Higo Raises $3.3 Million For Cloud B2B Payments

Higo, a cloud-based payment startup in Mexico City, is working to cut down on cumbersome vendor payment processes, Yahoo Finance said on Thursday (March 18).

The company was founded in January 2020 by Rodolfo Corcuera Meier, Juan Jose Fernandez Gallardo and Daniel Tamayo. Recently, the company raised $3.3 million from U.S. investors, including Homebrew, which led the round. Susa Ventures, Haystack and J Ventures also participated.

The founders of Higo realized that the manual processes were just not working out like they should have been.

“In Mexico, small businesses mostly handle payables with nothing more than spreadsheets and email and legacy bank accounts,” CEO Corcuera said.

Higo’s goal is to provide more automation and to help small businesses in particular. A portion of the country’s businesses are “informal” and make up 23 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).

Higo also wants to make it so those businesses do not have to rely on traditional banking. Corcuera said in the article that they “want to build the Venmo for B2B payments in Latin America.”

With help from Higo, owners of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will hopefully have fewer tedious tasks and more time to focus on business. The article says Higo has hundreds of SMB customers already and aims to have thousands by the end of 2021.

“E-invoicing is ubiquitous in the States, and in the U.S., receiving a PDF invoice is enough,” Corcuera told TechCrunch, according to the article. “But in Mexico, it has to be electronic to be [tax] deductible by law. With our platform, invoices are automatically populated so businesses can have visibility into what has to be paid, what vendors they owe and when they owe.”

The digitizing can make for a faster experience, according to Dylan Jones, vice president of operations and corporate payment solutions at WEX, PYMNTS wrote.

Jones said the elimination of paper processes also had the potential to boost revenue for the company. He noted that the U.S. B2B market was significant, holding $25 trillion in annual payment flows, and so there’s a need for companies to maximize cash flow and efficiency.