Addi Raises $86M Series D: How a Trip Home Became a $200M ARR Fintech

In 2010, Santiago Suárez took a week off from his job at Lending Club — at the time, the biggest fintech company in the world — and flew home to Colombia. He wasn't looking for a startup idea. He came back with one anyway.

Suárez had spent over a decade building his career about as far from Bogotá as a finance career gets: JP Morgan in New York, then Silicon Valley, at the company that basically invented the modern consumer lending playbook. Every career decision he'd made pointed away from home. That week changed the direction.

What he saw wasn't a lack of ambition or talent. It was a gap nobody serving Colombia's middle class seemed to notice: people who weren't poor enough for microfinance and weren't "banked" enough for a real credit card, paying full cash price for everything, or turning to informal lenders charging rates that would have gotten Suárez's old employers sued. He opened a spreadsheet, ran the numbers, and the math worked.

In September 2018, Suárez teamed up with Daniel Vallejo and Elmer Ortega to launch what they first called Adelante Soluciones Financieras — a mouthful that would eventually become simply Addi. The idea was buy-now-pay-later, but the real product was trust: instant approval, transparent terms, none of the fine print designed to trap anyone.

Seven years later, that overlooked gap is a company serving more than three million customers through partnerships with over 39,000 merchants, from corner stores to major retail chains across Colombia. And the number that actually turns heads in venture capital circles isn't the customer count. It's this: by the company's own account, Addi posts gross margins above 55% and has now logged eight consecutive profitable quarters — including US$6.5 million in net profit in 2025 and US$6 million in pre-tax profit in Q1 2026 alone. For context, that's a healthier margin profile than Nubank, Affirm, or Klarna, three of the most closely watched consumer fintechs on the planet.

That profitability is precisely why Addi's July 2026 round looked different from a typical LatAm fintech raise. The $85–86 million Series D was led by Citius — a long-time shareholder betting on a company it already knows intimately — and co-led by BTG Pactual's Private Capital Growth arm, marking the bank's first-ever growth investment outside Brazil. Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and Monashees rounded out the round. Add in a $150 million structured credit facility that J.P. Morgan — Suárez's old employer — arranged just months earlier, and Addi's total debt commitments now sit above $680 million.

None of that reads like a startup anymore. It reads like infrastructure — which, sixteen years after a week-long trip and a spreadsheet, is exactly the point.

Deal covered in WarZ LatAm VC Monitor — Weekly 27.