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The official CEO.com podcast featuring unfiltered conversations with the leaders shaping our world.
Clint Betts: Ximena, welcome to the show. You are the co-founder and co-CEO of Prometeo—am I saying that correctly? Tell me what it is, how you became the co-founder and co-CEO, and honestly, I want to know everything about you. I’ve been so excited to talk to you. Give me a sense for how you got here.
Ximena Aleman: Yes, exactly—Prometeo.
So, I’m Uruguayan. I live in Uruguay in South America, and I’ve been a fintech entrepreneur for almost 10 years now.
Actually, Prometeo is my third fintech startup.
I started building in 2015. My first company was a digital wallet where we provided account-to-account transfers and payments through WhatsApp. At the time, it felt very avant-garde—almost sci-fi for fintech in Latin America.
Then my co-founders and I built a PFM product, similar to Mint in the U.S. It was a single point of access to financial information for micro-entrepreneurs in Latin America.
It was a beautiful idea, but honestly, a very difficult business to monetize.
Through those two experiences, my co-founders and I realized there was a huge lack of API infrastructure in the region, and that this was becoming a bottleneck for fintech innovation.
Because we already knew how to build powerful financial technology, we decided to pivot into what eventually became Prometeo.
We always thought about Prometeo as this giant highway for financial information and transactions across financial institutions and countries in Latin America—a single point of access into an enormous network of banks and financial systems.
Over the last five years, we’ve built the largest open banking network in the region.
Today we aggregate more than 1,200 financial institutions across 11 countries throughout the Americas. Since last year, we’ve also expanded into the U.S. market where we provide account verification services.
Clint Betts: Give me a sense for what the fintech ecosystem is like in Latin America.
Ximena Aleman: It’s incredibly active.
At this point, I almost feel like a veteran in the fintech ecosystem because I’ve been able to witness several different waves of fintech evolution across Latin America over the past decade.
In the beginning, fintech in Latin America was mostly about expanding access to lending for individuals and small businesses.
Then the next major wave became financial inclusion.
That’s where companies like Nubank became iconic. You also had major lending fintechs like Konfío and Kueski in Mexico.
Eventually, it became obvious that payments needed to improve dramatically across the region.
So then you saw a huge rise in payments infrastructure: digital payment companies, point-of-sale systems, credit-card network alternatives.
Companies like eBanx and Clip emerged during that era.
And then eventually, we realized the real bottleneck wasn’t just products—it was infrastructure.
The rails themselves needed to improve.
That’s where Prometeo came in.
We realized the incumbent financial institutions needed help modernizing and becoming more efficient.
So our mission became:
How do we automate processes?
How do we create better interoperability?
How do we make the financial system itself stronger?
I think that’s where the region is now:
building foundational infrastructure that allows financial services to become more efficient and more widely adopted.
Clint Betts: How is AI changing all of this?
I know Prometeo recently announced initiatives involving AI and agents. How are you thinking about AI and integrating it into your product? And more broadly, how is it affecting fintech?
Ximena Aleman: I think we’re at a moment where AI has become impossible to ignore.
But in financial services specifically, I think it still needs to fully prove itself.
Financial institutions are currently trying to figure out:
How do we adopt AI?
How do we integrate it into legacy systems?
How do we modernize safely?
At Prometeo, of course, we already use AI internally as a company.
But what excites us most is how we can empower our customers with AI-driven infrastructure.
One thing we’ve consistently observed in Latin America is that many financial institutions are still behind in areas like: digital transformation, open banking, automation.
In Europe, many of these problems have already been solved. In Brazil, open banking is far more mature.
But in much of the rest of Latin America, these are still active challenges.
Because Prometeo already has this extensive network infrastructure, we believe we’re uniquely positioned to support AI agents operating within financial systems.
That’s why we launched our MCP.
Right now, we’re enabling real-time access to financial institutions, bank accounts, payments, receivables, and automation capabilities that AI agents can operate through securely.
Clint Betts: AI is incredible, but fintech obviously introduces another layer of complexity around regulation, security, governance, and trust.
How do you think about safety and compliance with AI inside financial infrastructure?
Ximena Aleman: It’s extremely important.
Honestly, trust is the core currency of financial services.
At Prometeo, one thing we’re incredibly proud of is how secure and compliant our infrastructure already was before AI entered the conversation.
The infrastructure itself was designed from day one to satisfy the requirements of large financial institutions.
So any AI capabilities built on top of that infrastructure inherit those safeguards.
The second piece is that we’re intentionally segmenting access for agents.
We are not giving AI agents unrestricted access to all financial accounts or all company infrastructure.
Instead, we create specific accounts or payment environments that agents are authorized to operate within.
That means companies can limit exposure and define exactly what an AI agent can and cannot do.
So rather than giving an agent total financial control, you’re granting controlled access within tightly defined parameters.
That’s really our first iteration of how agentic finance should work safely.
Clint Betts: How do you think about crypto and stablecoins in Latin America?
What’s adoption like there?
Ximena Aleman: I absolutely think crypto and stablecoins are game changers.
In some Latin American countries, adoption has already been extremely strong.
Argentina is a great example.
Venezuela as well.
Bolivia too.
In countries where people struggle to access U.S. dollars or where foreign exchange restrictions exist, stablecoins have become incredibly useful tools.
People adopt them because there’s a real economic incentive.
Now we’re beginning to see broader institutional interest as well.
Large financial institutions are running stablecoin pilots and exploring how these technologies can integrate into traditional financial infrastructure.
I think the next major phase will be regulatory clarity.
Governments and regulators across the region are beginning to build frameworks for stablecoins and crypto.
And honestly, that’s necessary for broader institutional adoption.
For Prometeo specifically, regulation matters enormously because we work with major financial institutions.
Two of the five largest banks in the world use our infrastructure in Latin America.
So regulatory certainty is critical for us.
Right now, we’re closely monitoring regulatory developments country by country and evaluating where stablecoins may eventually complement our infrastructure.
Today we are not operating directly through stablecoins, but it’s definitely something evolving very quickly.
Clint Betts: What does a typical day look like for you?
Ximena Aleman: It starts very early.
I have six-year-old twins, so my mornings begin before 6 a.m.
I usually wake up, work out a little—that’s basically the only part of the day I fully control.
Then it’s time to wake up the kids, get them ready, take them to school, come back home, have breakfast, and prepare for the day.
By 9 a.m. I’m fully working.
Then it’s basically nonstop meetings until around 6 or 6:30 p.m.
Internal meetings, investors, customers, prospects, PR, strategy discussions.
A little bit of everything.
Then it becomes family time again.
The kids go to bed early, and I really try to protect that time.
Afterward, depending on how intense things are at Prometeo, I may jump back into Slack, WhatsApp, or email because of different time zones across Latin America and the U.S.
And usually I try to finish the day around 10 p.m.
Clint Betts: How did you fund the company?
Ximena Aleman: The first half of my entrepreneurial journey was fully bootstrapped.
Back in 2015 and 2016, the venture ecosystem in Uruguay wasn’t very developed.
Fundraising simply wasn’t common.
Most entrepreneurs were bootstrapping.
So we bootstrapped for about four years.
Then when we launched Prometeo and really understood the scale of the infrastructure opportunity, we realized this would be extremely capital intensive.
We believed deeply in building standardized connectivity across all of Latin America—not just one country.
That’s a huge challenge.
So we knew we needed outside funding.
We raised a pre-seed round, then a seed round, and in December 2023 we closed our Seed II round.
That round was led by Antler along with participation from PayPal Ventures, Samsung Next, Cometa, and others.
So far, we’ve raised about $20 million total.
Clint Betts: That’s remarkable. What an incredible journey.
How are you feeling about the broader macroeconomic environment going into 2026?
Tariffs, volatility, uncertainty—all of that.
Ximena Aleman: From a go-to-market perspective, those macro movements don’t dramatically change our customer relationships.
If anything, difficult macro environments often accelerate demand for infrastructure efficiency and automation.
Companies become more motivated to reduce costs and modernize systems.
That usually benefits us.
Where macro uncertainty becomes more difficult is fundraising.
Especially when you’re raising capital for infrastructure in Latin America, which many investors already perceive as riskier.
So uncertainty definitely impacts fundraising environments more directly.
Clint Betts: How do you think about culture at Prometeo?
How many employees do you have? Is the company remote? Hybrid? In-person?
Ximena Aleman: We’ve actually been remote-first from the very beginning—even before remote-first became common.
So when COVID happened, we were already fully adapted to it.
Because the company was designed that way from day one, we hire intentionally for people who thrive in that environment.
Culture is deeply embedded into how we operate.
Every team has: daily meetings, weekly meetings, monthly all-hands town halls.
My co-founder and I regularly participate in team meetings.
And every November, we bring the entire company together in Uruguay for a full onsite week.
That’s become a huge cultural tradition for us.
But beyond processes, I think culture requires intentionality.
We’ve been thinking about culture very deliberately since 2020.
One thing that’s very important to me personally is that when someone leaves Prometeo, they carry part of our culture with them into whatever company they join next.
I think startup ecosystems grow that way.
You “pay culture forward.”
If we create a culture that values: effort, learning, growth, collaboration, then hopefully that spreads into future companies and future founders as well.
Clint Betts: Finally, we end every interview the same way.
At CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes.
When you hear that, who gave you a chance that helped get you where you are today?
Ximena Aleman: First, definitely my co-founders.
My background wasn’t traditional for fintech at all. I studied journalism—not investment banking or engineering.
So they really believed in my ability to learn, adapt, persevere, and build.
Then I think our early investors gave us huge opportunities.
That very first institutional check from Oriol Ross at FJ Labs and Colonial Ventures was incredibly important.
And then the first financial institution that trusted our infrastructure—Interbank in Peru—that was also a huge moment for us.
All of those people gave us chances early on, and I truly value that deeply.
Clint Betts: Ximena, thank you so much for coming on the show.
What an incredible company you’ve built. We absolutely need to have you back because I could talk to you for another hour about all of this.
Seriously, thank you so much.
Ximena Aleman: Thank you. I truly appreciate the conversation and the opportunity to be here.