We're excited to announce that our portfolio company OmniLatam, cofounded by Diego Caicedo and Andres Abumohor, was acquired by Greensill Capital, a London-based fintech startup backed by General Atlantic and Softbank.
This acquisition will further Omni's mission of helping solve working capital needs of the region's SMEs. From the Bloomberg article:
“We realized Latin America requires very special skills, and yet at the same time the region has a very significant working-capital gap that we estimate to be on the order of $750 billion,” Greensill founder and Chief Executive Officer Lex Greensill said in an interview. “So we found a company, a team, a technology that is a perfect fit considering the values and the approach of the Greensill organization.”
Omni, founded in 2018 in Bogota, has provided about $300 million in digital working-capital products to small and midsize businesses that supply large companies in Chile and Colombia. The firm collects data such as invoices and tax forms to help make credit decisions based on the prospective borrower’s clients, sales and employees.
“We don’t ask for the company’s financial statements, which will only tell you about the past,” Omni CEO Diego Caicedo said. “We’re seeing the movie in real time here,” he said, adding that “small companies’ situations change very fast, and in a world in a pandemic crisis like today, it changes even faster.”
Magma has been an investor since late 2016 when it was called Portal Finance, which won our Latin America-wide fintech competition and received a pre-seed investment, and we continued to follow on in every round until the acquisition. We're excited to see how Diego and Andres continue on their mission to help SMEs in Latin America continue to grow, while helping SME owners build wealth and create jobs in Latin America, with their new partner Greensill Capital.