In Lima, the corporate expense report is still, often, a manila envelope. A salesperson hands a stack of taxi receipts to an assistant. The assistant types numbers into a spreadsheet. A finance manager chases approvals over WhatsApp. Somewhere in that chain, a tax-deductible boleta goes missing.
Khipu, a Peruvian fintech founded in 2024, is selling the bet that artificial intelligence can compress that workflow into something a phone can finish in under a minute. The company, built by co-founders Gabriel Proaño, Alessandro Ossio, and Antonio Salinas, sells a subscription product that automates corporate expense reporting and is now signing customers in technology, education, logistics, and professional services [Blog Venture Capital]. It is targeting US$40,000 in monthly recurring revenue within twelve months [Crunchbase; Startups Latam].
The bet
Khipu's wedge is narrow and deliberate. The product attacks rendición de gastos, the Spanish-language term for the receipt-and-reimbursement cycle that, in much of Latin America, still runs on paper and Excel. Khipu uses AI to read receipts, classify expenses, and route them through approval workflows [Startups Latam]. The pitch is that expense reporting is a clear operational pain point in the regional corporate sector [El Comercio Perú].
Distribution is a two-tier subscription: Khipu Pro and Khipu Basic, sold monthly [Crunchbase; Startups Latam]. A consumer-facing Android app is live on Google Play, which lowers the friction for individual employees inside a client company to start capturing receipts before procurement formally signs a contract.
Why it could be big
Latin America's expense-management category is not empty. Rindegastos, a Chilean incumbent, has been working the same problem across the region for years and is Khipu's most direct competitor. But the category is also nowhere near saturated. SME finance digitization in Peru, Colombia, and Chile lags the United States by roughly a decade, and the arrival of usable receipt-reading AI changes the unit economics of going after companies that were previously too small to justify a per-seat enterprise SaaS license.
Khipu has one notable name in its corner: Google Cloud, listed among its backers, which gives the startup access to model infrastructure that would have been prohibitive for a seed-stage Peruvian team three years ago. The company also came through the entrepreneurship center at Universidad de Lima.
The regional expansion plan is the more interesting tell. Khipu has told El Comercio and Latam Fintech that it intends to enter Chile and Colombia this year [El Comercio Perú; Latam Fintech]. Chile puts it directly into Rindegastos's home market. Colombia, with a larger SME base and an active fintech-licensing regime, is the bigger prize.
Traction in numbers
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2024 |
| Active client sectors | 4 (tech, education, logistics, prof. services) |
| MRR target, 12 months | US$40,000 |
| Pricing tiers | Khipu Pro, Khipu Basic (monthly) |
| Planned market entries | Chile, Colombia |
The team
Khipu's three co-founders split the standard early-stage roles. Alessandro Ossio is listed as COO and co-founder on his LinkedIn profile [LinkedIn]. Gabriel Proaño and Antonio Salinas round out the founding team, which Startups Latam describes as combining product, finance, and technology backgrounds [Startups Latam].
What the bears say, what the bulls answer
The credible concern is competitive. Rindegastos has a multi-country head start, an installed base, and the brand recognition that comes from being the default answer when a Latin American CFO Googles "rendición de gastos software." A one-year-old startup planning to enter Rindegastos's home market on a $40,000 MRR run rate is picking a real fight [Crunchbase; Startups Latam]. The bull answer is that AI receipt capture is a genuine product reset for the category. Incumbents built on rules-based OCR have to retrofit; Khipu was designed around the model layer from day one, and its sector spread across technology, education, logistics, and professional services suggests the product is not locked into a single vertical's quirks [Blog Venture Capital].
What to watch
The next twelve months turn on three things: whether the Chile and Colombia launches produce paying logos rather than pilots, whether Khipu can convert its Google Cloud relationship into a more formal commercial co-sell, and whether the company raises a priced seed round to fund the expansion. The MRR target is the simplest scoreboard. Hitting US$40,000 by mid-2025 would put Khipu on a credible path to a Series A conversation with regional funds; missing it would force a harder choice between geographic spread and product depth.