FILE PHOTO: Stori co-founder GY Liu, co-founder Marlene Garayzar, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Bin Chen, cofounder Sherman He and Chief Technology Officer and co-founder Nick Chen pose in Stori's Mexico City office, in this handout taken in Mexico City, Mexico, March 11, 2024. Stori/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican fintech Stori, which aims its products at the large number of people in the country without bank accounts, will use a fresh $212 million in funding to roll out new products and expand current offerings, it said on Tuesday.
The funding round for the unicorn - a term for a startup with a valuation of more than $1 billion - comes in the form of $105 million in capital and $107 million in debt, Stori said in a release.
The round is the largest announced by a Mexican startup in the past year, according to data compiled by Crunchbase.
Stori offers credit cards with credit limits starting at just 500 pesos ($25.89) and last year rolled out savings accounts with the unusually high yield of 15%.
The firm has also signaled that it hoped to soon offer investment services.
Just over half of the Mexican population uses some sort of financial product such as a bank account, according to the nation's financial watchdog, Condusef.
Startups such as Stori are increasingly vying to capture the untapped market. It faces competition from Brazil's Nubank and Argentina's Uala.
Stori serves more than 3 million clients, it said on Tuesday, while in Mexico Nubank and Uala have recently reported 7 million customers and 1.5 million customers, respectively.
Stori said it will use the new funding "to support the introduction and scale-up of new and existing products, which will allow it to strengthen its leading position in Mexico."
It did not provide more detail.
($1 = 19.3110 Mexican pesos)
(Reporting by Kylie Madry; Editing by Leslie Adler)
