Primero's $12M bet: wiring Latin America's corporate chaos for AI

Ask any chief information officer in São Paulo or Mexico City why artificial intelligence stalls inside their company and you will rarely hear about model quality. The bottleneck is messier: decades of ERPs, CRMs and warehouse tools that were never built to talk to one another. That is the gap Primero is chasing, and it just convinced two of the most powerful venture names in the Americas to fund the hunt.

The startup, founded by José Murillo, Andrés Rosales and Santiago Buenahora — alumni of Meta, 8VC and Robinhood — has closed a $12 million seed round led by Kaszek and General Catalyst. Definition, Conviction and 8VC also joined, alongside angel investors tied to FEMSA, Bimbo, Aeroméxico and Kimberly-Clark de México. The company already counts Kimberly-Clark de México, SmartFit, Verde Valle, Sede Café and Mexico City's economic development secretariat as clients, and the fresh capital will go toward expanding operations and building AI products aimed squarely at large Latin American corporations.

For outsiders, the names may not resonate, but they should. Kaszek is the region's most storied venture fund, the firm behind MercadoLibre's early days, and General Catalyst is a global heavyweight that rarely enters Latin America without a thesis. The angels from FEMSA and Bimbo are equally telling: those are the consumer empires that anchor Mexico's economy, and their operators are betting personal capital on Primero's premise. That premise is simple — the region's biggest companies run on an archipelago of disconnected software, and until that is fixed, AI will remain a PowerPoint slide.

The numbers back the pain. MuleSoft's 2026 Connectivity Benchmark Report, cited by Primero, says organizations manage an average of 957 applications but only 27% are connected. In Mexico, a ManageEngine study found 87% of companies say technological fragmentation limits their ability to scale AI. This is not a niche annoyance; it is the structural reason why so many pilots die quietly. Primero's answer is Primia, a platform that sits on top of a company's existing systems, ingests their data and, crucially, absorbs the business rules and logic that make operations function. The result is AI agents that can automate workflows with context — one construction client automated 85% of a manual review process, and a consumer goods client recovered over $10 million in deductions that had been lost to fragmented records.

The timing matters beyond Primero's own balance sheet. Latin American executives are past the experimentation phase. IBM's Institute for Business Value reports that 69% of executives in the region expect AI agents to take autonomous actions by the end of 2026, and 85% believe they will lose competitive advantage without real-time operations. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum estimate AI could lift regional productivity growth by 1.9% to 2.3% annually and generate between $1.1 trillion and $1.7 trillion in extra economic value each year. But those projections hinge on implementation, not aspiration. Primero's bet is that the companies which solve integration first will capture that value, and the region's capital class is clearly listening.

What this signals is a maturation of South American tech investment. Seed rounds of this size, led by top-tier global and regional funds, used to flow to fintechs or marketplaces. Now the money is going to infrastructure for legacy enterprises — the factories, retailers and food producers that generate real GDP but run on aging software. That is a profound shift. It acknowledges that Latin America's advantage is not building the next Silicon Valley unicorn from scratch, but modernizing the industrial champions that already exist. Primero's founders say it plainly: the world's most competitive companies can be built in Latin America, and AI is the lever.

The road ahead is not smooth. Convincing conservative corporate IT departments to let AI agents touch core processes requires trust that Primero has only begun to earn. But the modular rollout — engineers embedding with each client to codify language and culture — suggests a patient, consultative approach rather than a land-grab. For anyone tracking capital in South America, Primero is worth watching not for the $12 million alone, but for what it represents: a generation of founders who understand that the region's biggest opportunity is not replacing its companies, but connecting them.