Santiago-based Wherex closed a $7 million Series A round in August 2021, betting that Latin American enterprise buyers were ready for a modern alternative to legacy procurement systems. Kayyak Ventures led the financing, joined by FJ Labs, Jaguar Ventures, and Tuesday Capital—a mix of investors who saw opportunity in digitizing what remains, for many companies, a surprisingly analog process.
The five-year-old B2B marketplace had already facilitated roughly $720 million in transactions as of May 2021, connecting 125 enterprise clients with more than 20,000 suppliers across four countries. Not bad for a company operating in markets where procurement software adoption has historically lagged more developed economies.
Pandemic Tailwinds and Ambitious Targets
CEO Juan Carlos Hurtado Cruzat and co-founder Felipe Manterola launched Wherex in 2016 with a straightforward thesis: enterprise procurement in Latin America was ripe for disruption. The COVID-19 crisis, as it turned out, accelerated their timeline considerably. The company reported 220% growth in both transaction volume and customer base during the pandemic—a figure that reflected a broader shift as companies scrambled to digitize supply chains almost overnight.
At the time of the funding announcement, Wherex aimed to reach 250 enterprise clients and $1 billion in platform volume by year's end. Whether those targets materialized isn't entirely clear from public records, though the company's trajectory suggested momentum was building.
The Platform Play
Wherex's product handles the full procurement lifecycle: RFP creation, supplier discovery and matching, contract negotiation, and payment processing. The platform operates across Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, using AI-driven algorithms to connect buyers with suppliers—essentially acting as a two-sided marketplace with enterprise software capabilities built in.
Integration proved crucial to the company's value proposition. Wherex connected with major ERP systems including SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft Dynamics, recognizing that large enterprise buyers wouldn't rip out existing infrastructure. They needed something that plugged in seamlessly, not another standalone tool requiring manual data entry.
Eyeing the U.S. Market
Perhaps the most ambitious element of Wherex's plan involved a push into the United States, scheduled for 2022. Hurtado Cruzat pointed to approximately 60,000 prospective enterprise clients in the U.S. market—a figure that underscored both the opportunity and the challenge of competing against established players like Coupa, Ariba, and Jaggaer on their home turf.
The Series A also brought aboard Benjamin Garcia and Francisco Puente as co-founders, both MIT graduates and Y Combinator Summer 2020 alumni. Adding founders post-launch is unconventional, though not unheard of when companies need specific expertise for expansion phases.
The Bigger Picture
Wherex's fundraise came during a particularly frothy period for Latin American tech companies. Investors were pouring capital into the region, drawn by a combination of pandemic-driven digitization, growing middle-class markets, and—frankly—better unit economics than many U.S. competitors could achieve.
The procurement software category itself had been consolidating, with giants like SAP acquiring Ariba years earlier and Oracle building out its own suite. Yet room remained for regional specialists who understood local supplier networks, payment rails, and regulatory environments. Wherex positioned itself squarely in that niche, at least initially.
Whether a Chilean startup could truly crack the U.S. enterprise market—or even needed to—remained an open question. But with $7 million in fresh capital and triple-digit growth rates, the company had at least bought itself time to find out.
