A four-person team out of Santiago built the compliance layer Latin America never had. Plutto turns business background checks - the unglamorous, lawyer-heavy work of KYB - into an API call. It started with a rejection.
The story goes that a founder walked into an investor meeting to pitch a fintech, and the investor turned her down with a line that had nothing to do with the deal: "We're not going to accept your investment. At the moment we're not taking business clients." Onboarding a company - not a person, a company - was too much of a headache to bother. That headache is now a business called Plutto.
Plutto builds software for a task most people never think about and most compliance officers can't stop thinking about: KYB, or Know Your Business. It's the corporate cousin of the "Know Your Customer" checks that banks run on individuals. Before a bank lends to a company, before a retailer signs a supplier, before a payments firm onboards a merchant, someone has to answer a deceptively hard question - is this business real, solvent, legally sound, and not tangled up in anything that will become your problem later?
In Latin America, answering that question has traditionally meant lawyers, spreadsheets, and a scavenger hunt across government registries that don't talk to each other. Founded in 2022 in Santiago, Chile, and shaped inside Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch, Plutto set out to compress the scavenger hunt into a single input and a fast, auditable report.
Here's the pain in concrete terms. In Chile, the founders point out, a business can wait up to three months just to open a bank account. Onboarding a single business client could cost a company around $100 in legal and research time. Multiply that across every vendor, merchant, and counterparty a growing company touches, and compliance stops being a checkbox and becomes a tax on doing business at all.
Plutto's core move is to start from the one thing every company already has: its tax registration number - the regional equivalent of a TIN. Feed that number in through the dashboard or the API, and Plutto goes and gathers the rest.
Submit a company's tax registration number - nothing more to start.
Plutto queries 15+ legal, financial, tax and labor sources.
Sanctions and PEP lists checked; AI summarizes the risk.
Continuous alerts if anything changes after onboarding.
White-label forms handle the documents a public registry can't provide, collecting them directly from the vendor or client so the compliance team isn't chasing PDFs over email. The output isn't raw data dumped into a tab - it's a synthesized profile, screened against sanctions lists and PEP (politically exposed person) databases, with an audit trail attached.
The economics are the argument. Where the manual process ran near $100 per client, Plutto prices verification at roughly $6 to $20 per check. That's not a discount - it's a different category of cost, the kind that lets a company screen everyone instead of only the counterparties big enough to justify a lawyer's hour.
Time follows cost. Plutto reports cutting third-party evaluation time by about 77%, and says some clients get a validation in under ten minutes. For a compliance team, the difference between "three days of back-and-forth" and "before lunch" is the difference between blocking a deal and closing it.
Plutto has grown from a verification tool into something closer to a full third-party risk platform. The product now spans the lifecycle - from the moment you consider working with a company to the moment you're monitoring how it performs.
Unified request forms with centralized documentation and real-time tracking, so onboarding paperwork stops living in inboxes.
Automated queries across 15+ official sources, continuous sanctions/PEP monitoring, AI analysis and auditable reports.
Detects family, corporate and commercial ties between employees and third parties - up to the third degree.
KPI tracking with dashboards, automated alerts and remediation plans across the vendor relationship.
The conflict-of-interest module is the one that tends to raise eyebrows. It maps hidden relationships - the cousin who happens to own the vendor, the shared corporate parent two steps removed - the kind of tie that usually only surfaces after a deal has gone sideways. Plutto tries to surface it before the signature.
Plutto's users are the people who own risk inside a company: compliance, legal, procurement, finance, and risk teams. The industries skew toward the regulated and the operationally complex - retail, energy, mining, banking, education, salmon farming, construction, manufacturing, and food production. Among the logos that have appeared in its customer roster are names familiar across the Chilean economy, from large retailers to telecoms and industrial firms.
That customer profile explains a lot about the company's design choices. These aren't buyers who want a clever demo. They want traceability, audit documentation, and the ability to prove to a regulator exactly why a given business was cleared. Plutto's emphasis on auditable reports and continuous monitoring is aimed squarely at that anxiety.
Business verification is a crowded idea globally - firms like Middesk in the U.S., the big data houses like Dun & Bradstreet and Moody's, and screening specialists like ComplyAdvantage all touch pieces of it. Plutto's bet is geographic and infrastructural: the data that makes KYB work in Latin America is scattered, non-standardized, and locked inside registries a foreign vendor won't bother to integrate. Wiring into 15-plus of those sources is unglamorous, slow work - and that's precisely what makes it defensible.
Its real competitor, for now, is the status quo: the lawyer, the spreadsheet, and the one-off registry lookup. Convincing a compliance team to trade a familiar manual process for an automated one is its own kind of sale. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a napkin - same job, one-tenth the cost, a fraction of the time, and a paper trail an auditor will accept.
Plutto was founded by Antonia San Martín Sola (CEO), Ignacio Márquez Covarrubias (CTO), Felipe Domínguez, and Sebastián Margozzini. San Martín came to the problem after stints at Heineken and Nike and an earlier run at a travel startup; Márquez arrived from an engineering background at Platanus, the Chilean venture studio. The team is small - around 20 people - and engineering-led, the kind of shape that suits a product where the hard part is data integration rather than flash.
The company raised a reported seed round of roughly $650K, with Y Combinator, Platanus Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, and Cathexis Ventures among the backers. It's expanding beyond Chile toward Peru, Colombia, and Mexico - markets with the same fragmented-data problem and no shortage of companies that would rather not wait three months to say yes to a customer.
There's a tidy symmetry to it. The company exists because someone was once told their business was too much trouble to onboard. Plutto's entire pitch is that no business should be too much trouble to onboard - you just need to know who you're dealing with, and know it fast.