Argentina's Takenos raises $7m seed extension to take stablecoin accounts to 15 countries

What Takenos does

Takenos gives individuals and businesses dollar accounts and cards, and offers APIs that companies use for payments, payroll and treasury management. Underneath, money moves as stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to the US dollar, which lets Takenos move funds across currencies and borders.

Takenos says it builds every layer itself: licences and local payment rails in each market, a consumer app with cards and dollar accounts, a platform for small businesses, corporate APIs for payroll, payouts and treasury, and an institutional trading desk. It also issues its own stablecoin, and names Stripe, Mastercard and Visa as partners. The company says the same infrastructure serves a freelancer in La Paz, an exporter in Guayaquil and the crew of a global airline.

The company said it processes more than $5bn a year and has millions of users. It is live in six countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay and Guatemala. LATAM Airlines runs payments and financial services on its infrastructure, and its corporate clients in Bolivia include energy and mining companies.

In Bolivia, Takenos says it became the first company incorporated and regulated by ASFI, the country's financial supervisor, under its new fintech framework.

Who invested

North Island Ventures and Road Capital Management led the round. North Island also invested in Takenos's original seed round and said it wanted to invest more after watching the team expand across six countries. "Takenos is doing the hard thing: building regulated stablecoin infrastructure in the markets everyone else overlooks," Travis Scher of North Island Ventures said. "We believe that Takenos can become the leading financial network for Latin America."

Variant, Lattice and Reverie, which backed the company earlier, returned. Takenos did not say how much it raised in earlier rounds beyond the new total.

Takenos was founded in 2022 by Lucas Posada, Joaquín Herrera, Francisco Goulu and Simón Bouché. Posada is chief executive.

What the money is for

Takenos plans to operate in more than 15 countries in 2027. The money will pay for licences and local payment rails in each new market, a larger enterprise API business with global corporations, new products and hires in engineering, compliance and go-to-market.

"The next great financial company in Latin America will be stablecoin-native. This is the future of the financial system," Posada said.

Posada argued that established financial companies are still running pilots while Takenos has its own licences and local on- and off-ramps. "We didn't put an app on top of someone else's rails," he said. The company's announcement claims that 19 Latin American markets outside Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina together see more than $1 trillion in cross-border flows a year.