Crestone
Salcedo St, Makati, Metro Manila, 1200, Philippines
Overview
Crestone Venture Capital is a US-based Fintech specialist Venture Capital Fund founded in 2019 by Kai Schmitz and Inanc Balci. Crestone invests in early-stage Fintech companies in Emerging Markets covering Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. The Fund specializes in embedded Fintech, financial infrastructure, business enablers, consumer finance, Fintech-aaS and lending. Current portfolio includes Neivor in Mexico, Chico in Brazil, Minka in Colombia and Peddlr in the Philippines. Crestone values highly driven entrepreneurs with excellent execution skills and provides hands-on financial and operational support from A to Z. For more information, please visit http://www.crestone.vc
- Total investments
- 2
- Lead investments
- 0
- Investments · 12mo
- 1
- Active investors
- 0
Sector focus
- Financial Services
- FinTech
- Venture Capital
Investment portfolio
- Cicada Technologies
Participated · Series A · Feb 2026
Cicada operates the first fully all-to-all electronic trading venue for emerging-market local-currency bonds, starting with Mexico’s $500 billion fixed-income market where roughly 98% of the daily $5–7 billion volume is still voice-traded. The platform offers a modern execution stack featuring a central limit order book, RFQ workflows, and proprietary protocols such as Spread Trading and Double Downs, enabling sophisticated, transparent execution for global buy-side and sell-side institutions. Registered with the SEC as an alternative trading system and a FINRA member broker-dealer, Cicada seeks to level the playing field and strengthen North-South capital flows. A dedicated strategic equity program brings leading Wall Street market makers onto the cap table to anchor early liquidity. Proceeds from its newest round will expand commercial efforts, boost liquidity, broaden product coverage, and deepen integrations with third-party platforms. The company also plans to launch an electronic interest-rate swap execution venue focused on Mexican TIIE, a market averaging $24 billion in daily trading. Continued investment in regulatory, compliance, and risk infrastructure is a priority as the firm scales across additional Latin American markets. The article does not disclose current revenue or user figures.
- Kanastra
Participated · Seed · Jun 2023
Kanastra offers a platform that streamlines fund services, securitization and banking operations for issuers, asset managers and banks participating in Brazil’s fast-growing private credit market. Its software automates workflows across the entire lifecycle of private credit facilities, helping clients operate with greater scale, efficiency and transparency. In less than three years the company has reached US$7 billion in assets under service across 250 facilities and has grown 150 percent in the last 12 months. Clients include major Brazilian financial institutions such as Itaú, XP Investments, Patria Investments, Vinci Partners, Solfácil and Creditas. With private credit in Brazil expanding 230 percent over the past five years, Kanastra positions itself as critical infrastructure for the sector’s maturation. The firm plans to use new capital to accelerate product development, deepen automation and broaden its customer base, thereby cementing its role as the operating backbone for Latin American private credit. Earlier this year, Itaú made a strategic investment and signed a commercial agreement to leverage Kanastra’s platform across the bank.
Team
No current team members are available.