hiSofi secures $1M to build Uruguay AI and data science hub
Uruguayan fintech hiSofi closed a $1 million funding round to establish its primary artificial intelligence and data science center in Uruguay, marking a strategic return to the country where founders Leonardo Paladino and Tatiana Pomar originally launched the company. The round was led by SaaSholic, a Brazilian venture fund specializing in early-stage B2B software, and included a $250,000 co-investment from Uruguay's Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación (ANII) through its matching funds program.
The company provides AI-driven debt recovery services, initially validated in Uruguay with ANNI support before relocating to Brazil in 2020 to access larger markets during the pandemic. Now operating across Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Argentina with 28 employees, hiSofi is concentrating its core technical capabilities back in Montevideo.
During 2025, the platform processed more than 44 million debts, closed over 451,000 payment agreements, and recovered $61 million for corporate clients including iFood, Natura, and Credicard. The company replaces traditional call-center collections with a data-driven approach using WhatsApp, RCS, email, and landing pages, applying e-commerce logic to debt management.
Why Uruguay's tech talent attracts regional AI operations across LATAM
Paladino explained that while Brazil offers market scale, language creates a barrier for managing Spanish-speaking operations across the region. Uruguay provides both technical talent and the ability to coordinate multi-country workflows without linguistic friction, according to the funding announcement.
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For employers evaluating where to anchor technical operations serving multiple Latin American markets, hiSofi's decision offers a concrete data point. The company maintains distributed teams but is consolidating engineering, AI, and product development in one location. That choice reflects a calculation that Uruguay's technical talent ecosystem can support sophisticated machine-learning and data-science work at sufficient scale to serve six national markets simultaneously.
The hub will grow through distributed hiring, adding positions in engineering, data science, and product, with Uruguay as the base for regional technical decisions. Companies scaling across Brazil and LATAM markets face a similar trade-off: whether to centralize technical leadership in the largest market or in a location optimized for cross-border coordination and talent density.
Uruguay functions here not as a low-cost alternative but as a technical anchor capable of managing complexity across Portuguese and Spanish-speaking markets. The ANNI co-investment, structured as matching funds, signals continued public support for companies that establish high-value technical operations in the country, a factor relevant to workforce planning for firms considering similar moves.
Engineering and data science hiring signals from hiSofi's six-country expansion
The company's conversational collections model depends on real-time behavioral analysis, predictive routing, and automated decision-making across multiple communication channels. CEO Tatiana Pomar noted that the platform determines the optimal channel, timing, and strategy for each debtor interaction, a process requiring continuous model training and iteration.
That technical architecture explains why hiSofi is investing in a centralized AI and data science function rather than distributing those capabilities across six operating markets. The 28-person team already works in a distributed model, but the new funding will concentrate specialized roles in Uruguay while maintaining commercial and operational presence elsewhere.
For companies hiring in similar contexts, hiSofi's structure illustrates a hybrid approach: distributed go-to-market teams paired with centralized product and engineering leadership. The company's client base spans consumer goods, education, and marketplace sectors, all of which have adopted embedded financial products that generate collection workflows. As Pomar observed, companies like Natura and iFood now function as fintechs, creating demand for specialized debt-recovery infrastructure.
The platform covers the full debt lifecycle, from pre-delinquency to long-term arrears, and provides debtors with a self-service portal to review balances, negotiate payment plans, and close agreements online. That scope requires product, engineering, and data science talent capable of building and maintaining multi-channel orchestration, credit-risk modeling, and user-experience design across regulatory environments in six countries.
Firms evaluating Colombia recruitment agency options or planning technical hires across the region can extract workforce signals from hiSofi's approach: centralized technical leadership in a talent-dense, bilingual hub, paired with distributed commercial execution. The company's return to Uruguay after four years in Brazil suggests that for AI-intensive operations serving multiple Spanish-speaking markets, talent quality and coordination efficiency outweigh proximity to the largest single market.
The SaaSholic investment, combined with ANNI's matching funds, reflects investor confidence in Uruguay as a base for B2B software companies with regional ambitions. SaaSholic's focus on early-stage B2B software aligns with Uruguay's positioning as a hub for technical services rather than consumer-scale operations.