When Peter Spradling and Jacob Shoihet met at Antler’s inaugural residency in New York in 2019, they had no idea what sort of company they’d start building. Jacob, who hailed from Canada, had a classical music background and had meandered into tech via sales. Peter, from Uruguay, was a serial entrepreneur – in the past he’d been involved in a Merino wool export business and his family were established in the meat industry. He was also applying for jobs in the state department, and the FBI kept contacting people at Antler as part of its background checks. “So a lot of people thought I was a spy…”

The pair – and the chemistry between them – epitomised what Antler is all about. “They just bring in talented, ambitious people, put them together in a room and see what comes out of there,” says Peter. Six years later the results speak for themselves. Marco is a global fintech company with four offices and a team of 44. It has raised over $30m in equity and $200M in debt financing to date; most recently a $12m (oversubscribed) Series A to boost its Latin American expansion. Its latest milestone, Jacob says, is that it has now provided $1bn in financing. 

Attacking the finance gap

Marco addresses the $1.5T global trade finance gap that disproportionately impacts small-and medium-sized (SME) businesses. Although SMEs make up 40% of global trade, banks reject 50% of SME applicants. It’s an issue Peter had encountered first hand with his own businesses and the issue became even more pronounced after the 2008 financial crisis. Banks, the pair realised, were not only limited in the amount of financing they offered to SMEs, but they were overpricing the risk associated with it too. “You had a lot of companies based in Latin America that had contracts with triple A companies,” says Peter. “They sold to Walmart, they sold to Costco and they were paying thirty, forty percent for their money.”

Marco, which began with a particular focus on Latin America, where a  $350 billion trade finance gap limits access to the US market, uses new technology to improve the underwriting process – using models that analyse data in real time – as well as factoring in trade with US partners. By providing innovative financing for developing markets, Marco has a social impact that goes beyond just business. Coming into the Antler program, Peter admits, he was thinking more about sustainability – fintech was one industry he was not interested in looking at. “Which is ironic now. But what actually got me comfortable with fintech was not the financial and engineering part of it; it was having the real impact of allowing small companies access to finance.” 

Impact beyond business 

This can have a huge impact in a region like Latin America, where most people - between 70-90% work for SMEs. For these companies to grow, they really need to secure exports – the US being the key trading partner. When the pair were building Marco, they met with representatives at ProColombia, a government agency responsible for promoting exports. “He said that in Colombia a 1% increase in the level of exports of textiles creates half a million jobs,” says Peter. “That's the level of impact you can have if you can support a business that doesn't have access to financing. We've now seen companies of ours double, triple, four X their sales. That means they can hire more people and they can create jobs.”

Securing finance was crucial for Marco to grow too. Particularly since it needed to be able to provide credit to customers. “We're selling money essentially,” says Peter. “So we not only had to raise equity, but we also had to raise a debt facility to be able to start lending. 2020 was a year of building all the infrastructure, all of our policies, everything we needed to have a credit facility in place.” It took a year to secure a credit facility and Marco made its first loan in 2021. 

Elevating the startup

After that, business started flying. “We completely overshot our expectations and we had to find a new lender in two years,” says Peter, describing how Marco secured a $200m credit facility in 2023. “We were able to get one of the largest asset managers in the world and we're today financed by MidCap Financial (owned by Apollo), that's our senior lender, and we have a pretty sophisticated large facility.” Marco also got the support of Antler’s Elevate program; now it is diversifying from lender to AI-supported platform, rolling out a multi-currency Global Account that enables cross-border payments and FX, expanding into LLC formation, integrated accounting and compliance services, and launching a revolving credit line for growing businesses.

For Jacob, Marco is now “at the most exciting place we’ve ever been as a company.” He hopes it will not only be scaling key Latin American markets, but globally too: “We do believe that there's this opportunity to be this operating system, this financial operating system, for emerging markets.”