In Medellín, Colombia, a startup that began life as a payments API is making a much larger bet: that the future of Latin American real estate will be decided not only by who owns the buildings, but by who runs the software and the money rails underneath them. Palomma, a Y Combinator–backed company, now describes itself as an AI and financial-services company for the region’s property market, with a stated ambition to become the AI-native bank for real estate, starting with rent.
The pitch is deceptively simple. Property managers, agencies and developers across Latin America still spend much of their day chasing leads on WhatsApp, reminding tenants to pay, reconciling transfers by hand and answering the same questions again and again. Palomma’s answer is to put AI agents on the front line of that work and to pair them with payment infrastructure that moves rent from tenant to landlord with far less friction. According to the company’s own materials, more than 500 real estate companies already run leasing and collections on its platform.
For a region where housing is a central pillar of household wealth and household stress alike, the implications reach well beyond one startup. Here is how Palomma got here, what it is building, and what its rise says about where proptech and fintech are heading in Latin America.
A Market Built on Friction
Anyone who has rented an apartment in a major Latin American city knows the ritual. A listing appears on a portal or a social feed. An inquiry goes out by message. A visit is scheduled, rescheduled and sometimes forgotten. Documents are exchanged as photos and PDFs. Rent is paid by bank transfer, cash deposit or a mix of both, and a human being somewhere has to confirm that the money arrived, match it to the right unit and pass it on to the owner.
That process works, but it works slowly and expensively. Each step relies on staff time, and each handoff is a chance for a lead to go cold, a payment to be missed or a landlord to lose confidence in the manager they hired. Operators in the sector often run lean teams with sprawling portfolios, so a missed message at 9 p.m. can quietly become a vacancy that lasts weeks.
The broader regional picture reinforces the point. Reporting on Latin American proptech has repeatedly noted that many developers and operators still depend on spreadsheets and manual processes, and that fragmented tools have long held back agent productivity. New entrants are racing to change that, and investors have noticed. Colombian proptech Habi secured a US$40 million credit line from BBVA Spark, Lebane raised a US$4 million seed round to bring AI-driven management tools to developers, and Mudafy launched an AI-powered, end-to-end network called Fenix in May 2026, pitching it as a replacement for as many as six separate tools.
In that crowded and fast-moving field, Palomma’s distinguishing claim is that real estate in Latin America is, at heart, a fintech problem wearing a proptech costume.
From Pay-by-Bank to Property
Palomma did not start in real estate. In early 2023, three founders launched the company out of Medellín with a clean, unglamorous pitch: a single platform and API that would let online merchants across Latin America accept payments directly from a customer’s bank account, skipping the two to five percent in fees that card payments typically carry. The company went public with that offering out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch, with Colombia as its starting market.
The founding team brought an unusually international résumé to the task. Its members have backgrounds that include Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Nubank and MIT. Chief executive Cipriano Echavarría left Medellín to study economics at Duke University, intending to return home and build a company, and spent time on Wall Street gaining fluency in the machinery of capital before doing so. In 2023, the founders appeared on Forbes’ first regional 30 Under 30 list for Latin America in the technology and innovation category.
The early strategy was sound but crowded. Pay-by-bank is attractive in markets where card penetration is uneven and fees are high, yet convincing merchants to switch payment methods is an uphill climb. What changed Palomma’s trajectory was something the founders noticed in their own customer conversations: the clients who cared most were the ones for whom payments were not a checkout detail but the heartbeat of the business. Property managers collect rent every month, disburse it to owners, and live and die by how reliably that cycle runs.
So in 2024 the company did something many startups talk themselves out of. It followed the customer instead of the plan. Palomma pivoted to real estate, launching AI agents alongside a rent collection and disbursement product, and began describing the payment layer as the foundation of something larger. A payment product, the thinking went, could become the financial layer beneath a full operating system for property management.
Inside the Platform
Palomma’s offering now spans several products, each aimed at a different part of the rental lifecycle.
Palomma AI is the company’s suite of AI agents, which it positions as always-on digital employees for real estate teams. They handle sales outreach, answer prospect and tenant questions over WhatsApp and phone, follow up automatically on inquiries, and work to move leads from first contact to a scheduled visit. For a property manager, the value proposition is speed and consistency: a prospect who writes at night gets an answer immediately, and every lead receives a follow-up rather than only the ones a busy human remembers.
Palomma Pay is the payments backbone. It automates rent collection, disbursement to owners and treasury tracking, using the pay-by-bank technology that the company built in its earliest days. Because tenants pay straight from their bank accounts, the flow avoids much of the cost and delay associated with cards, and because the money passes through a single system, reconciliation, one of the most tedious tasks in property management, becomes largely automatic.
Palomma Plus is the tenant-facing sweetener. Renters who pay through Palomma Pay can access rewards, discounts and monthly raffles, an attempt to give tenants a reason to prefer the platform instead of treating it as one more bill-paying chore. It is a small feature on paper but a strategically important one: when renters want to use the payment rail, property managers get higher on-time payment rates and fewer awkward collection conversations.
The company also lists Palomma Protect and Palomma Advance among its offerings, extending the platform toward protection and financing needs around rent. Specific terms and eligibility are best confirmed directly with Palomma, but the direction is clear. Once a company controls the flow of rent, it is positioned to offer the financial services that tend to cluster around that flow.
Palomma’s business model reflects the same logic. It earns subscription revenue from its AI services and payment solutions, selling to residential property managers, multifamily operators, real estate agencies and developers, and through them reaching the landlords and tenants who sit beneath. Pricing is customized to the size and needs of each client rather than published as fixed plans.
Why AI and Fintech Belong Together
The most interesting part of Palomma’s strategy is not either technology on its own. Plenty of tools automate messages. Plenty of tools move money. The company’s argument is that the combination is what matters.
Consider what happens when an AI agent and a payment system share the same data. A leasing agent that knows a prospect’s inquiry history can also see whether a current tenant has paid on time, and can tailor its follow-up accordingly. A collections workflow can send a reminder through the same WhatsApp thread where the tenant first asked about the apartment. A property manager looking at a dashboard sees not just who has paid, but which leads are about to convert and which units are likely to sit empty.
That integration also addresses a weakness of many AI-agent vendors, which can point a chatbot at real estate without understanding the payment flow that determines whether the business actually gets paid. By owning both ends, Palomma can close the loop from lead to lease to monthly collection, and measure its success in the metrics operators care about: visits scheduled, contracts signed, rent collected on time.
There is a second advantage that is easy to overlook. Rent is among the most predictable, recurring cash flows in any household or business. Data from that flow can, in principle, support better underwriting for financial products later on. That is the logic behind the company’s stated goal of building an AI-native bank for real estate, with AI agents first and payments next, so that it owns the flow of rent before layering on more sophisticated financial services.
Recognition and Early Traction
Palomma’s growth has drawn attention. The company has raised about US$2.3 million, backed by Y Combinator and other investors, and KPMG Colombia named it among the country’s top ten technology promises. Third-party startup trackers describe its annual recurring revenue as having reached US$2.5 million, though investors and readers should treat figures from aggregator sites with care until confirmed by the company.
The headline number the company itself emphasizes is adoption: more than 500 real estate companies now run leasing and collections on the platform. For a business-to-business startup in a region where enterprise software sales cycles can be long and trust is hard-won, that is a meaningful signal. It suggests that the pain Palomma targets is real and that operators are willing to hand over some of their most sensitive workflows, customer conversations and cash collection, to a young company.
The pivot itself is part of the story. Many founders hold on to an original idea long after the market has stopped rewarding it. Palomma’s willingness to move from a general payments API to a vertical focus on real estate, within roughly a year of launch, shows the kind of customer-led flexibility that early-stage investors prize.
A Crowded, Fast-Moving Field
None of this means the road is clear. Palomma competes, directly or indirectly, with a growing list of players.
On the AI side, specialist property-technology firms and general-purpose AI-agent vendors are all pursuing property managers and developers. On the payments side, banks, wallets, card networks and other fintechs are working to capture rent flows. And on the platform side, regional marketplaces and operating systems such as Mudafy’s Fenix are trying to become the single pane of glass that agents and brokers use all day. Global names like Zillow and Redfin, though focused on North American markets, set the template for what data-driven real estate software can look like and shape the expectations of investors and customers alike.
Palomma’s counterargument is focus. It targets residential rentals first, and it builds for Latin American realities: WhatsApp as the default channel, bank transfers as the dominant payment behavior, and property managers who juggle many small landlords rather than a handful of institutional owners. Vertical depth, the company bets, will beat horizontal breadth.
Challenges on the Road Ahead
Building a bank-like business on top of an AI company is hard, and Palomma will face tests on several fronts.
The first is regulation. Moving money and offering financial products are among the most tightly regulated activities in any economy, and Latin America is not a single market but a patchwork of national regimes with their own licensing, data-protection and consumer-protection rules. Expanding beyond Colombia will require careful, country-by-country navigation.
The second is trust. Handing customer conversations to AI agents raises questions about accuracy, tone and accountability, especially when those conversations touch on contracts, deposits and payments. Operators will need confidence that the agents behave reliably and that humans can step in when they should. Tenants, for their part, will want to know when they are speaking with software and how their data is being used.
The third is economics. Subscription software and payment margins can both be attractive, but financial products such as advances carry credit risk. Managing that risk while growing quickly is the classic fintech balancing act, and the company’s eventual success will depend on how well it does so.
Finally, there is the macro backdrop. Currency swings, interest-rate cycles and shifting investor appetite for emerging-market technology can all affect a young company’s funding and growth. Founders in the region have learned to build for resilience, and Palomma’s lean, revenue-generating approach appears designed with that in mind.
What It Means for Renters, Landlords and the Region
If Palomma’s vision plays out, the benefits could be felt across the rental chain.
For property managers, the promise is leverage: smaller teams handling larger portfolios, with fewer missed leads and less time spent on reconciliation. For landlords, it is predictability: rent that arrives on schedule, with clearer reporting on what is happening with their units. For tenants, it is convenience and, potentially, rewards: a simple way to pay, quicker answers to questions and perks for being reliable.
There is also a larger inclusion story. Formal credit in much of Latin America remains hard to reach, and a consistent record of on-time rent is one of the few financial behaviors that many households already demonstrate. If platforms like Palomma can turn that behavior into verifiable data, and do so responsibly, they could widen access to financial products for people the traditional system has overlooked. The same theme runs through other regional proptech efforts, including Chilean fintech Creditú’s use of AI to open mortgage access to families that banks have long ignored.
Those outcomes are not guaranteed. They depend on execution, regulation and the willingness of customers on all sides to trust new tools with important parts of their lives. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: the region’s property market is going digital, and the companies that combine intelligent automation with financial infrastructure are positioned to define what comes next.
The Bottom Line
Palomma’s story is a reminder that the most promising startups are often the ones willing to change course. It began as a way to make online payments cheaper and found its real calling in the monthly rhythm of rent. With AI agents answering the messages and a payment rail moving the money, it is trying to remove friction from one of the most universal transactions in urban life.
Whether it becomes the AI-native bank for Latin American real estate, as it hopes, will depend on how well it handles regulation, risk and trust over the coming years. For now, the company has momentum, a clear thesis and hundreds of customers testing it daily. In a sector long defined by spreadsheets and missed messages, that is a promising place to start.
Palomma is a Medellín-based AI and financial-services company for real estate in Latin America, starting with rent. Founded in 2023 and part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 batch, the company builds AI agents and payment infrastructure for residential property managers, multifamily operators, real estate agencies and developers. Its products include Palomma AI, Palomma Pay, Palomma Plus, Palomma Protect and Palomma Advance. Palomma’s goal is to become the AI-native bank for real estate in Latin America. Learn more at palomma.com.
Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley–based startup accelerator that has funded and supported thousands of early-stage technology companies from around the world. Through its batch-based program, YC provides seed funding, mentorship and a global network of founders and investors. Palomma joined YC’s Winter 2023 batch. Learn more at ycombinator.com.
Cosmopolitan The Daily is a digital publication delivering news, features and analysis for a global, curious readership. Its coverage spans business, technology and world affairs, with a focus on the people and ideas shaping modern life. Cosmopolitan The Daily is committed to accurate, engaging and accessible storytelling for readers everywhere.