Argentine star fintech Ualá wins fresh funding from Allianz and Alan Howard

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Argentine fintech Ualá has raised $300mn in one of the largest fundraising rounds for a start-up in Latin America in recent years, in what libertarian President Javier Milei described as “proof” of an impending wave of tech sector growth in the notoriously tumultuous economy.

The latest fundraising takes Ualá, which launched in 2017 and now has 8mn customers and banking licences in Argentina, Mexico and Colombia, to a valuation of $2.75bn.

The round is one of the largest in the region in recent years, according to data from Dealogic, following a $500mn fundraising for cold-chain storage firm Emergent Cold LatAm in 2023. Brazilian fintech Neon Pagamentos also raised $300mn in 2022.

The round was led by Allianz X, the growth investment arm of insurer and asset manager Allianz, and also included hedge fund manager Alan Howard. Ualá is backed by the SoftBank Latin America Fund and China’s Tencent.

The move follows three years of relatively scant venture capital investment in Latin America amid higher US interest rates. 

Milei, who is 11 months into a drastic austerity and deregulation drive that has slashed Argentina’s sky-high inflation rate, said on Monday that Ualá’s fundraising was “proof that . . . Argentina has everything it needs to become a technological power”.

“We are a pressure cooker ready to boil over with potential,” he added.

Argentina has one of the largest tech industries in the region and is the birthplace of ecommerce giant MercadoLibre and software development firm Globant. The sector stands to be a big beneficiary of Milei’s plans to stabilise the macroeconomy, scrap regulation and eventually lift currency and capital controls that have been in place for nine of the past 13 years, which have deterred investment.

“This fundraising round will allow Ualá to never raise capital again and to reach full profitability in all our markets, after already achieving that in Argentina this year,” Ualá founder and chief executive Pierpaolo Barbieri told the Financial Times.

“Our goal with this round is to become the largest bank in Argentina, period,” he added. 

Ualá has grown rapidly in Argentina by capitalising on the country’s bureaucratic banking sector and large unbanked population. Almost a fifth of Argentine adults now hold a Ualá account, according to the company, which offers debit and credit cards, payment services, loans and investment products. 

The firm had quintupled its credit book in 2024, Barbieri said, as Milei’s reform drive begins to expand Argentina’s long-stunted private credit market, which has shrivelled further in recent years amid a severe economic crisis.

Argentina’s private credit market currently measures just 5 per cent of GDP compared with more than 50 per cent in Brazil and 90 per cent in Chile, Barbieri said.  

“It should at the very least, quadruple to match where it was in 2017, 2018. But then it should grow by 10 or 20 times [over] a couple of decades,” he added. “The direction of travel is very clear — if the macro stabilisation is successful.”