For the roughly 68 million Latinos living in the United States, sending money to family and friends across Latin America can be a hassle. It can mean standing in line at a storefront and handing cash to an agent who charges a fee up front and then takes another cut through the exchange rate. U.S.–to–Mexico is the biggest remittance corridor in the world, and one of the cheapest, yet sending money through it still costs about 5% of the transfer on average, amounting to billions of dollars a year in friction.
Moving money shouldn’t be this hard. The scale of the problem: $161 billion was remitted to Latin America and the Caribbean in 2024, roughly 80% of it from the U.S. A lot of this still moves through physical cash networks.
Stablecoins offer a solution. Dollars can now move onchain in seconds, for lower fees than the banks charge, with none of the waiting. Because settlement is near-instant, companies don’t have to park capital in accounts in every country where they pay out. Stablecoins are uniquely suited to making cross-border transactions because the rails are better. But consumers don’t care about rails. They care about products. The winner here will likely be whoever makes sending money home feel as easy as sending a message.
Félix is doing just that. They have built an AI financial companion. They have looked to recreate the comfort and familiarity that comes with knowing your local banker and providing that same connection inside of one of our most personal apps on your phone – WhatsApp.
Why WhatsApp? Well simply put, it’s the dominant messaging app in Latin America and one that more than half of Hispanic adults in the U.S. already use. Félix’s conversational AI agent handles the details — onboarding, transaction processing, customer support — and helps recreate the familiar experience that many immigrants grew up with when sending money through a person at a counter. On the backend, Félix settles most transactions in USDC and converts to local currency through a network of payout partners.
Customers do not need to interact with crypto directly. They care that the money arrives quickly, the price is clear, and help is there when they need it.
Manuel Godoy and Bernardo García met as MBA students at Wharton, where they pitched an early version of the WhatsApp remittance flow at a startup competition and won. Both are immigrants who lived the problem they are now solving. Godoy, a Venezuelan engineer trained at Caltech, started Félix after watching his mother struggle to get money to family in Venezuela. García, from Mexico, had worked on market expansion at Uber and in banking analytics at McKinsey. They have since assembled a leadership team drawn from Google, Lyft, Airbnb, and Uber.
The product already has excellent traction – including processing over $8 billion, and serving six million people in eleven markets. Most of Félix’s new users arrive organically, through word of mouth and referrals rather than paid marketing. In consumer fintech, there’s no clearer sign that a product is working better than what came before it.
Remittances are just the first act toward a larger opportunity. U.S. Latinos produce roughly $4 trillion in economic output a year; if they were their own country, they would be the world’s fifth-largest economy. Despite this, U.S. Latinos remain underserved by the traditional finance industry. Félix is poised to expand into areas like credit and savings, layering a full financial platform onto its existing relationships. Stablecoin infrastructure makes this even easier to do, allowing the service to add lending, savings, and yield products in a more efficient and consumer friendly way, as compared to the current banking system.
We are proud to lead Félix’s Series C equity raise, and to partner with Manuel, Bernardo, and the entire Félix team as they build it.
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