At nine, Rodrigo Tumaian read about Linus Torvalds and Linux. What caught his attention was the invitation to contribute. People could add what they knew to something shared, without money being the reason they joined. For a future entrepreneur in financial technology, it was an unusual first lesson: an open system could be valuable precisely because other people were allowed inside.
As a teenager, he read hacking communities. He recalled being delighted by what he did not understand. Later, paid penetration testing supplied a more practical outlet for that curiosity. He would warn his wife before starting an assignment, knowing how completely the hunt for a weakness could absorb him. A relative called him the good policeman of cybersecurity. He preferred to regard it as professional work.
Today, Tumaian shares the chief executive role at Prometeo with Ximena Aleman. Eduardo Veiga is their fellow founder and chief technology officer. The company began in 2018. Its proposition is easy to state: give businesses a common way to work with banking systems that were built separately. Carrying it out requires a rather less convenient acquaintance with the differences between them.
The useful part was underneath
Before Prometeo, the founders worked on a personal-finance management product. Tumaian described conversations that began with financial education, usability and user experience, then kept returning to the same obstacle. How could another company reach banking information, make sense of it and use it through a dependable connection? The discussion was moving down a floor, from the application to its foundations.
Learning about European open banking, then seeing Mexico’s fintech law arrive in 2018, helped them recognize a different business. They could reuse technology they had already developed. Prometeo would provide access to banking information, transactions and payments. Tumaian’s earlier security work included experience at TCS and AT&T, a background that made the mechanics of access a familiar subject.
The product they left behind was called Ábaco. Its ability to bring accounts together was worth keeping; the surrounding personal-finance proposition could go. Their first clients included Colombian businesses lending to microentrepreneurs. Mexico became an important place to validate the idea. The founders were also selected for a Mexican fintech accelerator, among ten ventures chosen from 300 applicants.
There is something pleasantly unceremonious about that origin. A startup can spend years naming and polishing the thing customers will see, then discover that its useful invention is the plumbing underneath. The team followed that discovery into a business serving other builders. The abandoned application still had a contribution to make: it had exposed the difficulty everyone else would have to solve.
Personal-finance application
The technology worth keeping
Infrastructure for other businesses
One integration, many rulebooks
Tumaian now describes Latin America’s financial fragmentation as a translation problem. Every bank, regulator and country works from its own manual. Prometeo has taken on the task of reading those manuals and creating a common standard. This is an explanation of the company’s work with a welcome absence of magic. Translation requires attention to particulars; a familiar word can mean something different across a border.
His responsibilities reflect that patient work. He leads strategic vision and key internal operations, with a focus on product development, infrastructure and execution. His background includes financial cybersecurity and PCI DSS, the payment-card security standard. He also helps shape internal processes, connecting long-term objectives with daily decisions. The role reaches from what a product should do to how the organization actually gets it done.
At the company level, the ambition is a single integration through which businesses can connect to institutions, validate accounts and ownership, and initiate or receive transfers. Tumaian wants global operations to become a connection rather than a project measured in months. That is a useful test of infrastructure: how much work does the next business avoid because somebody has already done the difficult part?
“La fragmentación financiera de América Latina es, en el fondo, un problema de traducción.”
Rodrigo Tumaián · PrometeoLatin America’s financial fragmentation is, at heart, a translation problem. English translation
A taxi fare is a good test
For all the talk of architecture, one of Prometeo’s more tangible applications was paying for a taxi. The team introduced account-to-account payments in Peru and Ecuador in 2022, then brought the service to Uruguay in 2023. A passenger could scan a QR code and initiate a bank transfer. By November 2023, the Montevideo rollout had reached 3,000 taxi drivers through an agreement with the taxi association.
The money travelled through existing banking infrastructure. Settlement still depended on the banks; the local description at the time ranged from the same day to 48 hours. That detail matters. A new interface can make the experience simpler while retaining the practical characteristics of the systems beneath it. A taxi ride ends at a specific curb. The payment has its own itinerary.
It is a useful scale for understanding Tumaian’s company. The person paying a fare does not need a tour of the integration work. They need a way to pay, and the driver needs a way to receive the money. An infrastructure business earns its place by making that ordinary exchange possible. Its diagrams ultimately have to survive contact with ordinary errands.
Learning to think beyond Montevideo
Tumaian became president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Fintech in 2020, after serving as vice president. His stated aim was to connect local entrepreneurs with the wider industry. He saw experienced professionals and newer ventures as resources that could strengthen one another. The national ecosystem, he argued, needed networks that reached beyond a familiar domestic market.
In 2021, he spoke about the difficulty of learning to think at international scale. Uruguay had capable people, but founders needed more understanding of investors and access to substantial capital. He described the gap as a matter of experience. Working in a small market teaches one set of expectations; competing internationally can reveal a much larger range of possibilities.
By the 2024 Fintech Summit, his examples were becoming concrete. He pointed to an international Bank of America event featuring three Uruguayan companies alongside six from Brazil and six from Mexico. He credited the country’s software industry with helping establish a reputation that fintech companies could now draw on. His account gave the newer businesses predecessors, and a reason to look outward.
Capital arrives with homework
Prometeo’s $13 million Series A, announced in January 2024, brought together Antler Elevate, PayPal Ventures, Samsung Next, DN Capital partners, Cometa and Magma Partners. The round had closed in December. Aleman said the initial target had been between $8 million and $10 million. The funds were intended to deepen existing markets and develop additional products.
Tumaian’s subsequent account of expansion emphasized the work that follows a cheque. He named scalable technology, a diverse team, strategic financing and knowledge of individual markets as requirements. In June 2025, he described a network operating in eleven countries, with more than 1,500 active connections to 1,200 financial institutions. He discussed strengthening operations in Brazil, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean.
He also placed education alongside technology. Users need to understand who receives their financial information and why. The same conversation covered Borderless Banking, launched in March 2025, and the company’s attempt to support businesses operating across countries. The expansion story contains familiar ingredients, but his insistence on local knowledge keeps the map from becoming merely a collection of pins.
Capital to deepen existing markets and build additional products.
The next customer might be software
In June 2025, Tumaian turned to a different kind of banking user: an AI agent capable of making a purchase. His writing explored accounts linked to an identified owner, with a specified balance limiting the agent’s spending. Receiving funds, issuing payments and verifying transactions were distinct pieces of the design. The proposal was still being developed, and he presented the obstacles as part of the work.
The appeal is clear enough. Software might compare options and complete a transaction on someone’s behalf. The hard questions appear as soon as the transaction becomes real: whose authority is being used, how much may be spent, and what happens when the system makes a mistake? An owner-linked account with a limited balance gives the experiment a boundary. It does not make the rest of the problem disappear.
His October 2025 writing put emphasis on repeatable internal tasks, including reconciliation, monitoring liquidity and producing reports. He urged teams to begin with work they could verify, measure results and supply clear tools and clean data. The implication is restrained: an automation that reliably saves a little time, many times, can justify itself without a theatrical demonstration.
By March 2026, he was explaining where human approval belongs. His framework distinguishes reading information from changing an account, considers whether mistakes can be reversed, and examines exposure across batches of transactions. Permissions, limits and records should be enforceable. The old security question has acquired a new customer: before software can act, somebody must decide what it is allowed to do.
Pessoa, a sailboat, and the partners’ chat
A lunch interview in April 2024 supplied a different inventory. Tumaian chose Snipe sailing as his favorite sport, named Danubio as his football club and selected Fernando Pessoa’s poem Tabaquería when asked for a book, film or series. His hidden talent was cooking. His most productive WhatsApp group was the one called Socios: partners.
Asked for his greatest achievement, he chose his family. Asked for a superpower, he wanted to transform atoms. It is an agreeable pair of answers: one keeps the scale intimate, the other declines to set a sensible upper limit. The cooking and poetry are enough to complicate a portrait otherwise crowded with protocols and bank accounts. A person should be allowed interests that do not improve a pitch deck.
The first story, about a child reading Linux, gives the professional life a quiet continuity. Tumaian has kept returning to questions of access: who can contribute, who can connect, who can act. At Prometeo those questions now involve businesses, banks and software agents. Opening a door is useful. Knowing who has a key, and what they may do once inside, remains part of the job.
