Miami-based trade finance platform Marco has raised $12 million in a Series A round.
The funding will help support the company’s mission of helping small and medium-sized entrepreneur (SME) exporters in Latin America, according to a Tuesday (March 19) news release.
“Through my own journey as an SME exporter, I’ve experienced the struggle of securing essential financing for growth and faced many challenges when looking for alternatives that could support my business,” Marco Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Peter Spradling said in a news release.
“Marco’s trade finance solutions, especially our factoring model, not only align perfectly with SMEs needs but also minimize risk along the way.”
Founded in 2020 by Spradling and CEO Jacob Shoihet, Marco offers an operating system for Latin American SME exporters involved in cross-border trade. This includes access to financing, as well as various services aimed at the unique challenges facing, with tools that include LLC formation, bookkeeping, foreign exchange payouts, cargo insurance and banking services.
The company’s Series A follows last year’s announcement of a $200 million line of credit and an $8 million equity investment.
The funding round is happening amid a sea change in trade finance, with — as noted here earlier this month — several trends emerging that suggest a future “marked by increased efficiency, transparency and security in trade finance, collectively promising to reshape the way businesses engage in cross-border transactions.”
Among these trends is the rise of digital trade platforms as centralized hubs that pull together various stakeholders in the trade ecosystem to facilitate end-to-end digitization of trade documents, communication and financing.
Debopama Sen, head of payments, Citi Services, told PYMNTS in a recent interview that as more commerce moves online, companies that had long been linked to what might be considered “traditional” supply chains are now, “increasingly dealing directly, and digitally … with a whole different set of counterparties.”
This has led them to demand that trade financing is tied into the technological infrastructure linking buyers and suppliers.
“The payment solutions that [banks] are offering to their customers need to be completely and seamlessly embedded within the commercial transactions they’re doing for their clients,” Sen added, adding that otherwise these companies risk losing business to digital upstarts.
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