Investing in the Man From the Future
A redacted version of our 1Q26 Letter from the GP
One of the most common themes in sci-fi is time traveling. What if you could go back in time, knowing what you know today, and act before everyone else?
Although this seems like pure fiction, we believe there is a parallel in investing. We call it the “Man From the Future” thesis.
When you’ve watched a market mature in one geography, going to another geography where the same (or similar) transformation hasn’t happened yet feels like traveling to the past with the answer key. The change feels inevitable, it’s a matter of timing. The gap between “inevitable” and “priced” is where alpha lives.
We haven’t articulated this thesis in a structured way before, but we realized we have been practicing it since our first investments back in 2019 and our conviction that it works has grown with every new case.
To be frank, an emerging Brazilian manager claiming it can invest in the US by exporting Latin American knowledge sounds ambitious at best and delusional at worst. We know that. But what we’ve found is that the pattern recognition built in this region is exactly what gives us an edge in opportunities that global players haven’t thought about yet.
In this letter, we walk through the thesis, the investments where we’ve applied it, and where we think it goes next. We are also excited to announce the first investment of SaaSholic Fund III, the newest and perhaps clearest expression of this idea.
Becoming the Man From the Future
We invest across geographies by identifying what one market has already built and deploying it where the transformation hasn’t happened yet.
However, the instinctive read is that this only works one way: see what succeeded in a more developed ecosystem like the US and replicate it in Latin America (aka copycats). That was the dominant playbook of Latam tech for over a decade.
MercadoLibre was founded in 1999 as the “eBay of Latin America” and eventually surpassed eBay itself in scale1. 99, the first Brazilian unicorn, replicated the ride-hailing model and was acquired by Didi for $1B2. Resultados Digitais brought HubSpot’s marketing automation playbook to Brazil and was acquired by TOTVS for R$2B3.
The model worked, produced some of the region’s most valuable companies and exits, and may continue working in the future. But sticking only to it is first-level thinking, too obvious and pursued by dozens of like-minded people.
We believe great opportunities also exist in the opposite direction: Latin America exporting what it has already built to the world.
Ignoring that is a massive underestimation of what the region is. The entrepreneurs behind Brex and dLocal built and operated in Latin America first, then applied that experience to build global companies from scratch. Wellhub, Tractian, Wildlife, VTEX and Pipefy were born and scaled in Brazil before expanding across dozens of countries. Nubank started in Brazil and now serves over 100M customers across Latam and is starting its expansion into the US4.
These founders were forged in a tougher business environment: high taxes, high interest rates, scarce funding and complex regulation, but when they move to markets with easier conditions, they carry a structural advantage. The founder who built profitably at 15%+ interest rates doesn’t panic when rates go from 0% to 5%.
Why Latin America Built It First
There are spaces where Latin America has built technology and infrastructure that are genuinely ahead of the rest of the world. All of it was built by necessity.
When interest rates run at 15%+ for decades, holding cash becomes expensive and the entire financial system is forced to move money faster, settle in real time, and create instruments that generate daily returns. When fraud is endemic, the system builds identity verification and real-time monitoring before anyone else has to. When the tax environment is notoriously complex, commercial transactions get digitized earlier because paper cannot keep up with compliance. These pressures accelerated innovation, and the infrastructure that emerged is ahead of what most developed economies have built.
PIX is the most visible example. Brazil created CDI in the 1980s, an overnight interbank rate that trained the entire population to expect daily yield on their money, something with no equivalent in the US or Europe.
That culture of daily yield and intolerance for idle cash is what produced PIX, launched by the Central Bank in 2020. PIX allows anyone to send money in real time, 24/7, for free, and went from zero to 32% of all transactions in four years5. It is ahead of India’s UPI in volume, per capita usage, and growth despite India having 7x the population6. PIX has already generated over $14.5B in value by eliminating cash-handling and card processing costs7. The US is only beginning to attempt something similar with FedNow, at a fraction of the adoption.
Another, less visible but perhaps more important example for us, is receivables.
The same cost of capital that made PIX urgent also made waiting 30, 60, or 90 days to receive a payment unsustainable. For a Brazilian merchant, getting paid two weeks earlier can be the difference between restocking and shutting down. That pressure created massive demand for receivables anticipation, which required infrastructure to verify who owns a receivable, whether it has already been pledged, and whether it is available to be financed.
Before 2019, none of that existed, and merchants’ receivables were locked to their acquirers. Brazil built that infrastructure. Electronic invoicing turned commercial transactions into legally valid digital records. A Central Bank regulation required receivables to be registered in authorized registries operated by CERC, Núclea, and B3, and made them accessible to any credit grantor.
Since the system went live in 2021, monthly volumes at CERC grew 8x to R$244B while merchant discount rates dropped from 18% to 9%, turning every invoice into a traceable, financeable digital asset8.
The same pressure to build trust and verification infrastructure extended across the entire financial system. Open Finance lets consumers share their full financial history across institutions and has already reduced fraud cases by 27%9. Regulation enabled fully digital banks in 2016 and fintechs to lend in 2018, and today 43% of Brazilians hold accounts at digital banks10. Anyone who has used a Brazilian fintech and then tried to make a transfer at a US bank can feel the gap firsthand.
Where We’ve Applied the Thesis
The advantages described above are exportable, and we have been exporting them. What began as recognizing a familiar business model in a neighboring country evolved into incubating new companies in the US and, most recently, identifying infrastructure gaps that Latin America solved years ago.
Here are three cases that shaped our thinking.
1. ContaSimples & Cuenta Mono - Fund I
When we invested in Banky in 2019, the thesis was rooted in a gap that felt obvious. Nubank had already revolutionized B2C banking in Brazil with simplicity, transparency and zero fees. But B2B banking was lagging years behind on customer experience. At the same time, mature BaaS solutions like Dock were emerging and would enable a new generation of financial players to arise without needing a banking license.
The conditions were in place for someone to do for SMBs what Nubank had done for consumers. Rodrigo Tognini saw that opportunity and founded Banky as an account for the “PJotinha,” a banking solution for the smallest businesses in Brazil.
What the team quickly discovered was that “PJotinhas” were not the customer segment with the biggest pain points or best unit economics. The real opportunity was in B2B online spenders, companies buying media on Meta, Google, and AWS, that were terribly served by incumbents. Banks were slow to issue new cards, user management was poor, credit limits were laughable and anti-fraud systems were constantly blocking legitimate transactions because they weren’t tuned for B2B online spending.
The company pivoted and rebranded to ContaSimples to solve exactly this. Virtual cards issued instantly, user management built as a core feature, “Crébito” generating strong interchange-based revenue, and fine-tuned anti-fraud that meant media campaigns would no longer shut down for no apparent reason. Customers could rely on it, and acquisition grew organically through the community.
ContaSimples was soon accepted into Y Combinator, marking international recognition and opening access to global investors. Valor, Base10 Partners, and Jam Fund invested after us. Today, the company keeps reinforcing this value proposition while developing credit offerings and is, hands down, the best investment of Fund I.
By August 2020, with ContaSimples showing strong traction, we started asking ourselves: where else does this problem exist and no one is solving it?
We mapped the B2B banking landscape across several Latin American markets. SMBs across Spanish-speaking Latin America faced the same pain. They were unserved by large financial institutions, and when served, the experience was far from good. Colombia stood out for the sheer depth and attractiveness of the opportunity. After validating the market and mapping the teams building in the space, we became convinced by Juan Camilo’s vision and team. In April 2021, we invested in Cuenta Mono, whose proposition was ContaSimples for Colombia.
One year after our investment, the company also joined Y Combinator and later raised a large round with Tiger Global. The company is one of the leading B2B neobanks in Colombia and is now at the forefront of processing transactions on BRE-B, the “Colombian PIX”, and is seizing this unique opportunity.
BRE-B moved from certification into production this year, and Mono was among the first participants to go live on the rail. If BRE-B follows a similar trajectory to PIX, it has the potential to transform the Colombian financial ecosystem the same way PIX did in Brazil. Mono is perfectly positioned to ride that wave.
ContaSimples taught us the model. Mono was the first time we consciously exported it. We saw the business work in Brazil, deeply understood why it worked, recognized the same gap in Colombia, found the right team and invested before the market. That experience planted a seed. If the thesis worked across Latin American borders, could it work in a completely different direction?
2. Clad - Fund II
Clad is counterintuitive at first glance.
William, one of SaaSholic’s partners, was an angel investor in EducBank, founded by Danilo Costa. Danilo is an educator and M&A lawyer turned entrepreneur who, in 2019, created School Income Guarantee in Brazil, a category that didn’t exist before him.
Private schools in Brazil wasted too much time chasing delayed payments from parents. EducBank guaranteed their tuition income by advancing 100% of invoiced revenue on the due date, absorbing collection and default risk, in exchange for a take rate similar to the delinquency the school already had.
EducBank grew fast, scaled across hundreds of Brazilian schools, raised a R$200M round from Vasta, and reached a strategic partnership with the largest education group in Brazil in 2022. A fast follower called Isaac saw the model, replicated it, and was acquired by Arco. Two strategic exits in two years validated a category that one founder had created from scratch.
After exiting, Danilo spent time at Stanford studying the US education market. He came to William with a question that was far from obvious at the time. Would the model he built in Brazil work in the US?
In Brazil, basic education is largely private and paid. In the US, it is predominantly public and free, so a similar business had no obvious place to exist. But after a site trip to Arizona, we discovered something we weren’t expecting.
The most acute pain wasn’t in traditional K-12. It was in childcare. In 45 states, two children in center-based care cost more than annual mortgage payments. More than 92,000 licensed childcare centers run this market, with no underwriting, no collections team, and no balance sheet to absorb delinquency11. The pain was real, but invisible unless you had already built the solution somewhere else.
In 2023, Danilo came to us with an idea and a track record, without a deck or a co-founder. We brought him into our Entrepreneur in Residence program and worked alongside him for six months on the translation of the model to the US.
Clad reached significant traction less than nine months after product launch and continues to grow fast, with zero churn since the first customer was onboarded. Every single customer came through a school-to-school referral. Its take rate runs at three times the closest US payments substitute.
Clad is the same model exported to a market five times larger, with better unit economics at every layer.
With Mono, we exported a proven model within Latin America. With Clad, we exported a Brazilian financial model to the US and proved that the thesis could work across the continent.
The next question was whether the same logic could apply to something deeper than a single business model: could it apply to infrastructure?
3. Enter Heft - Fund III
After diving deep into the proprietary data market and actually investing in the space with Liquid, Didit and others in Fund II, we found a huge gap in the US.
The trust layer underneath the US receivables market still runs on borrower-submitted PDFs, screenshots, and shared portal access. Equities have the DTCC. Payments have card networks. Consumer fintech had Plaid. Receivables still lack a neutral verification primitive.
The consequences of this gap are showing up in billions of dollars in fraud. At the same time, the US private credit market has grown 5x since 2009, reaching $1.3T12. The infrastructure to verify and monitor the collateral underneath it hasn’t kept pace. The market is scaling on trust that no system is checking.
As we were studying this gap, Henrique Tormena from CERC introduced us to the founders behind Heft, and our conviction only grew from there. We are happy to announce that Heft is the first investment of SaaSholic Fund III as a direct expression of the thesis.
Heft is led by two founders who embody the Man From the Future idea.
Mauricio Vergara, the CEO, spent nine years at Google and Unity Technologies building the demand side of platforms where developers, partners, and capital allocators all needed to be coordinated. He lived the SMB cash-flow problem firsthand, speaks the language of both invoice owners and funders, and is already recognized inside the receivables finance industry.
Pete Thomas, the CTO, co-founded C2FO, the world’s largest on-demand working capital marketplace, with $200B+ deployed across 160+ countries and $570M raised at a unicorn valuation. He spent 16 years as its CTO turning invoice liquidity into software at scale.
Together, they combine the technology platform experience and the deep receivables market knowledge needed to build this.
Verified receivables should be cheaper to fund, safer to monitor, and easier to trade. Heft is building the infrastructure to make that happen.
The company has already verified over $500M in receivables across with its paying design partners. For a pre-seed company, these are unusually strong data-scale signals that gave us the conviction to lead the round.
Heft is applying Latin American market-structure memory to a market 10x larger. We couldn’t be more excited to kick off Fund III with an investment that so clearly embodies the conviction we’ve been building.
Where This Goes Next
The thesis is a permanent lens we use to source deals and build conviction. We see it working across multiple directions: US to Brazil and Latin America, Brazil to the US, Brazil to Latam and now Latam to the world.
ContaSimples, Cuenta Mono, Clad, and Heft each represent a different vector and we believe there are many more to explore.
This mindset is also pushing us to study markets across the Americas that have historically been outside our scope. In Fund III, we are diving deep into other geographies where similar transformations can happen. More to come on this soon.
For decades, the venture industry took what worked in the US and replicated it in Latin America. We believe the reverse has not been articulated or practiced with the same intentionality. As we scale Fund III, we expect this to become a defining part of how we invest.
Founders, Apply for Funding!
If you've recognized an opportunity in one market that hasn't been built in another, we want to hear from you. We're deploying Fund III and looking for founders who carry the kind of cross-border pattern recognition!
MercadoLibre was founded in 1999 by Marcos Galperin. The company was initially backed by eBay, which took a stake in 2001. MercadoLibre went public on NASDAQ in 2007 and has since surpassed eBay in market capitalization.
Didi confirms it has acquired 99 in Brazil to expand in Latin America, TechCrunch, January 2018. Deal valued 99 at $1B per Valor Econômico.
TOTVS compra a Resultados Digitais por R$1.86B, Exame, March 2021. Largest private SaaS M&A transaction in Brazil at the time.
Nubank public company filings. Customer count includes Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
Central Bank of Brazil, Payment Methods Statistics; Central Bank of Brazil, “The Brazilians and their relationship with money” Study (2024). Cash total number of transactions estimated based on Central Bank of Brazil methodology. Data compiled via Atlantico, Latin America Digital Transformation Report 2025.
NPCI Press Releases; Central Bank of Brazil, Instant Payment System Statistics; International Monetary Fund; United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024); IBGE 2024 Population Projections.
Worldpay Global Payments Reports 2019, 2021, and 2024; Visa, Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments. Only P2B PIX transactions are considered for conservativeness.
CERC Statistics; Central Bank of Brazil, Open Data Portal. CERC is one of the four Central Bank-authorized receivables registries. Monthly volumes measured as of latest available data. For background on the regulation, see TechCrunch, What does Brazil’s new receivables regulation mean for fintechs? (August 2021).
Capgemini, Open Finance Maturity Index Brazil, 2023 and 2024 editions.
Central Bank of Brazil; ANBIMA, 8th X-Ray of The Brazilian Investor.
Child Care Aware of America (CCAoA), Child Care in America: 2024 Price & Supply Report, April 2025. Licensed-center counts reflect a 40-state sample with complete reporting; actual US total is higher. In 45 states plus Washington DC, the average annual price of center-based child care for two children exceeded annual mortgage payments.