Investing in Jeeves

Pre-pandemic, it was increasingly common for tech companies to have employees and operations in more than one country. Post pandemic, it’s almost guaranteed. The benefits of distributed workforces are obvious: access to talent, direct access to customers and partners in more markets, faster. This is especially true in Latin America where entrepreneurship is exploding.

While a multi-country talent and customer strategy help companies scale faster — it creates the corresponding complexity for finance teams. Very quickly a company will find that they need to pay for expenses in multiple countries, multiple currencies, using many different payment rails (credit cards for local expenses, the local bank-to-bank rails for larger transfers, wires for international money transfer, etc.). It’s not just making the payments that is challenging — they then all need to be reconciled on the backend, a process that takes weeks after each month-end to close the books. It’s slow and prone to error. Why has this problem persisted? The answer, of course, lies under the hood.

Every country has their own:

• Bank transfer system (e.g., ACH in the US, SPEI in Mexico, CIP and now PIX in Brazil, etc.)
• Rules around who can issue a credit card (e.g., in Mexico and Brazil you can get your own BIN and be a principal member of Visa or Mastercard, in Canada & the US you need a banking partner)
• Approved payment processors
• Currencies (obviously)
• Bank accounts

Many countries lack an elegant solution for “just” that country. For example, in Mexico and Brazil, it’s a challenge to get a corporate credit card and still difficult to do payouts despite the presence of real-time payments.

The flow generally looks like this:

Now imagine you have operations in more than one country! You require seamless integration and orchestration between payment methods not only within each country, but across countries as well. Enter Jeeves.

For one of Jeeves’ early customers: the team is based in Mexico, Brazil, and Spain with customers across Latin America. Their employees in three countries need to pay for expenses; the company itself has expenses in those three countries, as well as expenses for multiple software providers in the US (e.g., AWS). With Jeeves, they are able to use one provider to handle card, bank to bank transfers and FX in every country they operate with fast and accurate reconciliation on the backend.

The pent up demand is evident. The team quickly amassed a waiting list of over 5000 companies while still unannounced across their core markets: Mexico, Colombia, and Canada, with Brazil and Chile coming soon.

The founders of Jeeves, Dileep Thazhmon and Sherwin Gandhi, are uniquely positioned to take on this global opportunity. Dileep was previously co-founder and COO of Jeeng (formerly known as PowerInbox) where he built and scaled all operations and sales. Sherwin adds financial and regulatory expertise from his time at high growth companies like AppNexus and Viagogo. We were impressed from day one by the velocity at which this team executes.

As part of this funding round we are also delighted to welcome a world class group of angels, such as: David Velez (CEO Nubank), Carlos Garcia (CEO Kavak), Sebastian Mejia (Founder Rappi), Daniel Vogel (CEO Bitso), William Hockey (Cofounder Plaid), Courtney McColgan (CEO Runa), John Kim (Sendbird CEO), Ricardo Weder (Justo CEO) and Florian Hagenbuch (Loft CEO) to take part in the Jeeves journey.

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