When founders are building financial systems from scratch rather than improving what already exists, fintech becomes less a sector choice than a response to what is missing.
That helps explain why financial technology now accounts for more than a fifth of the companies supported by Endeavor, a non-profit working with entrepreneurs across more than 50 countries and co-investing in selected businesses through Endeavor Catalyst.
Constanza Castro Feijóo, managing director at Endeavor, speaks to Fintechly about why companies built around gaps in banking, payments and credit can travel so successfully, what separates the founders able to scale and where she sees the next wave of fintech growth.
Constanza, why does fintech feature so prominently in Endeavor’s portfolio?
Endeavor
Fintech represents over 20% of Endeavor’s portfolio today and nearly a third of our fastest-growing companies – not because it’s a focus, but because it reflects the fundamental realities of the markets we work in.
In much of the world, founders aren’t improving financial systems; they’re building them from scratch. They’re solving for access, trust, credit, and the ability to move money across borders.
Nubank is the benchmark: it emerged when five banks controlled 80% of Brazil’s banking market and went on to redefine digital banking across Latin America entirely. Cashea did something similar in Venezuela, where traditional credit barely existed – today over a third of all Venezuelans use it. Rain shows how far these solutions travel: based in New York but with roughly 70% of its customers in Latin America, it uses stablecoin-backed products to solve currency volatility and limited dollar access in ways conventional banking simply can’t.
And sometimes fintech extends well beyond banking altogether – Moove and Kovi combined financing with mobility, enabling thousands of drivers to access income opportunities that were previously out of reach. When you build in these conditions, you build differently: you build infrastructure, you scale faster, and you serve millions from day one.
What makes this especially powerful is that local solutions quickly become global ones. The challenges of moving money, accessing credit, and building financial trust don’t stop at borders – and neither do the companies solving them. Founders solve deeply local problems, but because many markets share similar constraints, those solutions travel remarkably well.
At Endeavor, we call these markets ‘Elsewhere’: places where talent is abundant but opportunity is still catching up. Over time, we’ve watched founders go from Elsewhere to Elsewhere – from Brazil to Mexico, from South Africa to Southeast Asia, and increasingly, to London.
That’s where things connect. London is one of the world’s leading fintech hubs, not just for what is built here, but for who comes here. Founders arriving with businesses already tested in complexity, seeking capital, partnerships, and scale. At Endeavor’s London Global Hub, we sit at that intersection, and it’s exactly where we want to be.
How does Endeavor Catalyst fit into the wider organisation?
Endeavor operates as a hybrid model, and understanding the two sides is key. On one side, you have Endeavor, which builds and catalyses entrepreneurial ecosystems, identifies high-impact entrepreneurs, and provides access to markets, mentorship, and peer connections across 50+ countries with 600 people on the ground. On the other, you have Endeavor Catalyst, our rules-based co-investment fund, which now manages over $800 million in assets and co-invests alongside the world’s top venture funds, in the same companies we’ve already identified, vetted, and supported.
We invest between $1 and $3 million per company, and we participate in 96% of rounds involving Endeavor entrepreneurs. Our latest decacorn is ICEYE from Poland; Bending Spoons just filed for an IPO. What makes this model powerful is that our entrepreneurs don’t just receive, they pay it forward. They reinvest in the fund and sit on local boards. The chair of Endeavor Spain is Verónica Pascual, Endeavor entrepreneur and founder of ASTI Robotics. In Argentina, it’s Martín Migoya, EE and co-founder and CEO of Globant. MercadoLibre’s founder, Marcos Galperin, serves as vice chairman. Melvyn Lubega, the first edtech unicorn from Africa, sits on our South Africa board.
The thesis behind Endeavor Catalyst is simple: there is still significant geographic alpha. Fifteen years ago, there were almost no examples of large, successful technology companies built outside traditional VC markets, the one people remember is Skype, built by Scandinavian and Estonian engineers. Endeavor had MercadoLibre in Argentina, an early portfolio company we supported from the late 1990s and helped take public on Nasdaq in 2007, the first Latin American technology company to do so, valued at $133 billion.
We asked ourselves: ‘what if we started a fund to invest in the next MercadoLibres?’ We’ve now done it dozens of times over. We see two types of winners emerging: regional champions like MercadoLibre, Rappi, and Careem and increasingly, global innovators built anywhere: Spotify, Shopify, Canva, UiPath, Runway, ElevenLabs.
The next decade will look very different. The tools available today, particularly AI, are global from day one, available to every entrepreneur everywhere from the very start. The winners will be bigger, more global, and increasingly built in places the traditional VC world has yet to fully discover. That is precisely where Endeavor and Endeavor Catalyst play.
What do the fintech companies that scale successfully have in common?
At Endeavor, we’ve developed a pretty clear theory on how technology waves move through markets and fintech is the most obvious example. The companies that have gotten biggest break into two archetypes: consumer and infrastructure. On the consumer side, you have Brex, Moniepoint, Tyme or Tabby, companies that won by bringing millions of people into financial services for the first time.
On the infrastructure side, you have Checkout.com, Stripe, and Adyen, who built the rails the rest of the economy runs on. And then there’s a third pattern that’s been particularly powerful in emerging markets: cross-border. That’s exactly why dLocal is as big as it is, and why EBANX built such a defensible position. The through-line across all of them is the same: the biggest companies were solving the most acute problems in the most underserved markets. They built for broken systems, which meant they often had to build the infrastructure from scratch.
What gives us a unique edge in spotting these companies early is the network itself. A founder from Argentina or Brazil who lived through currency crises and broken payment rails can sit across from a founder in Vietnam or Pakistan and immediately recognise the pattern – the problem, the workaround, and the opportunity – long before a traditional investor would. That cross-market intuition, built into our selection panels, is one of the things that makes Endeavor’s model genuinely different.
What gets us most excited, though, is the next chapter of fintech. We’re seeing founders build the financial infrastructure that other businesses will rely on, making financial services part of products and industries far beyond banking. Pismo (acquired by Visa for $1 billion) and MercadoPago are the benchmarks. Pomelo and Nymcard are the next generation of that bet.
And then there’s the wave we think will be the biggest of all: stablecoins. In markets where currencies are volatile, banking is thin, and dollar access is restricted, stablecoins are the practical answer to unstable economies. In Latin America and Africa, stablecoin activity has grown 40% year-over-year, versus just 4% in North America. In Argentina, where inflation hit 118% in 2024, stablecoins represented roughly 64% of all crypto trading volume. Standard Chartered estimates $1 trillion could migrate from traditional banks to stablecoins across emerging markets in the next three years.
Through Endeavor Catalyst, we’ve been investing in this wave for a while now – Rain enabling stablecoin payments in Puerto Rico, Felix powering cross-border remittances, Zone building blockchain-based settlement infrastructure in Nigeria, and others. Our conviction is that the killer app for blockchain and tokenisation is the stablecoin, and that emerging market entrepreneurs are best positioned to lead it. They’ve done it before. Every wave we’ve tracked – from digitisation to disruption to deployment – has been led by founders building for broken systems, not ideal ones. Stablecoins are no different. And the founders who are already living that reality, who understand it instinctively, are the ones building the category-defining companies of this next wave.
What do you look for in founders with the potential to transform a market?
At Endeavor we select founders, not companies. Endeavor entrepreneurs are the top 1% of founders from their markets. They are the most ambitious, most innovative, most courageous, most resilient founders all around the world. We are the global network of trust of, by and for these founders. We look for those who will still be in the room in twenty years, helping the next generation get there. Our selection process has been refined over 30 years, with 600+ people on the ground across 50+ countries identifying and evaluating founders locally.
A global network of trust with deep local roots. From the first conversation to the International Selection Panel, where six mentors from across industries and geographies must reach a unanimous decision, with no standard questionnaire, just experience-led dialogue, the process is rigorous by design. Last year, 83 companies were selected, 146 entrepreneurs, and over 10,000 were scanned.. That’s less than 1%. The difficulty is intentional: it’s how you separate signal from noise at scale.
What we’re actually screening for sits inside what we call the Endeavor Selection Triangle: the entrepreneur, the business, and the timing. On the human side, we want ambition, transparency, and the kind of openness that makes someone genuinely coachable. On the business side, we need to see defensibility, scalability, and a growth strategy with real conviction behind it. And on timing, we ask whether this is the right moment for this particular founder and this particular business to go tenfold. All three have to line up. When they do, we see an entrepreneur capable of building a great company and eventually becoming a Multiplier.
That word multiplier is at the heart of everything we do. The theory of change is simple but powerful: We believe that a single high-impact founder, supported at the right moment by the right community, can shape an entire ecosystem. They inspire, mentor, and invest in the next generation of founders. They pay it forward. That compounding effect is what sets Endeavor apart. We are catalysing an ecosystem. When you get the selection right, and you put that founder inside a global network of peers who’ve done it before, you don’t just spark business growth. You spark a movement.
What do fintech founders need to get right when scaling from emerging markets?
Play your strengths and keep compounding them. The most powerful advantage you have as an emerging market founder isn’t despite where you are, it’s because of it. The broken systems, the missing infrastructure, the currency volatility, the unbanked populations, these aren’t obstacles to building a great company. They are the opportunity. And the truth is, most founders sitting in London or Palo Alto aren’t paying attention to them. That’s your edge.
The second thing is pattern recognition across markets. Study the markets that look like yours. dLocal started in Uruguay, cracked Latin America, and then looked at Africa and the rest of the world and saw the same problem in a different geography. EBANX did the same. The playbook travels because the underlying problem – how does global commerce flow through markets that traditional banking can’t reach – is the same everywhere. Once you’ve solved it in one place, you have an instinct that no outside investor can replicate.
And the last thing is this: the newest global technologies – AI, stablecoins, embedded finance – aren’t being built for your market. Which means the founders who localise them first, who adapt them to real constraints on the ground, will define what those technologies actually become. Silicon Valley builds for ideal systems. You build for real ones. That’s not a disadvantage. That’s exactly why the next generation of category-defining fintech companies will come from ‘Elsewhere’.
