STARTUP STAGE: Mendel wants to be the go-to corporate travel platform for Latin America

Mendel

Mendel provides a centralized platform for tracking expenses and travel booking that is tailored to companies in Latin America. 

Founded in 2021 and based in Mexico City, the company works with clients including Mercado Libre, McDonald’s and FEMSA.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Mendel is an all-in-one spend management and corporate travel platform built for Latin America’s unique complexities. We combine expense management, payments and a modern online booking tool (OBT), enabling chief financial officers (CFOs) and finance teams to manage travel and expenses in real-time while staying compliant with nuanced local regulations. In short, we are like "SAP Concur and AMEX having a child."

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

• Business: We tackle the fractured workflows and legacy systems enterprises face in LATAM, offering them a single source of truth for expenses, travel bookings and real-time budgeting.
• Technology: Our platform integrates with leading ERPs (enterprise resource planning) and travel management companies (TMCs), utilizes AI for invoice retrieval and policy enforcement and processes payments seamlessly thanks to our direct financial partnerships.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strengths: Only modern OBT built for Latin America. Deep local compliance expertise, robust enterprise focus, strong bank partnerships. 
• Weaknesses: Relatively new to the global travel conversation, so brand awareness outside LATAM is a work in progress.
• Opportunities: Huge potential to replace clunky, outdated travel and expense tools like SAP Concur, Argo and similar in a market that exceeds $10T (trillion) in B2B payments.
• Threats: Macroeconomic volatility in certain LATAM countries; global incumbents increasing focus on emerging markets.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

• Customer: Poor policy controls, slow approvals due to lack of modern workflows, fragmented booking systems, lack of visibility and automation for travel managers and complex tax requirements.

• Industry: High reliance on offline travel management companies in LATAM and a lack of modern OBT solutions that integrate with real-time expense and payments data.

So you’ve got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

We have a dedicated enterprise sales team targeting CFOs and travel managers in mid-to-large LATAM companies, plus strategic bank partnerships that amplify our go-to-market reach. Word-of-mouth and case studies from successes with some of the largest companies in the world drive strong referral activity.

Tell us what process you’ve gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

When we started four years ago, we validated market demand by analyzing legacy pain points, speaking to dozens of finance leaders and piloting with large enterprises. LATAM’s total addressable market (TAM) for B2B payments is $10–14 trillion, and travel alone adds billions more in annual spend — virtually all underserved by modern, region-focused tools.

How and when will you make money?

We already do. We generate revenue from recurring SaaS (software-as-a-service) fees, interchange income on corporate cards and per-booking or subscription fees on our OBT. As we expand regionally, this model scales without requiring heavy balance-sheet commitments.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Our founders have built and exited B2B SaaS companies before (Herolens to Innovid, Zetech to Visma) and also worked for the leading fintechs in the region (NaranjaX and Mercado Pago). They bring a proven track record in scaling enterprise solutions and navigating LATAM’s complex regulatory environment.

How are you addressing diversity and inclusion within your business?

We fundamentally believe in assembling the best possible team for every department, and that means drawing from a wide range of backgrounds, including diverse ethnicities, religions, genders, ages and sexual orientations. We don't rely on quotas or box-checking initiatives; instead, our open, skill-based hiring approach naturally brings together people of varied experiences and perspectives. We also believe firmly in equal pay and role-based compensation, ensuring that salaries reflect responsibilities and performance not identity. This environment of genuine meritocracy fosters creativity, problem-solving and innovation, ultimately leading to more robust solutions for our customers.

What’s been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Juggling the complexities of each new market has been the biggest challenge—particularly finding the right bank partners, integrating with networks and processors and meeting the extensive security and compliance requirements. In Latin America, local tax structures and invoice requirements differ dramatically from one country to another, so we’ve had to build deep, localized expertise from the ground up.

Dealing with banks, card manufacturers and payment processors also demands a great deal of patience. They’re often large institutions with long approval processes for security, technical integrations and overall due diligence, so getting them on board takes time. Balancing these moving parts while maintaining our speed of execution has been the hardest, yet most rewarding, aspect of building Mendel.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

By bundling travel with expense management and payments in a region desperately lacking integrated solutions, we’re solving a genuine market gap. Our strong enterprise focus and existing client base make adoption smoother than a pure travel-only play. We've spent four years consolidating the enterprise segment for expense managements in markets like Mexico and Argentina, travel is "just a new module" that expands our TAM.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

We plan to be live with our travel vertical across multiple LATAM countries, onboarding marquee enterprise clients and refining AI-driven policy enforcement for both travel and expenses. Our aim is to be the TravelPerk/Navan/Spotnana equivalent in the region, focused on enterprises.

What is your end-game? Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.?

For now, we’re focused on building a category-defining platform that can dominate enterprise spend management in LATAM. We’ll evaluate strategic opportunities as they come, but our immediate priority is to achieve sustainable growth, deliver real value to our customers and reach profitability by Q3, 2025. By having a profitable business, we increase our optionality — whether that means eventually going public, exploring strategic acquisitions, or staying private to keep scaling on our own terms.