Chile-based Xepelin, which offers B2B payments, financial info, data models, and more to SMBs in Latin America, raises a $111M Series B led by Avenir and Kaszek
Christine Hall / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Xepelin's $111M Series B lands in a Chilean fintech cluster that has been building out piece by piece: Fintual's Sequoia-led round put Chilean retail investing on the map, and Belvo's open finance API supplied the data rails other regional products are built on. Xepelin extends that stack toward businesses, bundling B2B payments with financial information and data models for SMBs.
The round also mirrors a playbook proven elsewhere: Melio's $110M raise at a $1.3B valuation showed investors will fund SMB-focused B2B payments at scale, and Avenir and Kaszek are now backing the Latin American version of it.
First-order effects
- Xepelin gains the capital to push beyond payments into the broader financial-data layer for Latin American SMBs, with Kaszek providing regional reach and Avenir the growth-stage check.
- The raise validates Chile as a source of venture-scale fintech deals, following Fintual's earlier Sequoia-backed round out of the same market.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent infrastructure players benefit: Belvo-style open finance APIs become more valuable as payment platforms like Xepelin need end-user data access, while Santiago-based Toku's consumer-payments focus marks the consumer side of the same funded wave.
- US-focused rivals like Melio face a regional counterpart chasing the same SMB treasury-and-payments wallet, raising the odds of feature convergence across markets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Latin American SMB finance consolidates from single-product lenders and processors into full-stack platforms combining payments, credit signals, and data models — with global funds rather than local banks setting the pace.
- Chile's accumulation of fintech rounds positions it as the region's product-engineering hub, deepening the divide between markets that export financial software and those that only consume it.
The trend: Latin American SMB finance is shifting from fragmented single-product providers to venture-funded full-stack B2B platforms, with Chile emerging as a core node.