Marco, the first tech-enabled financing platform built for small and medium-sized exporters in the United States and Latin America, raised $82 million in seed funding. Led by Kayyak Ventures, the company has increased its credit line to $100M provided by Arcadia Funds LLC.
"Small exporters, especially in LatAm, are burdened with a broken financing system that makes it nearly impossible to compete with larger exporters," said Peter D. Spradling, COO and co-founder of Marco. "Banks aren't built to serve the needs of smaller companies; they often make SMEs wait around 90 days before rejecting over 50% of trade finance applications. We built Marco specifically to support this disadvantaged market. The seed round will help build a more stable and equitable trade ecosystem."
The new funding will also be directed towards product development, specifically, Marco's vision to provide the trade finance rails for the world's largest logistics and shipping conglomerates. This embedded finance model will allow Marco to scale and support more SMEs in LatAm by giving large logistics providers the ability to finance exports on their own, underwritten by the Marco team. The new facility will also expand the fintech's supply chain finance, asset-based lines of credit, purchase order, and inventory financing.
"Driven by its purpose, culture, and world-class talent, we believe Marco is ready to revolutionize the massive but outdated trade finance market and help thousands of small LatAm exporters grow their businesses. We see immense potential for value creation in a space ready to be disrupted." - Cristóbal Silva, Partner at Kayyak Ventures.
News of Marco's seed round and credit facility expansion follows the company's $26M funding and credit round from September 2020. Since then, invoices have been processed across 20 countries, and the Marco team has grown to include several key players, including Prajwal Manalwar as Chief Product Officer and Sabrina Teichman as Chief Growth Officer. Prajwal joins Marco after 13 years at PayPal, where he most recently was a product lead focused on enabling PayPal Debit Cards and its expansion with 3DS platform, wallet tokenization for better transaction authorization rate, and expanding PayPal's presence in in-store payment via partnerships with Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Sabrina joins after 11 years in the Federal government, most recently serving as Managing Director for the Western Hemisphere at the U.S. Government's development bank, the DFC. After serving under three U.S. presidents, Sabrina is eager to directly impact the development of innovative solutions to support SMEs.
Additional investors in Marco's seed round and expanded credit facility include Village Global VC, Flexport Ventures, Tresalia Capital, 342 Capital, Struck Capital, Antler LLC, Antler Elevate, Florida Funders, and Fox Ventures. Strategic angel investors include Phil Bentley, CEO of Mitie and Naman Budhdeo, CEO and Co-Founder of Tripstack and FlightNetwork.