Palenca is part of YC S21 Batch! We're honored to be joining a community of YC companies that includes Stripe, Airbnb, and Rappi.

Hi - I’m José Carlos. Together with Antoine and Pierre we co-founded Palenca, the only Payroll API for LatAm. We make it easy for companies in LatAm to verify employment data and identity. Unicorns like Kavak and Lalamove, use us to run background checks and provide financial services.

Prior to Palenca, the three of us were building a lending company focused on the gig economy and had a hard time validating earnings and behavior that we needed to underwrite credit. To solve that we built integrations with gig economy platforms (e.g. Uber, DiDi, Rappi).

We realized the infrastructure we built to get access to the data was way more valuable than the lending business we had before.

PROBLEM

In emerging markets it’s extremely hard to validate income, identity and behavior as most of the worker's data is fragmented and inaccessible. As a consequence, countries like Mexico encounter poor credit penetration (20%) and high levels of fraud (2x the global level).

Moreover, 80% of the transactions in LatAm are in cash. As soon as workers are paid, they are withdrawing all the money out of the ATM to spend it in cash. This means the vast majority of financial and employee information can not be accessed through the bank accounts.

OUR SOLUTION

We integrate directly with payroll systems to provide access to any worker account via our API.


WHO IS IT FOR? 👀

Any company in LatAm who wants to validate earnings and identity. Some use cases include:

Financial Services 💸
- Validate borrower information through income/employment verification
- Enable direct deposit switching

Recruitment 🙎🏽‍♂️
- Verify employment for new employees easily

Vehicle Rental  🚘
- Check the employment status before renting a Car/Moto
-Continuous access to your user’s income to make sure they can pay the rent

Joining YC is an important step in our journey. During the program, we had 70% monthly revenue growth and 15k unique users registered through our API.

As of today we have 99% coverage of the Gig Economy in LatAm (workers and restaurants), we are building integrations with multinationals (Walmart), stated owned companies (Pemex) and HR Systems (Runa).

Our goal is to cover 90% of  LatAm's workforce, stay tuned 🚀

From 🇲🇽 with love,

The Palenca Team