Mentum

Overview

Mentum was a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2021 by three Colombian-born co-founders — Gustavo Trigos (CEO), Simon Avila (COO), and Daniel Osvath (CTO) — that participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2021 cohort. The company launched as a B2B investment infrastructure play for Latin America, building APIs and embeddable widgets that allowed non-financial apps to offer compliant investment products. After raising a $4.2M seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures in May 2022, it pivoted entirely to LLM-powered AI agents for U.S. procurement and supply chain teams — a complete geographic, vertical, and technology shift.

Mentum failed as an independent company because its original LatAm fintech product was structurally throttled by country-by-country regulatory friction that made multi-market scale nearly impossible on a $4.2M budget, and its subsequent supply chain AI pivot — while technically credible — never achieved the customer concentration needed to sustain a standalone business.

The outcome was an acqui-hire: Nuvocargo, a cross-border freight and logistics platform, acquired Mentum in October 2025. Only Trigos joined the acquirer as AI Product Engineer. Co-founders Avila and Osvath had departed before the deal closed, and acquisition terms were not disclosed — consistent with a modest technology-and-talent transaction rather than a strategic premium exit.

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Founding Story

Mentum was founded in 2021 by three Colombian-born engineers and operators who had each made their way to the United States to study and build careers in technology and finance. ^[1]

Gustavo Trigos, who became CEO, brought the most distinctive technical pedigree. He earned a Bachelor's in Finance and a Master of Science in Applied Statistics at Hult, and his interest in machine learning began in 2018 with a fake news detection project that was later cited in academic journals. ^[2] He went on to work as a quantitative analyst at BlackRock's Quantitative Investment Group, applying machine learning and AI to derivatives trading — and was named a 2021 BlackRock Founders Scholar. ^[3] His time at one of the world's largest asset managers gave him direct exposure to how investment infrastructure worked at institutional scale — and, by contrast, how little of that infrastructure existed for retail and emerging-market investors in Latin America.

Daniel Osvath, who became CTO, came from a distributed systems background, with engineering experience at Confluent and Apple. ^[4] Simon Avila, the COO, had worked in business operations at Wish, the e-commerce marketplace, giving the team operational and go-to-market experience alongside its technical depth. ^[5]

The founding insight was rooted in personal experience: Latin America had a large and underserved population of potential retail investors, but the infrastructure to offer compliant digital investment products — mutual funds, ETFs, local stocks — simply did not exist in an embeddable, API-accessible form. Trigos and his co-founders saw an opportunity to build the "Plaid for LatAm investments": a layer of regulated financial infrastructure that any app could plug into, abstracting away the complexity of local broker-dealer relationships and compliance requirements.

Before building the investment API directly, Mentum started with a related but less regulated problem: data orchestration for LatAm wealth managers. The company built SaaS tooling that processed hundreds of thousands of investment data records monthly for some of Latin America's largest wealth management firms. ^[6] This gave the team early revenue, domain credibility, and a firsthand view of the data plumbing problems that sat beneath any investment product — a logical on-ramp to the more ambitious API infrastructure play.