~/portfolio / active / mercately
Mercately
AI-powered WhatsApp sales and CRM for LatAm e-commerce. Customers buy without leaving the chat.
WhatsApp is where commerce actually happens in LatAm. Mercately bet on that early and built the rails (CRM, payments, inventory, AI agents) all inside the WhatsApp thread. They’re profitable, growing, and proved the unit economics before raising.
Why I backed it
The deer market, picked on purpose. Mercately is selling to mid-SMB merchants, exactly the animal that gives you optionality. They can move down to mom-and-pop self-serve later, or up to enterprise integrations. Right now the deer is paying.
LatAm-native channel. This isn’t a US playbook ported to Spanish. WhatsApp commerce is a different physics from email/web checkout, and the team built for the local reality from day one, Stripe + HubSpot integrations, MIA the AI agent, multi-country compliance. The playbook in São Paulo doesn’t ship clean to Boise.
Profitability before the round. The company hit $1.5M+ ARR before raising the $2.6M seed. That’s a founder discipline I respect. They didn’t burn capital looking for product-market fit, they sold first, raised after.
The bet
Conversational commerce is a generational shift in LatAm. The platform that owns the rails between WhatsApp + payments + AI for mid-market merchants is going to be a real outcome. Mercately got there first with discipline.
$ founders
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