Fresh Ink: Welcoming Comun, the foundational hub for Latinos’ financial future

The Ink: Comun’s $21.5M Series A funding

Investors: Annie Kadavy and Meera Clark

The Scoop: True to its mission of helping immigrant families thrive in the US, Comun is building the financial hub for Latino immigrants, starting with affordable and easy to access banking, debit, and remittance services.

The Opportunity: Living in the US as an immigrant presents challenges, especially within a financial system that offers limited support. Document gaps, language barriers, and high fees often exclude millions of Latinos from accessing crucial financial opportunities, which comes at a high cost – both to Latinos and to the banks who fail to serve them.

With a population of 64M and $3.4Tn in spending power, powering Latinos’ finances is a huge opportunity. Yet close to 30% of Latinos are unbanked or underbanked – and those with bank accounts generally face high fees and high friction in accessing these services. Today, as their wealth and financial services needs increasingly expand, they find themselves looking for a trusted partner that doesn’t exist in the US.

Enter Comun: Comun redefines local banking in the digital world by first focusing on building trust and meeting consumers in their communities. Comun is the only platform that allows these consumers to apply for a fee-free bank account online with more than 100 government sponsored IDs from across Latin America. Comun then marries 100% bilingual customer service with a network of 88K+ locations to deposit and withdraw cash, making financial access easier than ever before for this population. With their new bank account, Comun’s users also receive a debit card and access to the lowest price remittance network in the market today, saving them hundreds of dollars a year in fees. With 50% of users joining organically and many making Comun their primary spending account within weeks, it's evident the platform is meeting a critical need.

With this sticky early product suite, Comun has laid the foundation to become Latinos’ system of record for any financial decision they make, beginning with the roll out of additional purpose-built financial services over the coming quarters.

Tech Differentiation: While Comun’s community-first approach is its secret sauce, the meat of the platform is its end-to-end tech stack. We believe these tech investments will offer compounding advantages as Comun continues to expand its product suite, given the cost to serve and risk management advantages relative to easier to stand-up BaaS alternatives. With more than half of the team’s technical backgrounds hailing from the likes of Brex and Nubank, we believe Comun’s early technical rigor will only become magnified as the team expands.

The Investor Perspective: At Redpoint, we believe that the most powerful way to unlock economic opportunity is through financial inclusion – and that there are incredible businesses to be built by aligning economics with impact. As we dream of what should be, we could not be more excited to be partnering with Andres and Abiel on Comun’s journey.