The investment a16z was built to make
We give restaurants the best free POS on the market. They give us real-time transaction data. Six months later, we underwrite merchant cash advances with better data than any bank in Latin America.
01 — The Thesis
Square proved it in the US. Toast proved it in fine dining. Nobody has done it in Latin America's 680,000+ restaurants — a market where traditional banks won't lend, and delivery platforms take 30% while giving operators zero data.
Mexican restaurants can't get capital. Traditional banks require collateral, 18+ months of tax filings, and credit history most operators don't have. The ones that do get loans pay 40%+ annual rates.
→ $12B+ unmet credit demand in Mexican SMB food service
Every POS in Mexico shows what you sold. None of them show what you actually kept after Rappi's 30%, Uber's 28%, and DiDi's 25%. Operators are flying blind on their real margins.
→ Average operator misjudges profitability by 12%
If you process a restaurant's payments, you have real-time revenue data that's better than anything a bank can get. You can underwrite an MCA in minutes — not weeks — with fundamentally lower default risk.
→ This is exactly how Square Capital built a $9B lending book
“The biggest fintech opportunities hide inside non-fintech products.” — The a16z fintech playbook
02 — The Trojan Horse
We built the most feature-rich POS on the Mexican market and gave it away for free. Loyalty programs, menu boards, delivery analytics, AI-powered upselling, CFDI invoicing, kitchen displays — every bell and whistle a restaurant operator could want. Not because we need the SaaS revenue. Because every restaurant that adopts our POS is a future financing customer.
# The play
step_1: "Give away the best free POS in Mexico"
step_2: "Restaurant processes every transaction through us"
step_3: "We see daily revenue, ticket sizes, seasonality"
step_4: "Month 5: offer MCA based on real data"
step_5: "Repayment auto-deducted from daily sales"
# The restaurant owner never felt sold a financial product.
# Their POS just offered them capital they couldn't
# get anywhere else, at terms no bank can match.
default_risk: fundamentally_lower
reason: "we collect repayment at the point of sale"
Every layer reinforces the next
The restaurant sees a great POS. We see an underwriting pipeline.
03 — The Flywheel
A full-featured POS with loyalty, menu boards, delivery analytics, AI suggestions, kitchen displays, CFDI invoicing, and offline mode. Free forever. The most irresistible offer in the Mexican restaurant market. Every feature is a reason to switch — and a reason to stay.
Layer 1 — AdoptionCost: $0 per restaurant
AI-powered dynamic pricing, upsell suggestions, prep forecasting, waste detection, and delivery margin optimization. The features that pay for themselves. Recurring revenue that subsidizes growth while the real monetization engine spins up.
Layer 2 — SaaSTarget: 30% conversion to paid
After 4–6 months of transaction data, we know a restaurant's business better than their accountant. Daily sales velocity, seasonal patterns, platform mix, growth trends. We offer MCAs with automatic repayment deducted as a percentage of daily sales. Lower risk. Higher conversion. Better terms than any bank.
Layer 3 — FintechThis is where the real margin lives
04 — The Proof
Juan didn't pivot into fintech from a tech job. He ran a restaurant — Juanberto's California Burritos — and couldn't figure out why profitable-looking months felt cash-poor. The answer: delivery platform commissions were invisible in every POS he tried. So he built his own.
But here's what makes this different: Juan's professional background is in finance. Not restaurant tech. Not software. Finance. He didn't stumble into the MCA opportunity — he recognized it from day one. The POS was always the distribution strategy for a financing business. Every feature, every bell and whistle, was designed to make the bait irresistible.
A restaurant operator who understands underwriting, building the data pipeline he wishes he had as a lender. That's not founder-market fit. That's founder-market destiny.
“I didn't build a POS company that might do lending someday. I built a lending company that uses a POS as its distribution channel.”
05 — The Market
Mexico's restaurant market is massive, underserved by technology, and starved of capital. The delivery boom created 180K+ operators who process significant volume through platforms but can't get a bank loan. We're building the rails to serve them.
The structural moats are deep. CFDI 4.0 tax compliance blocks international POS companies from easy entry. The Rappi/Uber/DiDi trifecta is unique to Latin America — no US-built POS handles it. And traditional banks structurally cannot underwrite these operators because they don't have access to real-time transaction data. We will.
06 — Defensibility
Any team can build a POS. No team can replicate a live data network. Every restaurant we onboard makes our underwriting smarter, which funds better features, which attracts more restaurants. By the time a competitor realizes this is a fintech company, we'll have thousands of restaurants generating proprietary transaction data that no new entrant can match.
CFDI 4.0 electronic invoicing is deeply woven into every transaction. Square, Toast, and every international player would need to rebuild their core order flow for Mexico. We built it native from day one.
Active nowSimultaneous reconciliation across Rappi, Uber Eats, and DiDi Food — the Latin American trifecta that no US-built POS handles. Each integration took months of reverse-engineering platform payout structures.
Active nowEvery restaurant on the platform generates daily transaction data that trains our underwriting models. 500 restaurants give us a dataset no bank and no competitor has. 5,000 makes it unreachable. This is the moat that compounds.
Compounds with scaleWe process the payments, so MCA repayment is automatic — a percentage of daily sales, deducted at the point of sale. No bank can replicate this without building the same POS distribution. The collection advantage is structural.
Compounds with scaleThe POS is easy to copy. The bells and whistles are easy to copy. But the flywheel — free POS → adoption → transaction data → smarter underwriting → MCA revenue → reinvest in better POS → more adoption — that takes years and thousands of restaurants to replicate. We're already spinning it.
07 — Use of Funds
The product is built. The architecture is validated. The app stores are in review. What comes next is the land grab — getting restaurants on the platform as fast as possible so the fintech flywheel has the volume to spin.
Commission-based street sales teams in CDMX, then Guadalajara and Monterrey. Door-to-door with a $65 tablet and a free POS. Every signup is a future financing customer. Speed of adoption is everything.
MCA underwriting engine, credit scoring models, payment integration for automatic daily deductions, regulatory compliance, and continued POS feature development to keep the trojan horse irresistible.
Initial MCA lending capital to prove the model, onboarding infrastructure, customer success, and the operational backbone to support rapid restaurant acquisition.
// Go-to-Market
Phase 1 is pure adoption. Free POS, cheap hardware, boots-on-the-ground sales team. Every restaurant we onboard generates transaction data from day one — whether they pay us or not. The MCA revenue kicks in at month 5. By month 12, the unit economics flip and every restaurant is generating fintech margin that dwarfs the SaaS revenue.
Roma, Condesa, Polanco, Santa Fe — ghost kitchen clusters and delivery-heavy neighborhoods. Door-to-door with tablet demos. Target: 500 restaurants in 6 months.
Month 5–6: first cohort of restaurants hits underwriting-ready data threshold. Deploy initial MCAs. Prove the model. Validate default rates against projections.
Expand sales teams to tier-2 cities. Remote onboarding. WhatsApp referral networks. Begin conversations with institutional capital partners for lending facility.
08 — Why a16z
a16z has a thesis about embedded fintech — that the biggest financial services companies of the next decade will be companies that don't look like financial services companies. Desktop Kitchen is that thesis made real, in the largest Spanish-speaking market in the world.
You saw that Latin American delivery was a generational opportunity. Desktop Kitchen is the infrastructure layer that helps the 180K+ restaurants on those platforms actually survive the commission structures you helped build.
You understand that POS is a trojan horse for financial services. We're running the exact same playbook in a market 10x more underserved by traditional banking — with a founder who comes from the finance side, not the tech side.
Every dollar of lending that moves from banks to embedded platforms is margin that accrues to software companies with distribution. We have the distribution strategy, the data pipeline, and a founder who knows how to build a lending book.
Mexico is the entry point to a $650B+ LATAM restaurant market. Colombia, Argentina, and Chile have identical delivery dynamics, identical pain points, and identical unmet credit demand. Win Mexico, then expand with the same playbook.
Raising Now — Open Round
A fintech company disguised as restaurant software. A free POS that's really a data pipeline. A lending business with built-in distribution and automatic repayment. Led by a finance professional who built the whole thing from inside his own restaurant.
The product is live. The app stores are in review. The sales team is assembling. The only thing missing is the fuel.