With 30+ years of experience helping emerging markets get their footing, Quona’s new COO sees impact investing as the future of investing. David Mathewson, who recently joined Quona as Partner and Chief Operating Officer, has been enthralled with emerging markets since he stood in the center of the Brandenburg Gate…

Nocnoc instantly connects global sellers to LatAm’s network of e-commerce marketplaces. And then it helps them succeed. It didn’t take long for Diego Szilagyi, Joaquin Colella, and Ilan Bajarlia — who worked together on the founding team of dLocal, an Uruguay-based unicorn fintech that connects global merchants to emerging markets…

With Bureau, Ranjan Reddy aims to simultaneously solve two key priorities faced by businesses: creating a frictionless user experience while also verifying identity and transactions Ranjan Reddy has always been a little obsessed with mobile phones. His first phone? A Motorola flip, when he was a sophomore in college. His…

Finkargo is building a new asset class to help meet LatAm’s $350 billion trade financing gap For years, Marisol Ramirez Velasquez, CEO of ZMR Colombia, had been struggling to grow her merchandise and electronics import and distribution business, which launched in 2017. Like many SME importers across Latin America, ZMR’s…

For Egyptians traditionally left out of the formal banking system, Khazna provides a suite of services to transform the way they access and manage their money After earning his MBA at Stanford in 2014, Omar Saleh came back to Cairo where he was born and raised, wanting to build a…

Castia is changing the real estate landscape for homeowners in Latin America. For Mauricio and Nicolas Peñaranda, who grew up in Colombia, real estate investment has long been a family passion. The brothers have been involved in it since they were teenagers — their dad was a doctor who took…

By Ganesh Rengaswamy Since my early days as an entrepreneur in Mumbai in 2005, and subsequently as an investor in India and Southeast Asia for Greylock, Unitus, and my current firm, Quona Capital, a lot has changed in these markets. Back in the early 2000s, China was on the rise…

By Monica Brand Engel To say 2021 was a banner year for fintechs in Egypt is an understatement. The $159 million raised across 32 fintech companies last year was nearly a 330% increase over 2020, when $37.1 million was raised across 25 companies.

Using data and a B2B2C model, the online platform Sunday, led by visionary Cindy Kua, is reinventing how insurance works across the region. Cindy Kua grew up watching her dad build Malaysia’s largest insurance conglomerate, KSK. After living and studying in the UK for a decade, she moved back to…