Hello, we are Syntage

Today we are introducing Syntage, the business data platform (Open Data / Open Finance) that lets you connect to your SME customers’ private and public data across LatAm.

SMEs are the backbone of the Latin American economy. According to the United Nations, SMEs account for 90% of all businesses in the region, employ between 60% and 70% of all private-sector workers, and generate more than 50% of global GDP. Yet despite their significant contribution to the region’s growth and stability, SMEs rarely have fair, fast access to financial services or to the right tools to easily manage their data and operations with greater visibility.

Syntage’s technology is the infrastructure that powers the connectivity needed to build credit products, payment solutions, and SaaS for businesses.

We believe data is the power behind every successful business. Our mission is to help you get the most out of it.

Syntage is new, but our story isn’t

We started working on what would become Syntage almost two and a half years ago. In early 2020, we launched Satws: a product that connects the Mexican ecosystem (primarily financial institutions and fintechs) with the Servicio de Administración Tributaria (SAT) through APIs and a very easy-to-use dashboard. Today, around 150 institutional customers use Satws to make better, more informed credit risk decisions, streamline onboarding processes, and closely monitor their business customers’ activity.

The idea for this product grew out of the track record and experience of our co-founders: Matheus Pedroso and Sebastian Carlsson. Matheus was previously the CTO of Credijusto — one of Mexico’s largest fintechs — and Sebastian led LenddoEFL in LatAm after a distinguished career in corporate investment banking. At both companies, the two worked with technologies that gather information on businesses and individuals to enable faster onboarding and better risk assessment; Matheus built the technology, and Sebastian developed and sold it.

Satws’s vision has always been very specific: it focuses solely on SAT data and Mexico. That’s right — we chose to start with a smaller, more concrete idea rather than pursue a bigger but vaguer one. The company’s very name was a way to stay laser-focused on solving the acute pain we had initially identified in the Mexican market: accessing and making sense of tax information to improve onboarding and decision-making processes. We were confident this focus would let us build better products and learn faster about other pain points our customers experience that we could help them solve.

The strategy paid off, and by mid-2021 we had a team of 5 people serving around 60 institutional customers and were very close to breaking even. Customers were both satisfied and engaged, we had no churn, and there were signs of product-market fit from our earliest days of operation. By this point, product-market fit was very clear and solid to us. We had validated our hypothesis and built a product that added real value for customers.

That’s when we hit an inflection point: product usage was skyrocketing, and customers were demanding many more features and more holistic information about their own customers. The operation began to grow too large and overwhelming for our small team. Up to that point, the company had run on sheer effort, but our team needed to grow quickly to meet all this demand. We believed we had a very strong case for raising venture capital, and that it could unlock the immediate growth we needed as the company’s next step, allowing us to create more value for our customers.

We set out on the venture capital path and, more than capital, we were looking for partners whose real added value could drive our company’s success. We wanted partners who could bring operational experience, industry knowledge, and a relevant network. After many conversations, we narrowed our list down to two great venture capital firms we were excited about, who ended up co-leading our round: Nazca and Costanoa Ventures. The whole process was surprisingly fast, and within two weeks we had a signed term sheet. We then took the time to find the right strategic partners to complete our round, bringing on QED, RaliCap, Latitud, and ten amazing angel investors. We’ve been working with them for a few months now, and today we know we couldn’t have chosen better partners.

We raised a $4.3 million seed round to make business data more accessible across Latin America!

From Satws to Syntage

With everything we learned building Satws and the valuable feedback from our customers, we felt it was time to take the next step: broaden the vision while keeping it concrete.

Satws was born as an acronym for SAT Web Services. The company name was quite descriptive, since we offer web services (APIs) to connect with the SAT (Servicio de Administración Tributaria). While tax information is highly relevant to our customers, we learned alongside them that it isn’t enough to get a holistic view of their business users and the system integrations they need. Adding more private and public business data sources was one of the most requested features.

We realized it was the perfect time to rebrand to a name that reinforces our bigger vision of the future — one where we deliver data aggregation, enrichment, and access to a business data platform across all of LatAm. SAT data and the Mexican market remain part of our offering, and we will keep adding new features and data sources from different LatAm markets.

Syntage brings together several words that describe the core concepts of our product: Synchronizing data so you can access it effortlessly; Synthesizing data to generate insights that are both valuable and actionable; and creating Synergy in the relationship between businesses and products.

We are now Syntage, and Satws is a Syntage product.

What’s next?

We are working on new features and data sources launching in Q4 2022 under the Syntage name. Satws will continue to be sold as a standalone product until then, and customers will later have the option to migrate seamlessly from Satws to Syntage.

We can’t wait to see what products fintech pioneers will build with Syntage and the impact they will have on the ecosystem. We don’t know what every application of our technology will look like; we simply know that business data should be truly accessible, and at Syntage, we’re already paving the way.

Stay tuned. This is just the beginning.