Syntage is here

Today we announce Syntage, a business data platform (Open Data / Open Finance) that allows you to connect to your business customers' private and public data in LatAm.

SMBs are the backbone of LatAm's economy. According to the United Nations, SMBs represent 90% of all businesses in the region, employ between 60% and 70% of all private sector employees, and generate more than 50% of the GDP worldwide. And yet, despite their significant contributions to the region's growth and stability, SMBs often don't have fair and quick 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 for developing lending products, payment solutions, and SaaS for businesses.

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

Syntage is new, but our story is not

We started working on what would become Syntage almost two and half years ago. In early 2020, we released Satws: A product that integrates the Mexican ecosystem, mostly financial institutions and fintechs, with the Mexican fiscal authority (SAT) through APIs and an easy-to-use dashboard. Currently, about 150 institutional customers use Satws to make more informed credit risk decisions, improve onboarding processes, and closely monitor the activity of their business customers.

The product idea came from the backgrounds and experiences of our co-founders: Matheus Pedroso and Sebastian Carlsson. Matheus was previously the CTO of Credijusto - one of the biggest Mexican SMB lender fintechs. Sebastian headed up LenddoEFL in LatAm after a career in Corporate Investment Banking. They both worked with technologies that gathered information from businesses and individuals to perform a faster onboarding process and better risk assessment. Matheus built technology, Sebastian developed and sold it.

Syntage's co-founders: Matheus (left) and Sebastian (right)

Satws’ vision was very narrow: Only SAT data, only Mexico. We started with a smaller and more concrete idea than with a grand and vague one. The company name itself was a way to keep a laser focus on the strong pain we had initially identified in the market: Accessing and making sense of fiscal information for improving onboarding and decision-making processes. We believed that the focus would allow us to create better products and learn faster with customers about other related pains we could help them solve.

The strategy paid off and by mid-2021, we had about 60 institutional customers with a 5-people team and were very close to breakeven. Customers were satisfied and engaged; we had no churns. We had signals of product-market fit since the company's first days, but at that moment, the product-market fit became very clear and solid to us. We had validated our hypothesis and built a product that was adding real value to customers.

We then found ourselves at an inflection point: Product usage was skyrocketing, customers demanded many more features and data sources, and the operation was becoming too big and overwhelming for our small team. We bootstrapped the company until that point, and we needed to grow our team faster to keep up with demand. We thought we had a solid case for Venture Capital and that it would be able to unlock the immediate team growth we required for the company's next steps, allowing us to create more value for our customers.

We entered the Venture Capital path and, more than capital, we were looking for partners with real value-add that could boost our company's success; we wanted partners that could bring to the table operational experience, industry knowledge, and relevant networks. After many conversations, we narrowed down our list to two great VCs 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 that would complete our round, and we brought onboard: QED, RaliCap, Latitud, and ten amazing angel investors. We've been working with our investors for a few months now, and we couldn't have chosen better partners to work with.

We raised a U$4.3M seed round to make business data more accessible in LatAm!

Part of the team that attended the offsite event we had in July 2022 in Valle de Bravo, Mexico

From Satws to Syntage

With all the learning from building Satws and from valuable customer feedback, we thought it was the right time for the next step. A bigger vision while keeping it concrete.

Satws stands for SAT Web Services. The company name was quite descriptive: We offered web services (or APIs) to connect to the SAT (Mexican fiscal authority). Although fiscal information is highly relevant for our customers, we learned with them that it's not enough for a holistic view of their business customers and the system integrations they need. Adding more private and public business data sources to the product was one of the most requested features.

We realized this was the perfect moment for a rebranding to reinforce our bigger vision for the future: Data aggregation, enrichment, and platform for business data in LatAm. The SAT data and the Mexican market are still part of our offering, but we will enrich it with new features and data sources, including from different LatAm markets.

Syntage is the union of many words that describe the core concepts of our product: Synchronize data for effortless access; Synthesize data for generating valuable and actionable insights; Synergize the relationship between businesses and products.

We're Syntage now, and Satws is a Syntage product.

What is next?

We're working on new features and data sources that will be released by Q4 2022 under Syntage's name. Satws will still be commercialized as a standalone product until then, and customers will have the option to migrate from Satws to Syntage seamlessly.

We can't wait to see what products fintech pioneers will create with Syntage and the impact they will have on the ecosystem. We don't know what all applications of our technology will look like; We simply know that business data must be effortlessly accessible, and we are creating the rails for it.

Stay tuned. This is just the beginning.