Kontempo raises $10.5 million to build the infrastructure for industrial credit

Industrial commerce runs on credit.

Every day, manufacturers and distributors sell cement, steel, chemicals, paint, plastics, packaging, auto parts and thousands of other products with payment terms.

Behind each of those transactions are a series of decisions: Who is this buyer? How much credit should we give them? On what terms? Who takes the risk? When do we get paid? What happens if they don’t pay?

For something so fundamental to the industrial economy, the infrastructure behind these decisions is surprisingly fragmented.

Credit bureaus. ERPs. Spreadsheets. PDFs. Emails. Bank financing. Insurance. Collections teams. Reconciliation teams.

We started Kontempo four years ago because we thought there had to be a better way.

Today, we’re announcing $10.5 million in new equity financing from Portage, IGNIA, Tectonic, MS&AD and other existing investors to continue building it.

What we’ve learned

Our original problem was straightforward: make it easier and less risky for industrial suppliers to sell on credit.

Since then, Kontempo has processed more than $180 million across more than 50,000 transactions.

But one of the most interesting things we’ve learned along the way is that the technology we built to do this is valuable well beyond financing.

Our customers want to evaluate a buyer in seconds. They want to understand risk. Set a credit limit. Manage documentation. Decide whether to use their own capital or someone else’s. Insure some transactions and take the risk themselves on others. Collect. Reconcile.

Some of our customers spend two or three hours every day inside Kontempo operating their credit sales.

So we’re opening up more of that infrastructure.

A customer can use Kontempo to analyze a buyer and then finance the sale themselves. They can ask us to finance it. They can insure some or all of the risk. They can use our software to manage the portfolio, automate collections and reconcile payments.

Our infrastructure. Their rules.

Why AI changes this

Credit has always been a data problem and an operations problem.

Traditional risk models are very good at analyzing structured data. But a huge amount of credit work still requires people to read documents, interpret information, investigate exceptions, follow up with customers, reconcile payments and manage collections.

AI changes what can be automated.

We see three major opportunities:

That last part is particularly exciting to us.

AI won’t just help companies make better credit decisions. Increasingly, it will help them operate the credit function itself.

Building for the industrial economy

One of the things that has surprised me most over the last four years is how little technology is built specifically for industrial companies in Mexico.

This is one of the most important and sophisticated parts of the Mexican economy. These companies manufacture and distribute the physical products that keep the economy moving.

And contrary to what you might expect, we’ve found them to be aggressive adopters of technology when it solves a real problem.

The opportunity isn't to convince industrial companies that they need technology.It's to build better technology for them.

Our ambition is for Kontempo to become the system of record and intelligence layer for industrial credit.

From the moment a supplier decides whether to extend credit to the moment the invoice is paid and reconciled, we want Kontempo to provide the software, intelligence and financial infrastructure behind that transaction.

We’ve built a lot over the last four years.

There is much more left to build.