Palomma Wants to Run Your Building - and Collect the Rent While It's At It
The Medellin fintech launched in Y Combinator's W23 batch as a payments API. Then it noticed who was actually using it. Today Palomma sells AI agents that handle leasing, sales, and collections for Latin American landlords - and quietly moves the money underneath.
The most honest thing a startup can do is watch who shows up. In early 2023, three founders in Medellin launched Palomma with a clean, unglamorous pitch: a single API that let online merchants across Latin America accept payments straight from a customer's bank account, skipping the 2 to 5 percent that card networks skim off every sale. It was a good idea backed by good math. It was also not the company Palomma would become.
The original product was not a toy. Palomma's Pay-by-Bank flow reported conversion rates 30 to 40 percent higher than existing account-to-account options, with instant payment confirmation pushed to a dashboard and clean identifiers that made reconciliation - the accountant's nightmare of matching a transfer to an invoice - almost boring. The pitch to merchants was a spreadsheet they couldn't argue with: pay less than cards, confirm faster, reconcile easier.
Because when the team looked at the accounts leaning on the product hardest, they kept seeing the same face: real estate. Property managers collecting rent. Landlords chasing late payments. Agencies drowning in WhatsApp threads. So Palomma did the thing most companies talk themselves out of - it followed the customer instead of the plan. Today the company describes itself in one line: AI and financial services for real estate in LatAm, starting by rent.
The PivotFrom a Payments API to an AI Landlord's Assistant
Rent is a strange product. It is the largest recurring payment in most people's lives, it happens every single month without fail, and in much of Latin America it is still administered by a human being typing "hola, un recordatorio de tu pago" into a phone. The collections work is repetitive, slightly awkward, and never finished. It is, in other words, a job description written for software.
Palomma's answer is a set of AI agents that live where tenants already are - WhatsApp, SMS, and phone calls - and work the resident lifecycle end to end. They field inbound leads for empty units, run outbound sales, answer the same tenant questions a hundred times without sighing, and handle collections: the reminders, the follow-ups, the payment links. They do it 24 hours a day, which matters in a business where the person who needs to renew a lease texts back at 11pm.
Palomma is building the AI-native bank for real estate in LatAm - AI agents first, then payments to own the flow of rent. Palomma company description
The sequencing is the whole strategy. Agents are the wedge, because automating the conversation is how you win the account. Payments are the business, because once you run the conversation you have earned the right to move the money.
The PlaybookWin the Workflow, Then Bank the Flow
Think of a property manager's real job as a series of chases. Chase a prospect for a tour. Chase a signature on the lease. Chase the rent on the first of the month, then chase it again on the fifth. Palomma turned each of those chases into an agent, and then put a payment rail underneath the last one. A tenant clicks a link, pays from their bank account, and the money lands with the landlord - collection, disbursement, and treasury handled in one motion.
That is why the company can say it is building a bank without ever asking you to open an account. The property manager thinks they are buying automation. Underneath, Palomma is positioning to become the financial infrastructure the building runs on.
The StackWhat You Can Actually Buy
The product line reads like a rent-shaped bank. Some pieces ship today; others are announced and, per the company, on the way.
Palomma AI
24/7 agents for leasing, sales, and collections across WhatsApp, SMS, and calls.
Palomma Pay
Automated rent collection, disbursement, and treasury management.
Palomma Plus
Rewards, discounts, and monthly raffles for tenants who pay through Pay.
Palomma Protect
Insurance covering landlords against tenant payment default.
Palomma Advance
Up to 12 months of rent advanced to landlords, digitally, within 24 hours.
Palomma Flex
Lets tenants split a monthly rent payment into two installments.
Notice the shape. Protect is insurance. Advance is credit. Flex is consumer lending dressed as convenience. None of them make sense as a standalone product you would cold-sell to a landlord - but all of them make sense the moment you already sit in the middle of the rent flow. That is the payoff of the wedge.
The FoundersBankers Who Left to Chase Rent
The team is small and pointedly overqualified for the problem. Cipriano Echavarria, the CEO, worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and then at Nubank, the Brazilian giant, where he got a close look at how badly Latin American payments creak. Nicolas Gomez del Campo, an MIT computer science graduate, wrote code at JP Morgan before co-founding the company. Felipe Monsalve rounds out the technical side with a CS and economics background and an MIT master's.
They had Morgan Stanley, Nubank, JP Morgan and two MIT degrees between them - and chose overdue rent in Colombia. On the founding team
That resume mix is not decoration. A rent bank needs people who understand both the plumbing of payments and the discipline of credit risk, and it needs engineers who can make AI agents behave in a regulated, money-moving context. The bet is that this is a fintech problem wearing a proptech costume.
The MarketWhere Palomma Fits
Palomma sells to residential property managers, multifamily operators, real estate agencies, and developers - and through them, reaches the landlords and tenants underneath. Its competition is less a named rival than a default behavior: the status quo of manual, WhatsApp-driven collections, generic property-management software that stops short of moving money, card processors taking their cut, and a wave of horizontal AI-agent vendors that could point their chatbots at real estate without understanding the payment flow.
Palomma's argument for why it is different is the combination. Plenty of tools automate messages. Plenty of tools move money. Fewer do both from inside the same platform, tuned specifically for the resident lifecycle, in a region where the incumbent is a person with a phone. The company's plan to layer credit and insurance on top is the moat it is trying to dig before anyone else notices the trench.
The BackingYC, and a Colombian Vote of Confidence
Palomma went through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch and raised roughly half a million dollars, with a cap table that includes YC, Soma Capital, Latitud, Nido Ventures, NFX, 17Sigma, and Norte. KPMG Colombia later named it one of the country's "Top 10 Promesas" - a shortlist of startups seen as shaping where Colombian and Latin American technology is headed. For a company building from Medellin rather than a coastal US hub, that regional stamp is its own kind of distribution.
The ReadWhy the Boring Problem Is the Point
There is a lesson in Palomma that has nothing to do with real estate. The company started with a horizontal payments idea, and the market handed it a vertical it hadn't asked for. Instead of defending the original thesis, it rebuilt around the customer who kept showing up. The name, fittingly, means "little dove" in Spanish, and the brand carries a dove mark - a soft logo for a company doing the least soft job in the building: asking people, every month, to pay.
It is worth sitting with why this workflow stayed manual for so long. Rent collection is high-frequency, low-drama, and socially uncomfortable - the exact combination that repels ambitious software teams, who tend to chase glossier problems. A landlord will happily pay to never again send the fifth reminder of the month. An agency will pay to stop losing leads that came in after hours. Palomma's insight is that "never gets tired, never gets awkward, never sleeps" is not a feature list for an AI agent - in collections, it is the entire value proposition.
Whether Palomma becomes the infrastructure it describes depends on execution most outsiders won't see - collections that actually collect, credit products that price risk correctly, agents that don't embarrass the landlord. But the wedge is legible, the founders are pointed at the right layer of the stack, and the problem is large, recurring, and unglamorous enough that most people never bothered to fix it. That last part is usually where the good companies are hiding.