I am very happy to share that kubo.financiero, one of the companies in which we have invested, announced raising a new round of financing of $7.5 million dollars last week. Many congratulations to Vicente Fenoll, CEO and founder of kubo, and his team for this achievement. I was very involved in this process and know the amount of work that went into raising the round. We were also very happy to continue investing in this great startup.

Kubo is the leading online peer-to-peer lending platform in Mexico and the only one operating under the regulation of the Mexican financial regulator. Peer-to-peer means that individual investors lend through kubo to a number of individual borrowers directly (but taking only a small percentage of each loan). Most of the loans are for productive purposes and have interest rates that on average are below half of what these borrowers were paying with other alternatives. You can read more about p2p, its benefits and potential in some of my previous posts here, here and here.

This new round shows how new and existing investors – Mexican and international – have been impressed by the achievements of kubo in its four years of life. The company has provided more than 4,700 loans for a total of $105 million pesos, funded by more than 500 individual investors. It is an impressive growth that has accelerated in the last quarter.

The Mexican Fintech sector is having great traction with clients and investors. Many of the technology companies funded in Mexico have been in Fintech. The opportunity in the sector is huge because financial services have a low penetration and the banking sector is extremely concentrated in a few banks that are very profitable and then reluctant to innovate. We will continue to see kubo and other Fintech startups grow and getting more funding in the next quarters.