In the 21st century, consumer financial services should be a human right—but even the most basic services are not yet as universally available as you might think. Linxe, a Bogotá Founder Institute portfolio company, is a Colombian FinTech focused on offering small and short-term loans to low-income employees of SMEs with direct discount from their paycheck. Now, Linxe is successfully closing its pre-seed round of investment for a total of USD $1M, guaranteeing the beginning of the company’s operational stage.
Recently, Linxe Founder & CEO Diego Rodríguez and CFO Cesar Cuevas joined Founder Insights editor Dustin Betz to give an update on the latest at the inclusive financial services startup.
Linxe's vision is to build a truly inclusive financial services platform, one that generates credit history and provides an entry point for unbanked individuals that are too commonly overlooked by large institutional banks in Colombia and Latin America more broadly.
Linxe’s solution contributes to the financial inclusion of low-income employees through small and short-term loans that are easy and fast to obtain, helping these workers to break the month-to-month paycheck burden through tools that help to solve financial problem they may encounter. For the SME employers, Linxe is a tool that helps to improve employee retention and productivity, as it offers them a turnkey solution to help solve their employees’ financial problems.
B2B2C: Payroll providers offer a clear market entry point to affect immediate and meaningful impact
To begin the operation of the Linxe platform, six strategic alliances have been established with payroll providers, including technological integrations allowing Linxe to guarantee that the process is 100% digital for the employee and for the employer, and that there are no delays or unnecessary operating charges.
These strategic alliances allow Linxe to offer their services to more than 2,300 private sector companies in Colombia at launch, primarily medium and small companies, through which Linxe will be able to connect with more than 1 million employees.
The first go-to-market product offered by Linxe is a small-amount and short-term loan, where employees of the companies with whom an agreement is made can enter into the web platform from any mobile device or personal computer. In less than 5 minutes, they can have a loan approved; and in less than 24 hours, they can have the money in their payroll account.
Linxe was launched in March 2019, and achieve all its milestones in a short time through support from Bogotá Founder Institute, from which the founders graduated in May 2019. Linxe then applied for and was accepted to move into FI’s post-program Funding Lab, where the founders successfully raised their first round of capital with support from the Founder Institute HQ team in Silicon Valley.
Through the Funding Lab program, and after three-and-a-half months of hard work, 60 meetings with local and international investors, and 48 face-to-face presentations, Linxe is pleased to announce that the Pre-Seed round of investment is near to closing successfully, for a total of USD $1M to begin the fintech’s operational stage while the founders remain focused on accomplishing the next set of challenges ahead.
Keep an eye on fintech Linxe—the impressive rate of the startup’s early traction, and the huge market opportunity to affect positive change through the deployment of inclusive financial services to the unbanked in LatAm, demonstrate Linxe’s potential to meaningfully change lives through serving its customers.
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See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey.
