Pideaky

TL;DR: We help offline LatAm SMBs manage and accelerate their cash flow through inventory-based financing and payments/collection/reconciliation solutions.

📜 The story

We have been working with LatAm SMBs for more than 20 years and previously built two great (non-startup) companies:

At payphone manufacturer (R&C Telecomunicaciones), we sold more than100k payphones to corner shops across Latin America (Chile, Perú Argentina, Central America, and México) as well as to major carriers such as Movistar, Bellsouth, Telcel, and Telmex.

I remember the day my daughter received a message from her boyfriend, bypassing me! At that time, we all mainly used landline phones to communicate. This is when I realized that young people started connecting through the Internet, and I started thinking about how I should use this trend—to provide Internet access to people using the corner shop network.

So, we built the internet network (ORCA Wireless) from scratch and provided service to 250k neighbors of corner shops.

🥅 What Pideaky is

At Pideaky, we help offline LatAm SMBs manage and accelerate their cash flow through inventory-based financing and payments/collection/reconciliation solutions.

In 2021, we started by providing point-of-sale solutions to corner shops in Mexico.

Our Customers:

Corner shops that sell groceries and lack financial records, as well as their suppliers.

The Problem: Over time, we discovered that access to capital was the biggest challenge for these corner shops.

The Solution: Inventory-based lending powered by our proprietary AI

Market Size: Businesses like these account for almost $70B/year in gross merchandise value.

Tech stack: We build and train an AI tool that Translates photos and videos into credit scores and risk models using AI and computer vision (with 90% accuracy today). We also developed the best-in-class automated collection and reconciliation tools to collect our loans.

New Opportunity: These tools are helping us to acquire Corner shop suppliers as customers; we help them manage and collect their invoices in minutes, not days, and they allow us to increase the network of Corner shops.

Our Impact: More than 14,000 loans were disbursed, and more than 6K corner shops served.

Our Backers:

We’re backed by Silicon Valley VCs (Wayfinder, Goodwater) and are actively hiring and expanding across Mexico/LatAm. Let us know if you'd like to connect—I’m open for coffee chats.

Check us out at Pideaky.com or chat with me by emailing carlos@pideaky.com