Colombia's Yuno Raises $45M Series B, Makes Qatar Its Gulf Hub

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Colombia's Yuno Raises $45M Series B, Makes Qatar Its Gulf Hub
Colombia's Yuno Raises $45M Series B, Makes Qatar Its Gulf Hub

Bogotá-based payments orchestration platform Yuno has raised a $45 million Series B round led by Global PayTech Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, QuantumLight Capital, Monashees, Kaszek, and Endeavor Catalyst. Qatar-based Rasmal Ventures joined the round as the company establishes Qatar as its regional hub for the Gulf Cooperation Council, alongside new investors GrowthX Capital and Abu Dhabi's sovereign-backed Further Ventures.

Founded in 2022 by Juan Pablo Ortega and Julián Núñez, Yuno connects businesses to more than 1,000 payment methods across 190 countries through a single API. Ortega, the company's CEO, previously co-founded Rappi, Latin America's on-demand delivery unicorn, valued at $5.25 billion as of mid-2023, where he and Núñez met while building out the payments team. Yuno has already secured a Payment Technical Service Provider certification from the Saudi Central Bank, and struck partnerships with Tap Payments — opening local rails including Mada, KNET, and NAPS across all six GCC countries — and buy-now-pay-later provider Tabby, connecting the platform to more than 25 million shoppers in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Market Context

The round marks Yuno's third capital raise since 2022, following a $10 million seed and a $25 million Series A that valued the company at $150 million in early 2024. At the time, Ortega noted that most orchestration competitors focused on small and medium businesses rather than enterprise-grade infrastructure, positioning Yuno as one of the few players with integrations spanning every continent. That enterprise focus has since translated into scale: over the past year, Yuno recovered more than $5 billion in otherwise-failed transaction volume for merchants on its network, lifted authorization rates by roughly 5%, and saved customers over $500 million in processing costs. Its client roster now includes McDonald's, NetEase Games, GoFundMe, inDrive, and Rappi.

The timing lines up with a broader macro trend. The Middle East has been identified as the fastest-growing real-time payments market globally, with regional transactions projected to jump from $675 million in 2022 to $2.6 billion by 2027 — a 30.6% compound annual growth rate, driven largely by Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. That growth curve is exactly the corridor Yuno is now betting its Series B on.

Signal

"Being local everywhere is the hardest problem in payments, and anyone starting on it today is at least two years behind."
— Juan Pablo Ortega, Co-Founder and CEO, Yuno.

Regional Relevance

For the United States: Yuno counts major U.S. companies — McDonald's and GoFundMe among them — as clients, and its earlier rounds drew heavily from U.S. venture capital, including Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global, both of which returned for this Series B. As enterprise payments orchestration becomes a standard RFP category for multinationals, U.S. firms expanding into the Gulf or Latin America gain a viable single-API alternative to stitching together six or more regional processors themselves — a cost and complexity issue that directly affects margins for any U.S. company selling cross-border.

For Latin America: Yuno's raise reinforces Bogotá's standing as a serious fintech hub, following in the wake of Bold's $50 million Series C and Simetrik's $55 million Series B. That succession of large raises highlights the growing amount of capital flowing into Colombia's fintech scene more broadly. That a Colombian-founded company is now setting up a regional headquarters in Qatar — rather than being acquired or relocating outright — signals a shift in how LatAm-born startups are scaling: building global infrastructure businesses from a home base in Bogotá instead of migrating IP and control north or overseas.

The Other Side

Is a $150M-to-Series-B jump toward a larger valuation actually a sign of strength, or of catch-up spending? Ortega frames the round as capital to "meet customer growth" and reach profitability rather than "buy growth," but payments orchestration is increasingly crowded — Checkout.com, Juspay, and fast-moving entrants like Primer (which raised $100 million in May 2026) are chasing the same enterprise accounts. Whether Yuno's Gulf bet outpaces rivals with deeper regional roots remains untested.

Does a single-API model hold up as GCC regulatory environments diverge? Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are each building distinct real-time payment rails and compliance regimes. Yuno's pitch rests on abstracting that complexity away for merchants, but as more countries launch bespoke domestic schemes, the "one integration, every market" promise gets structurally harder to keep.

Sources & Transparency

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