Higo raises a $23M Series A led by Accel

Higo, a B2B company for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) announced a $23 million Series A investment round led by Accel. Other investors included Tiger Global Management, Haystack and Homebrew, as well as other executives related to Stripe: Claire Hughes Johnson (current COO) and Cristina Cordova, former partnership director.

Juan José Fernández, Daniel Tamayo and Rodolfo Corcuera founded the company in early 2020. Less than a year later, they got a $3.3 million seed investment.

Higo seeks to provide SMEs better tools for them to manage their cash flow. Most of these companies, especially in Mexico, are still using very manual processes to manage their pending payments.

The startup offers a platform “like Venmo, but for SMEs”, Corcuera told TechCrunch. This is the third country Corcuera, Higo’s CEO, has cofounded. He previously created Aliada and Tandem.

Some of Higo’s current customers are e-commerce logistics company 99minutos.com, delivery startup Jokr, and vinoschidos.mx, a wine delivery service. With this round of investment, Higo wants to keep growing in Mexico and eventually get to the rest of LatAm.

The market is promising. According to data from ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and Caribbean), 99% of the companies in the region are micro, small and medium. They employ 67% of the employees. The time it takes for them to receive payment from their customers is quite long. In Colombia, for example, it takes an average 100 days.