Tagged: colombia
18 results
Callbook AI
Callbook AI is a Y Combinator (S26) startup building AI voice agents that make and take business phone calls in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Founded by Colombians Diego Avellaneda and Daniel Martinez, it began as a plug-and-play AI phone system for Zoho CRM and has sharpened its focus on automated debt collections and portfolio management across Latin America, handling calls, WhatsApp, SMS, and email from a single platform.
Cifrato
Cifrato is a Colombian, Y Combinator-backed (W25) startup building an AI accountant for accounting firms and retail businesses across Latin America. Its AI agents run end-to-end accounting workflows - pulling electronic invoices straight from tax authorities like Colombia's DIAN, classifying them, applying taxes, reconciling payments, and pushing accounting-ready data into ERP and POS systems. Founded in 2025 by Juan Pisco and Yerson Cacua, the company reached roughly $1M ARR and processed over a million invoices for 270+ clients within its first year.
Luable - MejorCDT (YC S21)
Luable is a Colombian fintech running MejorCDT, a marketplace that lets everyday savers compare and open fixed-term deposits (CDTs) from many banks online, commission-free. For banks, it is a cheaper, faster funding channel than opening branches or hiring salespeople. Founded in 2021 and backed by Y Combinator (S21), it has processed over USD $30M in deposits and is expanding from Colombia into Mexico and the Caribbean.
Milio
Milio (YC W23) is a Colombian fintech building real-time, account-to-account payment infrastructure for Latin America. Through a single API, banks, fintechs, and enterprises can move money between accounts in seconds - handling collections, disbursements, cross-border transfers, and treasury automation while cutting transaction costs by up to 80%.
Palomma
Palomma is a Medellin-based fintech building an AI-native banking platform for real estate in Latin America, starting with rent. It deploys AI agents that handle leasing, sales, and collections for property managers across WhatsApp, SMS, and phone calls 24/7, then layers on payment collection and disbursement to own the flow of rent and monetize it through credit and insurance products. Founded in the Y Combinator Winter 2023 batch, the company originally launched as a frictionless Pay-by-Bank API for LatAm merchants before pivoting to real estate.
Carlos Araque
Carlos Araque is the co-founder, president and CEO of Quaise Energy, a Houston- and Cambridge-based startup trying to drill the deepest holes in human history to tap superhot geothermal heat. A Medellin-born mechanical engineer with two MIT degrees, he spent 15 years at oilfield-services giant Schlumberger, then ran technology at MIT's venture platform The Engine, where he met the plasma physicist whose millimeter-wave drilling idea became Quaise. His pitch: vaporize rock instead of grinding it, reach depths where water turns supercritical, and use the resulting heat to run the same turbines and power plants fossil fuels use today.
Maria Artunduaga
Maria Artunduaga is a Colombian-born physician-scientist, inventor and founder and CEO of Samay (formerly Respira Labs), a Mountain View medtech startup building a wearable plus AI platform that uses patented acoustic resonance to monitor lung function at home. She walked away from a plastic surgery residency at the University of Chicago after losing her grandmother Sylvia, taught herself engineering, and turned a kitchen-table idea into a company that has won the world's most competitive medtech accelerator and landed her on Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders list. She holds an MD, an MPH and an MTM, has collected dozens of prizes, six issued patents, and publications in Nature, NEJM and PNAS.
Nicolas Abad
Nicolas Abad is the co-founder and CEO of Telepatia, a Latin American healthtech company building AI healthcare workers - starting with an 'AI Doctor' that transcribes consultations, reviews records, flags drug interactions, and surfaces clinical guidance in real time. Named after his late father's nickname, the company grew from a Stanford MBA side obsession to a venture backed by Andreessen Horowitz, reaching more than 14 million patients across five countries inside its first year. Abad's stated ambition is audacious to the point of comedy: win Latin America's first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984 by turning healthcare from scarcity into abundance.
Diego Villegas
Diego Villegas is the co-founder and CEO of Slang, an MIT-born edtech startup that uses machine learning and NLP to teach industry-specific professional English to the global workforce. A serial entrepreneur, he first built MASA, a Colombian oil-and-gas technical-services firm that grew to roughly $200M in revenue and 5,000+ employees before its acquisition by Stork. The pain of watching capable employees stall - and get laid off - for lack of business English became the seed of Slang, which now offers 150+ career-focused courses to companies including Nestle, Banco Santander, and Hyatt across more than a dozen countries.
Maite Telleria
Maite Muniz Telleria is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Truora Inc., a San Francisco- and Colombia-based startup that helps Latin American businesses verify identities, run background checks, and automate customer engagement via WhatsApp. A former McKinsey consultant turned startup builder, she left corporate strategy to co-found Truora in 2018 alongside Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Cesar Pino. Under her product leadership, Truora scaled from a single-country MVP to a multi-country platform serving clients like Bancolombia, Didi, Mercado Libre, and Rappi, raising $15M in a Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022. Maite is also an angel investor focused on women-led ventures and a board member of The F Code.
Alejandro Casas Caro
Alejandro Casas Caro is the co-founder and CEO of Simetrik, a Y Combinator-backed AI-powered financial reconciliation platform that processes over 1 billion records daily for 100+ companies across 40+ countries. A technical founder who studied UX design in Barcelona, he pivoted from a failed fashion e-commerce startup to building what has become a $116M+ funded enterprise infrastructure company backed by Goldman Sachs, Tiger Global, and Mercado Libre Fund.
Alexander Gallego
Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.
Cesar Pino
Cesar Pino is the co-founder of Truora Inc., a Y Combinator-backed identity verification and fraud prevention platform built for Latin America. An electronic engineer with a specialization in cryptography from Universidad del Valle in Colombia, Pino previously worked as a fullstack engineer at Twilio before co-founding Truora in 2018 with Daniel Bilbao, David Cuadrado, and Maite Muniz Telleria. Truora helps companies across 9+ Latin American countries onboard users digitally through background checks, facial recognition, KYC/AML compliance, and WhatsApp-powered customer engagement - serving clients like Rappi, Bancolombia, Mercado Libre, and Uber. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by BBVA's Propel fund and Accel.
Daniel Bilbao
Daniel Bilbao is the co-founder and CEO of Truora Inc., a San Francisco-based identity verification and digital onboarding platform serving Latin America. Born in Cali, Colombia, Bilbao studied electronic engineering at Universidad de los Andes and earned an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth before stints at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Silicon Valley startups. He founded Truora in 2018 alongside David Cuadrado, Maite Muniz Telleria, and Cesar Pino, solving a problem he knew firsthand: background checks in Latin America took up to three weeks. Truora compresses that to under 20 seconds. The company has raised ~$40M in total funding including a $15M Series A led by Accel and BBVA's Propel fund in 2022, grew revenue to $32.1M in 2024, reached break-even, and expanded to seven countries. Beyond Truora, Bilbao co-founded Colombia Tech Week and the B2 Founders seed fund with his brother Andres Bilbao, co-founder of Rappi.
Maria Salamanca
Maria Salamanca is a General Partner at Ulu Ventures, the largest Latina-led venture capital firm in the United States with over $400M AUM. Born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in Orlando, Florida, she became the first Latina named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for Venture Capital in 2018. She co-founded SomosVC to increase Latinx representation in VC and was elected as the youngest and first LGBTQ+ school board member of Orange County Public Schools (Florida's 8th-largest district) in 2022. Her investing approach is rooted in data-driven decision-making, and she champions diverse founder teams at the seed stage.
Laura Mediorreal
Laura Mediorreal is a Colombian-American entrepreneur and AI/ML product leader, currently Co-Founder & CEO of a stealth-mode startup based in San Francisco. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School (Class of 2025) and holds degrees from Stanford University. Her career spans product management roles at Microsoft and Meta, a venture capital fellowship at True Ventures, and now building her own company at the intersection of artificial intelligence and enterprise software.
Felipe Chávez Cortés
Felipe Chávez Cortés is the CEO and co-founder of Robot.com (formerly Kiwibot), the company that put sidewalk delivery robots on college campuses worldwide. A Colombian entrepreneur who turned a burrito delivery sticker shock at UC Berkeley into a fleet of 500+ autonomous robots completing over 1 million tasks across the US, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and pilot cities in Europe and Asia. Named MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 for Latin America in 2018, he previously co-founded and sold Lulo - Colombia's first app to accept credit card payments - before pivoting to build what has become one of the world's most-deployed autonomous delivery networks.
Maria Barrera
Maria Barrera is the CEO and co-founder of Clayful, an on-demand chat-based mental health coaching platform that connects K-12 students with certified coaches in under 60 seconds. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who immigrated from Colombia at age 10, she moved from aerospace (Boeing, GE) into edtech (Nearpod) before a New York Times article about rising suicide rates in eight-year-olds pushed her to found Clayful in 2021. The company has raised $9.15M in total funding, serves 50+ school districts across six states in 133 languages, and frames mental health as coaching rather than therapy to reduce student stigma.