In most of the world, you barely think about how money gets from one bank to another. You tap, it moves, done. In much of Latin America, that same trip is slower, more expensive, and full of hidden tolls. Milio was built on the belief that this is an engineering problem, not a law of nature - and that whoever fixes the plumbing gets to sit under the entire system.
Milio is a payments-infrastructure company. It does not sell you an app to check your balance. It sells the rail underneath the apps: a single API that lets banks, fintechs, and businesses move money account to account, in seconds, without waiting on card networks or overnight batches. Founded in Bogota in 2022 and accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, it is the kind of company most people will never knowingly touch and might quietly depend on.
01 / THE PROBLEMMoney that moves like it's 1995
The pitch starts with a complaint anyone who has run a business in the region will recognize. Interbank transfers are slow. Processing fees stack up. There is no clean way to trigger a payment automatically, so finance teams reconcile by hand, chasing which invoice matched which deposit. In Colombia there is an extra sting: a financial-transaction tax that, structured badly, can hit the same money twice.
The company's answer is interoperability: connect directly to banks and digital wallets so money moves account to account, settle it instantly, reconcile it in real time, and design the flow so a business is not taxed twice for one transaction. Milio describes its checkout as the first interoperable, automated B2B payment button to arrive in Colombia.
02 / WHAT IT MOVESOne API, several jobs
Under the hood, Milio is less a single product than a set of money-movement primitives sold through one integration. A developer wires in once; the finance team stops thinking about the rest.
The checkout - marketed as the PID payment button - is a native, white-label way for a business to accept account-to-account payments with one click, settle instantly, and see the reconciliation land in real time. The disbursement API runs the other direction: paying out to bank accounts and wallets around the clock. On top sit cross-border transfers with full traceability, automated dispersion and direct debit that plug into legacy ERPs, cash-in/cash-out for wallets, and plain person-to-person transfers.
03 / THE NUMBERSWhat Milio claims
Infrastructure companies live or die on reliability, and Milio leads with numbers to prove it means to be plumbing, not a demo. Treat these as the company's own figures rather than audited fact - but they set the ambition clearly.
(reported)
per second
stability
availability
04 / WHO BUYS ITThe customers you never see
Milio's customers are companies that need money to move but do not want to build the rails themselves: banks, fintechs and startups, payment gateways, e-commerce shops, insurers, cooperatives, and ordinary enterprises across Colombia and the wider region. It is business-to-business, and often business-to-business-to-consumer - Milio's rail sits behind a fintech that faces the actual end user.
That is a deliberate position. The consumer-facing super-app is crowded and loud. The infrastructure beneath it is quieter, stickier, and - if you win the developers - much harder to rip out once the volume is flowing.
05 / THE TEAMA lawyer, a product mind, an operator
Milio was co-founded by Juan Luis Perez Escobar and Daniel Gomez, with Toni Riera on the founding team and Erwin Alzate as CFO. Perez Escobar - listed variously as CEO and COO - is a lawyer by training, which is less of a footnote than it looks. In payments, the rules are half the moat, and a founder fluent in them makes different product bets than an engineer alone would.
The team is small, roughly 16 to 20 people, and distributed across Colombian cities rather than sitting in one office. Y Combinator's Brad Flora was the partner on the W23 batch.
06 / THE MARKETWhere Milio sits
Milio is one of a growing set of companies trying to modernize how money moves in Latin America - a field that includes open-finance and payment-infrastructure players such as Belvo, Prometeo, Minka, Kushki and dLocal, plus the incumbent card networks and bank-transfer systems it wants to route around. Milio's angle is the interoperable, automated B2B checkout paired with a treasury layer, aiming to be the place a company's money lives and moves rather than just one connection among many.
Backing so far is early: a seed round in 2023 of roughly $500K within a reported $1M-plus total, from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund and Colectivo Jaguara. Valuation and revenue are not public. This is a company at the start of its curve, and the gap between a 20-person team and a continent-sized rail is exactly what makes the bet interesting.