New resources in the startup founded by Julian Colombo are contributed by Alexia Ventures, a Brazilian fund focused on AI, and Scale-Up Ventures, from Endeavor
Bloomberg Línea — Argentine executive Julian Colombo worked for two decades at Santander, during which time he held leadership positions in different Latin American countries and at the headquarters in Spain. He was responsible for various areas, from products to corporate customer service and CRM and BI.
With the experience, he left the institution in 2017, the same year he created N5, a startup specializing in connecting the dots between the various areas of financial institutions.
The N5 service currently works with a set of 34 functionalities to help in the digitalization of processes. The modules are divided into five business families: customers and prospects, employees, communication channels, products (complaints and processes) and data management.
The fintech has just announced the extension of the Series A round to enhance its new moment and to accelerate the delivery of AI models. Together, the Series A announced in September 2023 and extension now add up to US$ 20 million. The new investors are Alexia Ventures, a Brazilian fund focused on artificial intelligence, and Scale-Up Ventures, Endeavor’s venture capital.
Depending on customer demand, the startup plugs in the service, such as CRMs, BPMs (Business Process Management), incentives and omnichannel. Among the customers are names such as Santander itself, Mastercard, Itaú, C6Bank, Interbank, from Peru, and BCP, from Portugal.
In 2024, the operation reached 18 countries, such as Peru, Chile, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
“Recurring revenue with these products that are part of our platform grew 221% in 2024,” said Colombo. This year, we should double revenue and the number of customers, in addition to establishing long-term contracts from our partners.” The startup does not disclose the values.
Read more: Ex-Santander’s fintech receives funding invested by global banks
Other investors in the cap table include Illuminate Financial, a VC manager whose Limited Partners (investors) are institutions such as J.P. Morgan and Citi; Exor Ventures, the venture investment arm of Exor, a holding company controlled by the Agnelli family and a shareholder of Ferrari and Stellantis; Walmart’s Walton family’s Madrone Capital Partners; and Overboost, a venture builder firm.
Also completing the list are LTS Investments, the investment holding company of the families of Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira; and Arpex Capital, an investment firm owned by André Street and Eduardo Pontes, co-founders of Stone (STNE).
Bet on AI agents
Last year, N5 made a key turnaround and invested in building partnerships as a way to grow in revenue and stay focused on the proprietary platform. It closed agreements with names such as Capgemini, positiveIT, AWS, EY and Mambu, which start to offer the services and take care of the integrations with new customers.
“A large part of the investment also goes in the direction of giving more emphasis to this universe,” said Colombo, referring to the training of the teams of the new partners, events and marketing strategies. An “arm” of the business in which N5 provided consultancy to potential customers is also being shifted to these partners.
At home, what shines in the eyes of the Argentine entrepreneur are the AI agents that N5 has been putting into operation since last year.
The startup launched Alfred, a kind of butler that runs internally on each customer and captures and structures the information that circulates through banks to facilitate access to data, reading emails, and monitoring the customer journey.
“It is the first product we make that is not exclusive to the financial industry. Customers have arrived from sectors such as retail and health”, said the CEO.
The second is Pep, who works like a coach, replicating the behavior of professionals who are considered the best 1% in their areas and who can assist in various processes (a reference to the Spaniard Pep Guardiola, considered one of the best football coaches in the world).
“Pep is the AI that knows how to copy the best 1%, with knowledge about sales, collections, etc. And Alfred can make 50 emails in one second, for example. Combining the two, why will companies need a human in the middle? They don’t need to. The human can be elevated to the position of commander of artificial intelligence,” says Colombo.
The result of the merger between the two agents should be seen when N5 launches Singular, an agent scheduled for later this year.
According to the Argentine, the agents will help N5 position itself as one of the “winning” companies in the race for innovation and artificial intelligence. In a duel of billions of dollars of investments in hardware and as many dollars for algorithm training, the startup targets a third fundamental element to decide whether it will survive or not.
“The third way to win in this race and that we have – and it’s the hardest to have – is confidential data. They never leave the bank. And what do we do? We take our machine, put it inside the customer, who processes and makes decisions. This is our differential,” said Colombo.
