BTG Makes Its First Growth Bet Outside Brazil, on a Colombian Fintech

Colombia · Markets

The BTG Addi deal is small in dollars but large in signal, marking the first time Latin America’s biggest investment bank has backed a young company outside its home market.

BTG Pactual, the São Paulo-based giant, said on Wednesday it had co-led an eighty-five-million-dollar funding round in Addi, a Colombian financial-technology firm. The money came through the bank’s private-capital arm.

For an investor watching the region, the interest is less in the sum than in the direction. A Brazilian bank is now placing growth bets in a neighbouring market it thinks looks like Brazil a decade ago.

What the BTG Addi deal actually is

Addi was founded in 2018 by Santiago Suárez, a Colombian who spent six years at the US bank JPMorgan in New York and London. It offers online credit and payment tools to shoppers and to the merchants who serve them.

The model echoes Mercado Libre, the region’s e-commerce leader, by weaving lending into a shopping ecosystem. Addi leans heavily on artificial intelligence to decide who gets credit and on what terms.

The round was co-led with Citius, an American fund, and drew Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC and the venture firm Monashees, both already backers. People close to the deal put the valuation near one billion dollars.

Addi has drawn heavyweight names before. Earlier rounds pulled in some two hundred and fifty-five million dollars from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank and Quona Capital.

The company has won recognition to match. Fast Company recently ranked it among the three most innovative fintech firms in the world.

The raise caps a busy stretch for the company. In April it secured a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar credit line led by the US bank JPMorgan.

That financing pushed its total debt commitments past six hundred and eighty million dollars. The pace shows how quickly outside lenders have warmed to the business.

Why the BTG Addi bet matters

The novelty is the crossing of a border. BTG has expanded across Latin America before, but by buying banks and wealth managers, not by taking growth stakes in startups abroad.

Its private-capital chief framed the logic plainly. Colombia, she said, is living through the same shift in access to credit and financial services that Brazil went through years ago.

That thesis has teeth. Colombia has become one of the region’s most active tech markets, and digital banking is spreading fast among its fifty-two million people.

BTG is not a stranger to the country either. The bank already runs operations in Colombia alongside Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Peru, so the Addi stake builds on a footprint rather than opening one.

Addi itself is no longer a minnow. Its founder says the platform already serves millions of Colombian consumers and tens of thousands of merchants across the country.

A recent licence from Colombia’s financial regulator lets Addi operate as a supervised institution. That opens the door to taking deposits, a step that would deepen its reach into everyday finance.

What the BTG Addi move signals for the region

The deal is one more sign that Latin American capital is flowing sideways, from the region’s financial hubs into its faster-growing neighbours, rather than only waiting on money from abroad.

It also fits BTG’s stated ambition to be the bank for Latin Americans wherever they live. A growth stake in a Colombian fintech is a different tool for the same regional goal.

Alongside the cash, BTG and Addi agreed to work together on projects in the Colombian market. That hints at a longer relationship than a one-off cheque.

For foreign investors, the takeaway is that the smart regional money sees Colombian consumer finance as an early-stage version of a story that has already paid off in Brazil.

Background: Brazil Overhauls Tax System: A New Era for Business and Economy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the BTG Addi deal?

BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank, co-led an eighty-five-million-dollar funding round in Addi, a Colombian fintech. It is the first growth-equity investment the bank has made outside Brazil.

What does Addi do?

Addi runs a digital credit and payments platform for Colombian shoppers and merchants, using artificial intelligence to assess credit. It was founded in 2018 and recently won a licence to operate as a regulated financial institution.

Why does the BTG Addi deal matter to investors?

It shows a major Brazilian bank betting that Colombia’s credit market will follow Brazil’s path, and it marks regional capital moving across borders into faster-growing neighbours rather than relying only on foreign money.

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