a cross-border trade fintech, unless you take the view that a broken supply chain is the exact moment SMEs need someone to front them cash. He took that view. In the twelve months from December 2020 to December 2021, monthly transaction volume grew twenty-five-fold.
The mechanics are not exotic. Mundi does invoice factoring, purchase-order financing, revolving credit lines, and now multi-currency accounts with forward contracts up to one year. What's exotic - if that's the word - is running the operation in Spanish, underwriting Mexican SMEs against dollar-denominated receivables, and clearing it all from a Brooklyn office through New York-domiciled entities. There are three currencies in the sandwich and none of them are the founder's native peso.
By early 2022 Mundi had processed more than $120 million of invoices and raised a $16 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, which does not usually invest in trade finance in Mexico, which is arguably the point. Silicon Valley Bank later extended a $100 million warehouse facility, and total capital raised - equity plus debt - now sits around $138 million.
None of this is glamorous. It is the sort of fintech people forget to write about because it doesn't involve consumers, crypto, or a Super Bowl ad. Pustilnick appears to prefer it that way.
SMEs have major financial risks when trading internationally: lack of working capital, currency exposure, and non-payment. We are committed to reducing the barriers to cross-border trade so companies can focus on selling their products and services.
Martin Pustilnick, on the pitch, 2022The core product. Exporter uploads an invoice, Mundi underwrites and advances a percentage today, collects from the international buyer on the due date. Turns net-90 into net-0.
Money before the shipment leaves. Useful for exporters who need capital to buy raw materials the moment the PO clears.
Described at launch as the first fully digital FX offering in LatAm to let SMEs lock in rates up to a year in advance. Spot exchange, forwards, no in-person paperwork.
Working capital that behaves like a credit card for exporters. Draw when the shipment is confirmed, pay down when the buyer settles.
Bundled with the trade rails. If the goods sink or disappear, the exporter isn't underwater on their working capital advance.
Pustilnick and Mundi have published 35+ explainers in Spanish - INCOTERMS, pedimentos, cross-border payment methods. Marketing that reads like a small-business handbook.
Pustilnick grew up in Argentina and studied economics at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, which is where a lot of the country's serious quantitative types get trained. From there: BCG, OLX, PayJoy, Stanford, EXOR Seeds, FJ Labs. It reads like someone deliberately assembling the resume needed to underwrite the exact company they eventually built - consulting for the analytical scaffolding, PayJoy for the on-the-ground Mexico experience, the two investor stints for the pattern-matching, Stanford for the network. He is not a career banker who wandered into tech.
He lives in Brooklyn - his Twitter/X handle @martin_pustil says as much - and runs a roughly 150-person company that is nominally headquartered on West 24th Street in Manhattan but does most of its actual work in Mexico. This means he is running an operation in two languages, three currencies, and at least two regulatory regimes at the same time. He does not appear to complain about this in public.
The public-facing Pustilnick is a low-drama operator. He gives interviews, posts on LinkedIn, and appears on podcasts including a long Spanish-language conversation on Mindset Emprendedor where he described firing customers - the sort of unglamorous decision that separates a growth-at-all-costs founder from an operator who has read the loss ratios. He does not appear to enjoy hype. He appears to enjoy volume.
His public quotes are short and un-decorated. "SMEs have major financial risks when trading internationally: lack of working capital, currency exposure and non-payment." That's the pitch. It is also, more or less, the total problem statement of trade finance since about 1500.
Cross-border trade is a large, unfashionable market. It moves something like $28 trillion a year globally, but the actual mechanics look like this: an SME in Puebla ships to a distributor in Texas, gets a purchase order with 60-day payment terms, and functionally lends its own working capital to a company ten times its size. Multiply that by every exporter in Mexico. That is the market Mundi is inside.
The traditional answer to this problem is a bank. The problem with the traditional answer is that a bank in Mexico is not particularly interested in underwriting a $40,000 invoice from an SME with three years of financials and no relationship. Mundi is willing to. It is, in a boring and specific way, an infrastructure company.
Union Square Ventures, which led the Series A, is not a trade finance shop. That USV wrote the check is a signal - not that Mundi is the next social network, but that a partnership model between a fintech and a payment network for exporters looks, from a New York cap table, structurally like a real business. If nearshoring plays out and more manufacturing shifts from Asia to Mexico under the USMCA, the volume in Mundi's pipe compounds without Pustilnick doing anything except keeping the underwriting tight.
Grew up in Argentina. Built a company for Mexico. Runs it from New York. Every meeting has three time zones and at least two languages.
His author page on Mundi's blog has 35+ posts explaining INCOTERMS, factoring, and pedimentos in Spanish. Founder-authored SEO.
Discussed in a Spanish-language interview on Mindset Emprendedor. Trimming the book is unusual for a lender still in growth mode.
A long-form Spanish-language conversation where Pustilnick talks through Mundi, growth, and the counterintuitive decision to let customers go.
-> Mindset Emprendedor: "Es CEO y despidio clientes"Argentine co-founder and CEO of Mundi, a New York-based fintech providing working capital and trade finance to Mexican SME exporters.
A digital trade finance platform that pays exporters upfront for their cross-border invoices, plus multi-currency accounts, FX products, and cargo insurance.
MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business; BA in Economics from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina.
Public sources total roughly $138M in equity and debt, including a $16M Series A led by Union Square Ventures and a $100M warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
Founded in January 2020 with Paulina Aguilar Vela. The platform launched in July 2020.