Palenca
“Can Palenca become the authoritative income and employment data layer for all credit decisions in Latin America, the way Experian/Equifax do for traditional credit in developed markets?”
Palenca was founded in 2021 by three co-founders who were initially building a gig-economy lending company and found it impossible to verify worker income in LATAM. They built integrations with Uber, DiDi, and Rappi to solve their own underwriting problem, then realized the data infrastructure was more valuable than the lending product itself. They pivoted to become a pure B2B API — the '1st Income Bureau in LATAM' — selling user-permissioned income and employment data to fintechs, banks, and insurers across the region. The Experian-led funding round signals alignment with the credit bureau and alternative data space.