~/portfolio / active / galo
Galo
Smart CRM for retail B2B distributors in LatAm. Eats messy WhatsApp orders, builds a data layer on top, and triggers the actions that drive more sales.
Retail distributors and wholesalers across LatAm — one of the most fragmented and informal B2B markets on the planet — receive orders through WhatsApp: text, voice notes, photos of handwritten lists, PDFs of invoices.
They re-type all of it into the ERP.
Galo eats the mess on intake AND builds a smart-CRM data layer on top: which clients buy what, when, how often, what they stopped buying, what they could be cross-sold.
From the data, it triggers automated actions that drive more sales. The platform isn’t just order automation — it’s the sales engine sitting on top.
Started in food, where Tomás’s network and depth gave the wedge its first cut. Expanding the aperture across retail B2B — household goods, pharma, hardware, anywhere a distributor lives on WhatsApp.
Why I backed it
I worked with Benjamín at Darwin first. He was on the early team — relentless, fast, the kind of operator who doesn’t wait for permission. When he left to build Galo I knew the bet was on the founder before it was on the market. Young, hungry, real entrepreneurial energy. That pattern compounds.
Tomás brings the market. He built SimplEat and grew up in family gastronomy businesses — he knows distributors, restaurants, suppliers from the inside. Founder-market fit isn’t a vibe-check here; it’s deep in the bones. The Benjamín × Tomás combo is the reason this company will know the customer before its competitors do.
Vertical only works if you integrate both sides. I don’t have a generic preference for vertical — Darwin is horizontal on purpose.
What I respect about a vertical bet is the discipline it demands: you need deep industry knowledge AND you have to integrate both the external surface (CRM, sales, customer comms) and the internal stack (ERP, inventory, billing).
Horizontal players touch one side — pure CRM, pure communication, pure internal automation — because they have to be portable across industries. A vertical company that only does one side is just a worse horizontal product.
Galo went vertical AND committed to both internal + external. That’s the move that turns vertical into a real moat instead of a smaller TAM.
The data layer is the moat. Once Galo is processing every order for a distributor, it knows the customer base in ways the distributor itself doesn’t — buying frequency, basket-size drift, churn signals, latent cross-sell opportunities. That data is the asset, not the order automation. Order intake is the wedge; the data + automated actions on top is the durable business.
Real ROI in pesos. A distributor can quantify this: “we saved 4 hours of admin per day per branch, and lifted basket size by 9%.” Two numbers on the cover slide of every renewal. Easy to sell, hard to churn.
Right bet on Build for a World Where Every Customer Gets Their Own Software. Galo isn’t building a generic order entry app — it’s building one that adapts to each distributor’s catalog, pricing, ERP, and accent. That’s the right shape of B2B software for this cycle.
The bet
Retail B2B distribution is one of the largest fragmented and informal industries in LatAm.
The platform that becomes the AI sales layer — order intake + data + automated actions — between WhatsApp and ERP for that segment is going to print money.
Food is the starting vertical because that’s where the founders have an unfair advantage. The playbook generalizes across retail.
Early, but the wedge is sharp and the moat (data, integrations, switching cost) compounds with every customer added.
$ founders
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