Argentina-based payments processor Tapi has reportedly raised $22 million in new funding.
The company will use the Series A funding to help fuel its expansion into Mexico, Co-Founder/CEO Tomas Mindlin said in a Bloomberg News interview Friday (July 12).
According to the report, Tapi processes payments for large Latin American consumer platforms like Mercado Pago and cryptocurrency exchange Lemon. The company projects it will process around $400 million in payments this year in the five countries in which it operates, four times the amount it handled last year.
Tapi raised $9 million in a seed round in 2022. Mindlin told Bloomberg he anticipates that Mexico to be the company’s fastest growing market in the next two years.
“We’re going to be working with the FinTechs that are going to grow the most, continue to do the most financial inclusion and transform cash to digital payments, so Mexico is very important for us,” Mindlin said. “I’d say in a year from now we’ll have 80% of the banked population in Mexico working with our infrastructure.”
Bloomberg says Mindlin declined to comment on the valuation of his company, which has about 70 employees, primarily in Argentina. He added that total payment volume is projected to grow fivefold by the end of the year to 10 million transactions per month.
The report noted that Tapi’s name is a combination of Mindlin’s first startup project, a digital wallet called TAP, and API (application programming interface), the technology that supports his current company’s system.
PYMNTS examined the digital payments landscape in Mexico as part that country’s edition of the “2024 Global Digital Shopping Index,” a series of reports commissioned by Visa Acceptance Solutions to explore which digital features resonate in various corners of the globe.
That report found that nearly half of consumers shop in-store without using any digital shopping features. It’s not because they prefer it that way. Rather, it’s because merchants in Mexico aren’t offering the features shoppers want, with 62% of consumers looking for digital features that are not yet available there.
The reason shoppers in Mexico want digital shopping features is because often they allow them to save money and improve their overall in-store experience.
In other words — just as PYMNTS Intelligence found when examining consumer behavior in Brazil, the U.K., the U.S. and elsewhere — these local shoppers also enjoy upgrading their brick-and-mortar shopping adventures with digital features: an approach otherwise known as Click-and-Mortar™ shopping.