Colombia has become a magnet for startups in the past few years with innovators and entrepreneurs investing in the country, hoping to take advantage of the growing tech sector.
For example, one Bloomberg article cites that Mexico fintech Clara has recently received $90 million from Accial Capital in new financing to expand in Colombia.
The Bogota Post has identified 15 of the most exciting startups in the nation. These companies are solving real-world problems that affect the lives of many people. Regardless of your profession or status, these startups are absolutely worth keeping an eye on.
From e-learning sites to consumer goods solutions and e-commerce platforms, Colombia’s startup scene is truly booming.
Andro
Andro, a new digital asset protection platform, allows users to protect the value of their digital dollars without giving up ownership or control. With Andro, users can avoid the risk of parity loss through market replacement and simultaneously increase their capital. The group is connected to some of the best decentralized finance protocols, including Uniswap and Curve, to provide transparency, security, and real ownership of assets.
Founded in 2022, the startup protects users’ virtual capital from risks such as sudden market movements, regulations, or doubts about support, and prevents any potential problems from affecting asset stability. In light of several theft and devaluation events in the last two years, Andro’s Web3 technologies seek to prevent value reduction and combat inflation through secure and scalable savings in digital dollars. With Andro, founder Jose Pino hopes to provide a solution for people keen to safeguard their digital assets whilst maintaining control and ownership.
Landian
Landian is a metaverse startup building a limitless space for people to interact and engage with one another. The team asserts that the platform offers a place in which one’s ability to evolve and thrive is solely contingent on their efforts, and imagination is the only limit to becoming anyone or anything.
The platform encourages and rewards creativity and social interaction, and its shared value system is designed to benefit both founders and users.
The Metaverse, a virtual environment that allows users to create experiences and interact with others from around the world, has been a concept for decades. Landian approaches the Metaverse as an inevitable evolution of communication and storytelling.
With its many incentives, Landian aims to stimulate user engagement and commerce, making it a promising space for anyone looking to engage in a limitless virtual world.
Habi
Habi, a real-estate startup, has launched a platform that allows homeowners to sell their houses online without the need of an agent. The company purchases the houses within ten days of the transaction in cash, remodels them, and puts them back on the market at a competitive price. The startup’s services include helping homeowners buy their dream house, gain liquidity, and find investment opportunities in real estate. Currently, Habi has coverage in several Colombian cities, including Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, and Cartagena.
The company focuses on buying high-value properties located in areas with significant turnover and appreciation. Homeowners can sell their properties to Habi without intermediaries, and the company assumes the notary and registration fees for property sales. The process is open to mortgaged apartments or those with a judicial process, regardless of their condition. The company has become popular due to its prompt payment and excellent customer service.
Colorchain
Colorchain creates specialized medical clothing, disrupting the multibillion-dollar global medical clothing sector. Traditionally driven by cost and volume, the sector behaves like a fragmented and undifferentiated market. However, with professionals in the healthcare industry wearing their clothing for up to 12-36 hours at a time, Colorchain caters to the apparent need for more functional and personalized clothing.
Colorchain was founded a year ago by a team of experts in design and the textile industry who combined their business vision and medical experience. Instead of just creating clothing for their customers, Colorchain worked with them to create a line of high-end, specialized, and personalized medical clothing driven by adding value.
The startup focuses on a niche market that values safety, quality, and performance in their daily clothing. The sector has growth potential worldwide, and Colorchain strives to provide its customers with more confidence, greater comfort, and better function. With over 100 medical professionals participating in their product testing, the startup is prepared to meet the needs of this growing market.
Source Meridian
Source Meridian is a startup focused on addressing various issues within the healthcare industry by expertly applying Big Data Technology. They strive to assist clients in creating innovative solutions and services to promote growth within their company. With expertise in editing and text analysis, the company takes a customer-centric approach.
The team, composed of international software engineers and data scientists, collaborates with clients to examine their content models and business processes. They utilize cutting-edge technology to generate new revenue streams for clients and stay ahead of the competition.
Source Meridian is also focused on supporting young talent in Colombia by providing early access to next-generation technologies in software engineering and data science, aiming to promote the development of the industry and help young professionals stay competitive in the market.
Kiwibot
Kiwibot, established in 2017 by Felipe Chávez, Sergio Pachón Reyes, and David Rodríguez is an automated delivery service revolutionizing the service industry and creating a more affordable process for small business owners. The company runs a group of independent robots that transport products and food to clients securely whilst preserving quality throughout the journey.
Fitted with advanced GPS technology the robots possess accurate and reliable positioning, along with advanced AI technology and camera sensors to circumvent obstacles along the way.
With over $24 million dollars in funding, Kiwibot’s navigation systems are so well developed they can traverse up to several kilometers using optimal routes of their own design to arrive at their destination as fast as possible.
Properix
Properix, a burgeoning Colombian startup, has created an all-in-one system for managing real estate and condominium complexes. The web-based platform offers a novel and vigorous software solution that optimizes accounting and communication processes between administrators and residents.
The mobile app additionally grants co-owners instantaneous access to their account status, enables their participation in surveys and online voting, and allows them to reserve communal areas.
With a decade of regional market experience under their belt, Properix brings forth a highly efficient software that facilitates collection automation, expense and payment tracking, and communication via the online platform and mobile application.
Their technology simplifies the management of condominiums, making it effortless for administrators and residents alike to manage day-to-day operations.
Ubits
Ubits, a dynamic e-learning platform that has experienced rapid growth in recent years. With over 100,000 students, the startup’s client list has increased almost five fold in the last year.
The company has an international reach with bases in Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Chile Central America, Bolivia and Ecuador. They have even crossed the atlantic, expanding into Europe recently, with a new base in Spain. Providing courses on business, soft skills, and technology, Ubits has steadily built up an impressive array of over 1000 lessons. Keeping with current trends and technological developments, the startup seeks to employ artificial intelligence-based suggestions to improve the user experience and it is planning to help human resources managers create, execute and measure training strategies more easily.
Guane
Guane is a scientific research company that specializes in applying natural and data sciences tools to solve industry problems and facilitate the transition into the fourth industrial revolution. The company was founded by natural scientists, allowing them to contribute to computer science by creating new algorithms and identifying new challenges for standard AI paradigms while solving local industry problems. Guane aims to create new opportunities for local scientists and engineers while also promoting knowledge transfer between academia and private and public companies.
The company prioritizes its clients’ business needs, adapting their solutions to local infrastructure, and optimizing their business resources for maximum return. Guane’s expertise lies in AI solutions that address industry problems in the context of digital transformation and process automation through cloud software development. They specialize in developing cognitive assistants based on artificial intelligence for BPOs, banks, and large industries. Guane’s software as a service is tailored to the power generation and consumption forecasting needs of its clients, and they develop high-impact solutions for the logistics industry.
Elenas
Elenas, a platform that enables direct sales, is offering entrepreneurs in Colombia and Mexico a chance to market and sell wholesale products online through their digital catalog. The group has an extensive collection of hundreds of thousands of items that span several categories such as beauty, personal care, electronics, and home goods. People can scour through the catalog and pick products to sell. They can then set their preferred markups and publicize their listings on various social channels including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
The startup takes care of the arduous tasks of product sourcing, delivery, and payment collection, freeing up time for entrepreneurs to concentrate on driving sales. The team boasts, “In the span of just one year, over 100,000 female entrepreneurs in Colombia and Mexico have earned millions of dollars by selling more than 2 million orders on the platform”.
Addi
Addi, an e-commerce startup, is revolutionizing online sales in Latin America. The company aims to provide a hassle-free shopping experience that is easy, fast, and transparent. Customers can download the app and get credit approved to buy products from Addi’s partnered stores.
Their process is remarkably simple, you pick a store, choose the products, and select Addi as the payment method. Customers can select the number of installments in which they want to defer their payment with Addi. Once the transaction is completed, customers receive a code on WhatsApp, which they can use to complete the purchase.
Addi also simplifies the buying process for merchants by handling all payment collections, and installments. The platform has grown significantly since it was founded in 2018 by Santiago Suárez, Daniel Vallejo, and Elmer Ortega in Cali, Colombia. Addi expanded to over a million customers in 2022, up from 250,000 customers in 2021, and now has over 3,500 businesses in Colombia partnering with them.
Porter Metrics
Porter Metrics is a platform that simplifies data visualization and reporting, empowering businesses to make better decisions. It achieves this by consolidating data from various everyday apps into a single location, such as a data warehouse or visualization tool. Porter is versatile, capable of storing, transforming, and visualizing data from any source.
As with Zapier’s automation, SaaS companies are likely to integrate Porter as a standard feature to enable Business Intelligence capabilities. This approach avoids separating data in different applications with limited dashboards. Users can easily create custom pipelines, build beautiful visualizations and combine various data sources.
Porter’s actionable insights help businesses to optimize their ROAS, conversion rates, CPA, CAC, and followers. The platform updates automatically, replacing the need for an in-house data analyst. Marketing Director Foster Rowland states, “Our team uses Porter’s reports to analyze long-term marketing strategies. Additionally, the Premium Gallery feature enables us to work more efficiently.
Platzi
Colombia-based e-learning platform Platzi has garnered a significant following in Latin America’s online education spaces, attracting more than three million students from 140 countries. The platform provides courses and training across multiple disciplines, with a particular focus on digital fields in high demand, enabling young people to secure well-paying jobs upon completion. Platzi’s virtual classroom system incorporates a range of content, including text, live and pre-recorded videos, source code, and forums, and teachers are available to interact with students at any time. Upon passing tests, students receive physical diplomas in the mail.
Established in 2012, Platzi caters to individuals, companies, and governments, helping them acquire new and in-demand skills and keep abreast of the tech industry. The platform’s courses cover fields such as design, marketing, business, programming, and more, taught by top professionals. With a vast community of over four million students and over 1,000 organizations, Platzi continues to be a premier provider of online education in Latin America.
Alephee (YC S21)
Alephee is a platform that helps automate financial operations, streamlining accounting tasks and reducing errors and fraud risks. The group automates processes such as expense categorization, transaction reconciliation, and generating financial reports. In addition, Alephee offers other e-commerce solutions, including the Digital Shelf, which they boast as being one of the largest brand portals in the region, enabling brands to create digital catalogs of validated and certified products for distributors and sellers.
Alephee’s Sales Channels solution connects businesses with main marketplaces in the region, allowing centralized management of online sales. The platform’s Supply Center solution digitizes the entire commercial chain’s supply, with each brand or distributor having a personalized site to make their product catalog, prices, and stock available exclusively for sellers. Alephee aims to become the center of e-commerce operations, connecting brands, distributors, and retailers to boost sales with solutions for omnichannel, centralized product presentation, logistics, and traceability.
Melonn
Melonn, is another startup making waves in the e-commerce space in Latin America. The platform, the group affectionately refers to as ‘the missing half of Shopify,’ aims to provide an end-to-end fulfillment solution to enable e-commerce businesses to scale across multiple sales platforms and deliver orders to customers on the same or next day. This will empower sellers, regardless of their size, to compete and grow in the booming Latin American online market.
Despite the increasing demand for logistics in the space, many businesses still fail to maximize the potential of their online stores. Melonn elaborates on this point on their website explaining that, “we see cases like Mexico, where electronic commerce increased 23% , and retail sales via the Internet represented 13.4% ; and despite this panorama, we still find companies that have an online store, but their potential is not being used to 100%.”
The platform is backed by two top-tier VC funds from Silicon Valley and has three tactics to enhance the user experience in e-commerce. The team hopes their solution will streamline the logistics process, enabling businesses to succeed and meet the demands of the Latin American market.
