Built from nothing. Acquired by Bold.
A fintech for Colombian SMEs, built from an idea to an acquisition by Bold.
The problem
Colombia has 1.72 million registered SMEs. Most of them could not get a corporate credit card. Banks had spent decades treating the segment as too small to underwrite and too expensive to serve.
The gap was not only credit. Company spending happened outside any system. Receipts arrived late, expenses were logged by hand, and an owner found out where the money went long after it was gone.
Other fintechs were already in this market. Sempli, Clara, and Jeeves all served established companies. Nobody was serving the business reaching the financial sector for the first time.
What we built
Tuily was a Koombea venture. Founded in Barranquilla in 2023 by Koombea's founder, designed and engineered by the Koombea team, and self-funded. It took no outside round before launch.
The product was a Mastercard corporate credit card, issued through Paymentology, paired with an expense management platform. Companies could issue virtual cards and assign a cost center to each one. An expense was classified at the moment it was made, not reconstructed at month end.
Real-time budget controls, Apple Pay, and spend centralized across every card. The card carried no management fees. A 22-person team ran the whole company.
The product
Physical and virtual cards One card per cost center, issued in seconds. 
Expense management, web and mobile Spend classified as it happens, not at month end.
We want to change the way SMEs access financial products, something banks have not been willing to do for a long time.
What happened
Bold is a Colombian payments fintech with more than 500,000 customers and over 130 million dollars raised from General Atlantic, Tiger Global, and the World Bank's IFC. It bought Tuily to become a corporate neobank. CEO José Fernando Vélez framed the deal as the step that moves Bold from a payments company to a full financial services provider.
Bold acquired the card program and the expense management technology to launch its own corporate credit cards. Deal terms were not disclosed by either party.
A spend tool only works if the person spending actually uses it, so in a segment banks had ignored, the interface was the product. Judges scored it against consumer apps, not against banking software.
- Around 200 Colombian SMEs on the platform by October 2023, growing to more than 250 clients
- Four wins at the 2024 Indigo Design Award, three Silver and one Bronze, across Apps, Mobile App, and UX, Interface and Navigation
- Acquired by Bold in January 2025
Delivery notes
Stack: iOS and Android mobile apps, web expense management platform, card issuing through Paymentology, Mastercard rails.
Capabilities applied: Product Design, Product Engineering. Built as a Koombea venture rather than a client engagement.
Sources
Figures on this page are the ones published in Forbes Colombia.
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