On the second day of the LatAm conference, eight Latin American startups pitched their best in front of three industry judges for the second annual PitchIt competition.
After nearly two hours of presentations and questions from the VC judges, the final entrepreneur to take the stage won the gold.
Yave, a mortgage and credit fintech that aims to capture the Mexican mortgage market, won the day after an excellent presentation by co-founder and CEO Bernardo Silva. He said he wanted to break into the slow-moving trad marketplace for mortgages and help brokers put the mortgage right into the sales process.
“In Mexico, If you want to integrate the mortgage process into your sales, it’s basically impossible. That happens because, in Mexico, five banks and the government have 98% of the mortgage market. There’s no tec. There’s no separation.”
Silva said there’s no API integration, tech, and snail’s pace change in a market like that.
“What we do is we empower real estate partners and companies basically offer our loan online,” Silva said. “Alongside the way it works is we have a b2b infrastructure, where again, partnerships with companies can either use a web-based support or they can connect to us.”
Customers can get mortgages through their automated software or direct customer service, and they do all the underwriting in-house.
“We stand alone; we have over $400 million in funds, so we can originate loans and select them,” Silva said, coming from a background as a mortgage broker himself.
Silva took the stage after the likes of US-based 4toldfintech, CashQ from the US, Mexican fintech Mox payroll, the Columbian Nubloq, Nufi from Mexico, and Prezzta from Uruguay. The runner-up was Brelo from Brazil, a startup that enables lenders to use borrowers’ phones as collateral, with software to shut them out the phones of defaulting borrowers.
It will not be the last time the LendIt community hears from the startups that presented Wednesday won out in the end, presenting in front of an eager crowd of fintech professionals excited to build their business in LatAm.
